By Cathy Rogers, Photo: Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images, WagingNonviolence, January 31, 2023
Anyone who has come across “Why Civil Resistance Works” by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan will be familiar with the idea that size matters for social movements. Their highly cited “3.5 percent rule” says that once movements actively involve at least 3.5 percent of the population they will inevitably succeed.
The idea that this is a cast iron rule has been contested — including by Chenoweth — on the basis that it was a description of the past rather than a prediction of the future. Others have shown that the rule has been broken in at least two cases. And although it was extracted primarily from a Global South context for countries resisting regimes, it has since, controversially, been applied to the strategy documents of prominent activist groups like Extinction Rebellion and been widely quoted in the media, including by the BBC, The Guardian and The Economist.
Far less contested, however, is another of the book’s major takeaways, which is the idea that nonviolence brings a higher success rate. Looking at civil resistance focused on regime change between 1900 and 2006, they found that nonviolent campaigns were more than twice as likely to succeed as violent ones: 53 percent of nonviolent campaigns led to political change, while the same was true for only 26 percent of violent campaigns.
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