I'm Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, and today I'm talking about civil resistance: what we know about it, where and how it works. So civil resistance is a technique of struggle where ordinary people decide to work together in a coordinated, strategic way to defend, demand, and improve democracy through nonviolent means. And what makes it successful is typically four things. The first is the ability of people to organize large-scale participation and build momentum. The second is the ability to elicit loyalty shifts in key pillars of support. The third is the ability to maintain resilience even as violent repression escalates against a movement. And the fourth is the ability to innovate new methods of resistance beyond just street demonstrations, in order to build pressure on the opponent without exposing a massive number of people to high risk.
So let me talk a little bit more about those four things. The first relates to the ability to achieve mass mobilization and momentum. So, you may have heard of the 3.5% rule, and the 3.5% figure references the fact that historically it's very rare for anti-authoritarian movements to fail after they achieve a high threshold of participation, about three and a half percent, a tipping point of active popular participation.
And the most important thing to know about that three and a half percent rule is that even though there's no guarantee going forward that this number is predictive, it's a powerful indicator that a movement has successfully organized and attracted a very broad base of committed participants that have built significant power and momentum. The most important thing to know about why nonviolent resistance is so effective, I think, is that it's a truly inclusive method of resistance. Most people from different walks of life in a society can find a way into a movement that is committed to nonviolent action, and that allows the movement to avail itself of the active participation of a much broader universe of potential participants. And that is what lends its social power, its economic power, and its political power to the movement.
Momentum is just a sort of a way of thinking about the ability of a movement to build pressure and stay on the offensive. And one kind of cute way of thinking about movement momentum is in terms of linear physics. Maria Stephan and I did a study where we were looking at whether mass times velocity, as in linear physics momentum, could be stylized and kind of applied to movements. And so what we did was we multiplied the number of participants nationwide on any given day in a country by the total number of protest events that had happened in the prior week. And in a regional sample, we found that just that indicator that emerges from the number of people participating multiplied by the number of events in the previous week was a very powerful indicator of whether a national leader resigned from office. And so what this really suggests is just that people power isn't just about a huge number of people being in the streets, but it's about that building of pressure and the building of momentum.
And so that kind of leads us into the second thing that explains the success of civil resistance campaigns, which is the ability to get people to defect from the opponent's pillars of support. So every autocrat, no matter how tyrannical, has to rely completely on really thousands of people in different pillars of society to go along with things in order to maintain their hold on power. So these are people in the business and economic community or elites who are very wealthy. It includes security forces, state media. It includes civil servants and a wide variety of other people who kind of are impactful in what they do and in determining whether the leader can maintain their hold in power. And so successful civil resistance campaigns, through that building of momentum and the building of pressure, begin to chip away at the loyalties of those people in different pillars of support.
There's no such thing as a monolithic pillar. It's not like the entire business community is equally excited to support an autocrat. There's always a huge range and a spectrum of loyalties residing in all of those pillars, and that provides movements with opportunities to really begin to disrupt and pull apart those loyalties. So over time, movements that succeed are those that are able to really shape the loyalties of people in those pillars and elicit defections from them.
The third thing that successful movements do is that they maintain resilience and organizational discipline even as repression against a movement might escalate. And that usually looks like preparing for and being able to activate what's called the backfire effect. And the backfire effect is something that was observed by Brian Martin and kind of theorized by him. But it's really the observation that there are types of repressive episodes against civilians that tend to actually make things much worse for the autocrat than before they happen. And that's when those episodes are viewed as unjust, disproportionate, and inappropriate. That's just sort of like not morally right to crack down on civilians who were not doing any harm to society.
And so the idea is that movements that are prepared to demonstrate the unjustness of an episode of repression, and who are able to communicate effectively about it, to document it in a way that shows that there's no doubt that this was unjust, and who the perpetrator was, are going to be in much better position than movements that aren't able to shore up those capacities to make repression backfire.
And then the fourth thing that successful movements do is they innovate new techniques of nonviolent resistance. So they're not just overrelying on street demonstrations, but they're also engaging in different forms of economic, political, and social non-cooperation. The general strike, for example, is a powerful method of nonviolent action. Economic non-cooperation, withholding labor, is one of the most powerful forms of nonviolent resistance that societies have been able to develop. And the reason that they're important to the success of these movements is because the movements are often able to rely on those types of techniques when street demonstrations and other more overt forms of resistance become too dangerous or risky because of repression or because of infiltration, provocation, and other things.
So I think those four things that successful civil resistance campaigns do are kind of consensus factors leading to success. My colleague Maria Stephan and I wrote about them in our book, "Why Civil Resistance Works." Others like Kurt Schock, Peter Ackerman, Hardy Merriman, and Gene Sharp have written about similar factors, as has Charles Tilly, the sociologist, who referred to worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment as some of the most important things that movements that succeed are able to muster.
So I think the couple other things I'll say about civil resistance, particularly in the more recent past, is that the number of civil resistance movements around the world struggling for kind of major goals like independence or anti-military occupation or self-determination or the ouster of a dictator has grown in kind of historic proportions. So there are more people in the past decade using civil resistance techniques than really in the past 25 years than in the entire 20th century. So it's become a much more prominent kind of technology of resistance than it was in the 20th century.
That said, at the same time that it's become more prominent, it's also begun to decline in its success in the last few years. And this was especially kind of accelerated during COVID. So at this point we see far fewer successful civil resistance campaigns than we did 20 years ago, for example. And so this is something for researchers, including myself, to sort of look into and try to understand why that's happening.
And I think I'd hasten to add that armed resistance isn't becoming any more effective. So it's not like nonviolent resistance has stopped working and violent resistance has started working. That's not at all what the data show. In fact, they show the opposite: that it's both types of nonviolent and armed resistance that have become less effective over time. And I think that it points to the fact that we're in a different geopolitical landscape than we were during the sort of golden era of civil resistance and nonviolent resistance. And it suggests that there are opportunities for movements today to innovate in ways and adapt in ways to this new terrain that provide a host of new experiments for movements to undertake to try to become more effective nonviolent movements. So I think I'll leave it at that, but thank you for the opportunity to share.
