Why Civil Resistance Works the book that 2x figure comes from has some major controversy about cherry picking data as well as playing with the definition of peaceful protest.

If peaceful protests worked (as good as this article suggestions) the BBC wouldn't be writing about them.

YSK, This is blatant propaganda

if you're arguing that violence is a poor way by which to shape a society, preach that to the police. it's literally what they do for a living.

I heard a saying once (I cannot remember the provenance) that could be paraphrased like: "The liberal is someone who is for all movements except the current movement; against all wars except the current war."

There are two important points:

1. Every major movement in history has incorporated elements of violence;
2. Which movements we retroactively consider as violent is determined by sociological consensus.

For example, the American civil rights movement is today considered by people to have been largely non-violent. However at the time the movement's opponents definitely thought of, and portrayed it as a violent enterprise.

Opponents of a movement will always portray that movement as violent. The status-quo consensus perspective on historical protests is written by the victors. Therefore, the hypothesis that "non-violent" protests are more likely to succeed than "violent" ones is self-fulfilling. When protest movements succeed we are less likely to consider them "violent".

This is actually rewriting history.

The Philippines had multiple militant movements but notably the Reform the Armed Forces which had orchestrated and abandoned a coup that had popular support kicking off the protest movement.

Sudan was a military coup that overthrew bashir and then massacred protestors and was actually backed by American OSI NGOs.

Algiers street protests were illegal and they combined general strikes with police clashes and riots even though they were subjected to mass arrests.

For Ghandi MLK jr and others mentioned there were armed militant groups adding pressure. My take away is you need both approaches.

Without demonstrating the ability to defend your nonviolent protest with devastating results it just gets crushed. If you are militant with no populist public movement backing your ideals you get labeled as terrorists and assinated by the feds.

“There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event,” says Chenoweth – a phenomenon she has called the “3.5% rule”.

Me scatching my head thinking,"10% of Hong Kong protested and still got stomped by China's boot." I suppose it could be argued that it's not the same thing.

Non violent protests only work when there's a threat of violence backing them.

This sounds like propaganda

Liberal three-percenter lore?

I mean, I do think non-violent disobedience can be effective, but the state usually makes it violent. State sanctioned protests where most obey most of the rules isn't disobedience. Is a good start though, and I hope things progress (in a good way).

Well that's total bs, in Greece there's been dozens of non-violent protests far exceeding 3.5% that have failed spectacularly.

Bourgeoisie propaganda

STOP SPREADING THIS FUCKING LIE.

KING JUNIOR WAS DISLIKED DURING HIS NONVIOLENCE PROTEST.

IT IS PRECISELY VIOLENCE THAT THE STATE ENACTS THAT LEAD TO TRUMP’S REELECTION.

IF YOU WANT CHANGE, BE MORE UNGOVERNABLE THAN MAGA.

Remember when the Nazis surrendered because of all the witty placards people marched with?

Okay but who's the one defining a protest as violent? You get enough people together and you're going to have some aseholes that damage property but are the minority. If chocolate can have 5% bugs, then protests should be able to have 5% violence and still be called peaceful.

Or heck, if people react when police instigate, should that be called a violent protest?

600k Australians protested against the Iraq war in 2003.

The population was about 20m so 3.5% of that is 700k. So if another 100k had joined then the protest would have succeeded?

Quoting System of a Down: "Why don't you ask the kids at Tiananmen Square..."

I have never known a North American protest to succeed at anything in my lifetime.

Didn't BLM 2020 protests have over 3.5%? I don't think they accomplished much except put pressure to prosecute Chauvin. Like literally just that one guy.

boot licker post

It's also important to remember that non-violence serves the interest of entrenched power. The state is at its core a violence-control structure. When people excersize the power of violence in their own interests, the state must reassert it's dominion or risk collapse.

Non-violent requests can be accommodated without elites feeling like their ill-gotten power is threatened. But it's often the violent demands that scare them into doing so.

Non-violent protests still need to come with a credible threat of becoming violent if the protesters' safety is being attacked or if their human rights are compromised.

There's a book on the subject written by Srdja Popovic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blueprint_for_Revolution

Summary: protests that start (and try to remain) non-violent have a greater chance to succeed, because they can attract more people to their cause.

Critique: with some regimes, it's not possible to non-violently protest. For non-violent protest to work, the environment must respect a minimum amount of human rights.

Case samples:

• US during the civil rights movement era: yes
• USSR under Gorbachev: yes
• Serbia under Milosevic: yes, with difficulty on every step (Popovic was there doing it)
• Israel under Netanyahu: probably yes
• China under Xi: practically no (not for long)
• USSR under Kruschev/Brezhnev/Andropov/Chernenko: not really
• Russia under Putin: no, don't even hold a blank sheet of paper
• Iran under Khamenei: only if you're doing a bread riot
• Saudi Arabia, USSR under Stalin, NK under the Kim dynasty: no, and execution would be a possible outcome

...etc. In some places, you can't organize. Then your only option is to fight. As long as you can publicly organize, definitely do so - it's vastly preferable. :)

That statistic only works if the government cares what we think. Voters have trained politicians that they can do whatever they want with no repercussions. Therefore, they do not need to care what we think.

Is this why the opposition always tries to escalate the peaceful movement into a violent one?

Sounds like bullshit. Just in recent memory: look at Belarus 2021, look at the massive Serbian protests that have been going on for over half a year and the govt is still not relenting.

Let me know what all the peaceful protests on climate change did leading up to and since the Paris Agreement.

Civil disobedience, including violent action, absolutely has a place in changing the policy of the state.

Interesting how the paper picks East Timor/Indonesia as a case study but makes no mention of the massacres of the PKI and suspected communists, which the US was ambivalent, if not supportive about.

Any serious study of resistance movements around the world will paint a very different picture, one in which nonviolence is frequently met with slaughter, and people turn to violence specifically because nonviolence failed.

The fact of the matter is that people living in the imperial core cannot be well versed in the history of every country in the world (to the extent that we can even exert influence in the first place), and this allows the media to either ignore things like the massacres in Indonesia, or spin them in such a way to justify the preferred side through biased framing. The thing the paper cites as a major determining factor of success or failure is defections from security forces, but what if those security forces come from thousands of miles away?

Trying to assert a universal principle on a tactical level regarding such broad categories is kind of silly in the first place. It's too broad. You have to assess what you're trying to accomplish and formulate a strategy to get there based on the particular situation you find yourself in.

From "The Jakarta Method:"

This was another very difficult question I had to ask my interview subjects, especially the leftists from Southeast Asia and Latin America. When we would get to discussing the old debates between peaceful and armed revolution; between hardline Marxism and democratic socialism, I would ask:

“Who was right?”

In Guatemala, was it Árbenz or Che who had the right approach? Or in Indonesia, when Mao warned Aidit that the PKI should arm themselves, and they did not? In Chile, was it the young revolutionaries in the MIR who were right in those college debates, or the more disciplined, moderate Chilean Communist Party?

Most of the people I spoke with who were politically involved back then believed fervently in a nonviolent approach, in gradual, peaceful, democratic change. They often had no love for the systems set up by people like Mao. But they knew that their side had lost the debate, because so many of their friends were dead. They often admitted, without hesitation or pleasure, that the hardliners had been right. Aidit’s unarmed party didn’t survive. Allende’s democratic socialism was not allowed, regardless of the détente between the Soviets and Washington.

Looking at it this way, the major losers of the twentieth century were those who believed too sincerely in the existence a liberal international order, those who trusted too much in democracy, or too much in what the United States said it supported, rather than what it really supported—what the rich countries said, rather than what they did. That group was annihilated.

Data presented to you by BBC the same network that lied to you about WMS in Iraq, genocide of the Palestinians people, and most likely more.