I'm Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist who studies social movements, democracy, and authoritarianism. In my personal capacity, I prepared this short video essay about the history and practice of non-violent resistance in the context of democratic backsliding. That's because we're in the midst of a global democratic recession. And each year over the past 17 years, multiple independent observatories of political regime type like Freedom House, the Varieties of Democracy Project, and the Polity Project have recorded a general decline in the number of countries that are democratic and a rise in the number that are autocratic. In 2024, this trend seems to have accelerated somewhat because of a global anti-incumbent wave that tended to elevate far-right parties or leaders, including in the US.
As I record this essay, the US is at a crossroads in its own history. A moment in which civil society and civic institutions either push back and defend democracy in the US or the US may slide deeper into authoritarianism. Democracy is a process, not a destination. And no democracy is perfect. But there are some basic minimal standards in terms of rule of law, separation of powers, checks and balances, and respect for the rights of inhabitants such as free expression, assembly, conscience, and due process that allow for the pursuit of many possibilities and collective futures.
Most importantly, as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt have argued, democracies only survive when their leaders are committed to upholding democracy themselves. When they respect institutions meant to check their power, like the results of elections, congressional statutes, or judicial decisions, when they tolerate the presence of opposition and dissent, and when they refuse to use or condone violence as a way of sorting out partisan differences. So, one of the three projects that I mentioned earlier has already issued its own determination about where the US currently stands. Political scientist Monty Marshall of the Polity Project, which catalogs global regimes around the world since 1800, has already claimed that his project would be downgrading the United States to a non-democracy.
He argued that by February of 2025, the country had experienced what he calls an adverse regime change due to an auto-coup or executive coup, which means that the president had already usurped sufficient power through the executive branch to minimize or eliminate any oversight within it. There's also an intense level of partisan factionalism in the country and there are no effective checks and balances on the executive by Marshall's estimation. And indicators that this might be true include things like defiance of federal court orders and injunctions, dismantling of congressionally mandated agencies like USAID, and next the Department of Education, the withholding of funds from congressionally approved grants through the NIH, NSF, FEMA, and the like. The elevation of the false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen. Attacks on sites of independent thought like the media, science, universities, law firms, and think tanks. The detention and threat of deportation of student protesters and other activists. The attempt to erase speech and control expression related to civil rights in the US's racial history in both public and private institutions. The scapegoating and dehumanization of minority groups from immigrants to trans people. Ignoring or refusing to comply with court rulings, including the Supreme Court's ruling that the federal government must facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvador prison, and assertions that the president is above the law. These are all signs of executive overreach. And these actions bely a lack of commitment to the rule of law or the constitution, much less the norms of self-restraint that are required for democracies to function.
The role of Elon Musk and DOGE has made the current moment both more complex and potentially more urgent as private interests seize one of the most powerful public trusts the US government possesses, the private and personal data of those within its borders. And so the question is what can be done? The answer is a lot. Scholars have learned from countries that have come back from the brink and they have found that civil society can do a great deal and it matters what civil society does. In almost every major historical example over the past hundred years, movements that stand up to aspiring autocrats are what make the difference. Formal institutions are important, but they alone cannot protect democracy because they're often too closely aligned with the autocrat or they're totally sidelined to the degree that the autocrat simply ignores them. But ordinary people organizing in their communities and mobilizing in non-violent collective action have made a big difference in determining how far an aspiring autocrat can go in consolidating power or how long an autocratic government can maintain control once it has established itself.
Whether we're talking about how the civil rights movement in the United States mobilized against the autocratic Jim Crow system of segregation in the South, or how the Solidarity movement organized and mobilized against the communist regime in Poland, how Chileans broke through the fear and terror of Augusto Pinochet's far-right regime to peacefully force his ouster, how the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa created a democratic breakthrough against a white supremacist regime, how Koreans have mobilized against an attempted coup just a few months ago in South Korea. In all of these cases, a strong and sustained defense of freedom, justice, and accountability from the grassroots to the grass tops has been a critical factor. And that's true even when this seems far-fetched. That's because no government, no matter how tyrannical, is monolithic.
Every tyrant or aspiring tyrant has always been totally dependent on the cooperation, obedience, and help of thousands of people in various pillars of support. Aspiring autocrats like to project strength, permanence, and absolute loyalty and fealty. And that's to make people feel powerless, alone, demoralized, and demobilized. But people are not powerless, and they're never alone. Actually, people who oppose oligarchy and autocracy are in the majority in most countries around the world, though it can be hard for them to act like a majority sometimes and especially under pressure. The other thing to remember is that autocratic power is not permanent. It is actually extremely fragile. Loyalty has to be constantly refreshed and rewarded. This means that there are near constant opportunities to dislocate the powerholder from their pillars and make it harder for them to implement their plans. That means that movements don't have to convince the tyrant that they're right. They just need to get enough people to stop cooperating with him. So how does that happen?
It happens through civil resistance, which is a method in which ordinary people decide to work together in a coordinated strategic way to defend, demand, and improve democracy through non-violent means. And what makes it successful are generally four key things. The first is numbers and momentum. The second is loyalty shifts in key pillars of support. The third is resilience and discipline in the face of repression. And the fourth is the use of a variety of non-violent methods. So let me start with numbers and momentum. You may have heard of the 3.5% rule. And that figure references the fact that historically it's very rare for anti-authoritarian movements to fail after having achieved that participation threshold. There's more to the rule. And there's no guarantee that this number will be predictive going forward. But the important thing about knowing that 3.5% of a population has been a critical threshold in the past is that it's a powerful indicator that a movement has already organized and attracted a broad base of committed participants that has built significant power and momentum. So if we think about momentum in linear physics, that quantity is mass times velocity. In movement terms, a study by myself and Margarita Zechmeister suggested that movement momentum might also be stylized by multiplying the number of participants nationwide by the total number of protest events in a prior week. And in a regional sample, we found that this indicator has been a powerful predictor of whether a leader decides to resign.
So why is that? Why is momentum so important? Because it bears heavily on that second key factor related to movement success. It builds pressure in ways that might induce loyalty shifts in those pillars of support. So recall that no powerholder is monolithic and neither are the social, political, economic, and cultural pillars that uphold the status quo. These pillars can include the economic and business community, organized labor and professional associations, cultural or religious institutions, state-aligned media, civil servants, police, military and other security forces and the like. Within each pillar, there are lots of people or groups that have their own self-interests. Take the business sector for example. Within the business sector, there are tons of corporations and each corporation obviously has its own CEO and C-suite executives, but it also has mid-level managers and workers, vendors and contractors, shareholders, advertisers, distributors, retailers, salespeople and consumers. So, each of these groups is made up of people with a diverse range of interests that might shift their loyalties or investments if it helps their own bottom line.
So, we saw something play out like this during the California grape boycott mobilized by Cesar Chavez and the California farm workers movement, during which workers organized consumer boycotts of Safeway and other grocery stores that sold grapes from unscrupulous grape farmers. So when Safeway decided to stop carrying the grapes, the grape farm owners lobbied the US government to increase subsidies and the government purchased the grapes to send overseas to troops serving in Vietnam. But when the grapes arrived on the docks to ship overseas, the Longshoremen's union refused to load the grapes onto the ships and they spoiled on the docks. Ultimately, the farm workers union was able to negotiate key concessions from the grape farm owners and that was a major win for the movement.
In Chile, it was miners who kicked off the resistance to Pinochet, going on strike and ultimately providing a rallying point for there to be an effective organizing and mobilizing campaign around a referendum that Pinochet put forward to give him extra time in office. And they used that opportunity to effectively mobilize a huge no vote that won in the end and the military decided to stand by the vote rather than by Pinochet when he asked them to intervene on his behalf. In South Africa, it was economic pressure that created the political pressure for the National Party, which up to then had been the pro-apartheid party, to actually unban the ANC, begin negotiations and approve the country's first ever democratic elections. In Poland, the Solidarity Movement was literally the trade union movement that over the course of years built an irresistible alternative to the communist regime and laid out the path for a democratic transition. And in Serbia, it was police who refused to fire on demonstrators in Belgrade, with some later saying that they thought they saw their kids in the crowd.
So what's important here about these loyalty shifts is that they don't necessarily mean that people within pillars fully switch to the opposition. Instead, there's always a spectrum of potential allies from the active opponents of a movement to passive opponents of the movement to people who are neutral or want to stay uninvolved to one's own passive allies and then one's own active allies. And loyalty shifts rarely mean getting active opponents to swing all the way over to becoming passive or active allies. Instead, it looks like getting some passive opponents to become neutral or uninvolved. The Serbian security forces didn't put down their guns and join the movement. They just refused to carry out an unlawful order that would have been costly for themselves and their families. So movements don't win by melting the hearts of their active opposition, but instead they win by constraining their options by getting enough people in enough pillars to move one notch away from the opponent and that can be enough to shift the balance of power in total.
The third thing that successful movements do is they maintain resilience and organizational discipline even as violence or the threat of violence against the movement escalates. But being able to anticipate and prepare for an escalation in a way that does not throw a movement off of its plan can be key to ensuring that a repressive episode might backfire. That means being able to clearly document and widely distribute any abuses, explain why the violence was unjust, disproportionate, and demonstrate the peaceful nature of the movement, providing direct support to people who need assistance. Such techniques can help any violence against the movement ultimately backfire. And then the fourth thing that successful movements do is they use a variety of non-violent methods rather than repeating the same method over and over again. This means building methods of non-violent protest and persuasion but also non-cooperation and potentially the building of alternative institutions.
So right now in the United States, the Crowd Counting Consortium project, which involves collaborators of mine as well, has tallied thousands and thousands of protests taking place in the United States between the period of January 22nd and the end of March 2025. Our best guess is that three times as many protests have occurred during that period than happened during the same period in 2017. So there's a lot of protest happening in the United States right now. In terms of non-cooperation, we are also seeing signs of this or at least an appetite for this through things like boycotts or boycotts, the sell-offs of Teslas, corporate shareholder votes that reject anti-DEI proposals, etc.
And I think that in many cases where movements have succeeded in the past, they've been able to do so by moving to the ability to withhold labor, either through limited strikes or even through general strikes, which is perhaps the most effective method of non-violent resistance that people have ever developed. And then the third category of methods of non-violent action that have been used by successful movements include alternative institutions. And this is more about building beloved community or building a vision for a future that appeals to people that is irresistible. And we're seeing that through the development of mutual aid, the organization of workers who've been laid off, attempts to pool resources to provide support to people who are under threat, and a new sense of civic solidarity among a broad range of people. Alternative institutions can also include things like new media or new ways of solving local problems that increasingly make the autocrat and what the autocrat wants to do irrelevant in local communities.
So although there are no guarantees and there's no way to predict the future, political scientists have long studied how an engaged and mobilized civil society affects the quality of democracy. And even in countries that have transitioned ultimately to democracy, movements have been very important in holding them to account and in expanding rights. For example, for every progressive change that has been seen to improve the democratic experiment in the United States, a mass movement was generally behind it. Whether it was for the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the vote, labor rights, civil rights, reproductive rights, the protection of the environment, and many others. So, movements to uphold and improve democracy have always been important in the expansion and renewal of democracy. There are many, many examples from history of people resisting authoritarianism and many of these are still ongoing today. If history is any guide, the current global democratic recession may indeed reverse course, especially if committed networks of civil society are able to organize and mobilize effectively.
