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Shop nowWhy Civil Resistance Works
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Learn moreFor more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results.
In this book, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption, and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters.
Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence is necessary to achieve certain political goals.
Erica Chenoweth is professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her research focuses on political violence and its alternatives. Foreign Policy magazine ranked her among the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013. She also won the 2014 Karl Deutsch Award, given annually by the International Studies Association to the scholar under forty who has made the most significant impact on the field of international politics or peace research.
Maria J. Stephan directs the Program on Nonviolent Action at the U.S. Institute of Peace. She was formerly a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, where she co-led the Future of Authoritarianism project. Previously, Stephan was lead foreign affairs officer in the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations (CSO), where she worked on both policy and operations for Afghanistan and Syria engagements. Earlier, Stephan directed policy and research at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC), a private foundation dedicated to developing and disseminating knowledge about nonviolent struggle. She simultaneously taught courses on human rights and civil resistance at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service and American University's School of International Service.
Traci Odom, an American-born actor and voice artist, has built a successful career that spans decades. As a stage, film, and television actor, she has played everything from a tree to an Irish setter to a lawyer, but it is as a veteran narrator of more than fifty-five audiobooks that she has truly found her voice, inviting her listeners into the worlds of romance, witchcraft, devilry, and vampirism. To relax in her spare time, she daydreams of becoming the first female American Ninja Warrior-but then she would have to get off her couch to make that dream a reality, so she lives out her daydreams in her professional life, both on camera and on microphone. Working in close collaboration with her authors, she brings their creations to life with dynamic energy and commitment.