Also non violent protests turn violent because the opposition embed bad actors to create the violence or counter protest pushes people to violence out of self defense.
YSK: Non-violent protests are 2x likely to succeed and no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of the country population has ever failed
Submitted 9 months ago by MolecularCactus1324@lemmy.world to youshouldknow@lemmy.world
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world
Comments
lordnikon@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Randomgal@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
No man it was all the lawsuits and SLAMMING headlines.
electric_nan@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Remember when the Nazis surrendered because of all the witty placards people marched with?
TheLastOfHisName@lemmy.world 9 months ago
My great uncle served in WW II. He wasn’t exactly “reasoning” with the nazis.
electric_nan@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
🙄
annie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
bbc link imagine my shock christ what a fucking rag
psx_crab@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
Non-violent protest kinda imply that the receiving end doesn’t react violently ehh. If they start sending riot police and water tank then it would 100% spiral.
M0oP0o@mander.xyz 9 months ago
YSK, This is blatant propaganda
BestBouclettes@jlai.lu 9 months ago
What do you mean ! Women got the right to vote by asking nicely, so did workers when they got the 40h work week. Same for black people and civil rights, all was achieved by gently kissing the ruling class boots.
hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
And now in June, we celebrate the queer community’s liberation, which totally happened by walking up to a politician and asking “hey can we please not get assaulted and thrown into prison or a mental ward for existing? 🥺”, to which the politician responded “oh, I’ve spent my entire life thinking you guys were perverted mentally ill sinners that should be drawn and quartered, but sure! ☺️”
MangioneDontMiss@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
bingo.
LuigiMaoFrance@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
100% agreed, this line of arguing is how they’re trying to keep us docile.
This book changed my opinion on non-violent resistance movements a few years ago. Highly recommended.
How Non-Violence Protects the State (Peter Gelderloos)
Ebook: theanarchistlibrary.org/…/peter-gelderloos-how-no…
Audiobook: youtu.be/CSo1PGWojxE
aceshigh@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Winner winner chicken dinner!
annie@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
by a state broadcasting org published by the state that held onto its colonial possessions until it was literally untenable without violence.
Nelson Mandela: “Choose peace rather than confrontation, except in cases where we cannot move forward. Then, if the only alternative is violence, we will use violence.” (I feel like a boomer posting azquotes but people are going to keep erasing recorded history so I might as well try)
M0oP0o@mander.xyz 9 months ago
Also to note, that potential violence is still violence. “peaceful” protests with over 3.5% of the total people generally do as well on the implied potential violence. Movements that will never go hot have no power.
13igTyme@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The US population is about 340 million. So we would need 11.9 million to protest.
MangioneDontMiss@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
the US is too spread out and too stupid to mount consistent Ent protests in those numbers.
ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
MangioneDontMiss@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
“This was partly the result of strength in numbers. Chenoweth argues that nonviolent campaigns are more likely to succeed because they can recruit many more participants from a much broader demographic, which can cause severe disruption that paralyses normal urban life and the functioning of society.”
In other words, violent protests work better, but they lack the amount of people.
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I have never known a protest to succeed at anything in my life
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 9 months ago
If that were true, what happens if two different non violent movements each with more than 3.5% of the population involved, exist at the same time in direct opposition to eachother?
explodicle@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Democratic peace theory happens and they talk it out.
Objection@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Interesting how the paper picks East Timor/Indonesia as a case study but makes no mention of the massacres of the nonviolent 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.
cecinestpasunbot@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
Vincent Bevins the author of The Jakarta Method actually wrote a book about why the protest movements of the last few decades rarely achieved their stated goals. It’s worth checking out.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
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.
MangioneDontMiss@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
who knew that standing around shouting and basically doing nothing of any really effect would have… no real effect.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
It can have effect when the opposition is relatively weak, e.g. individual small companies or govts that aren’t powerful and authoritarian enough to ignore massive protests.
Seasm0ke@lemmy.world 9 months ago
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.
pineapplelover@lemm.ee 9 months ago
And you need backing of the mass public. Keyboard warriors who sit on their ass and don’t get out there won’t work.
Lowpast@lemmy.world 9 months ago
This is a really common misunderstanding of how nonviolent movements actually work, and frankly gets the causality backwards.
You’re right that successful movements often have both violent and nonviolent wings - but the nonviolent components don’t succeed because of the violent ones. They succeed despite them. The research is pretty clear on this: nonviolent campaigns are actually more likely to achieve their goals than violent ones, and they’re more likely to lead to stable democratic outcomes.
Nonviolent movements get labeled as extremist precisely when they’re associated with violence, not when they’re separate from it. The Civil Rights Movement’s greatest victories came when they maintained strict nonviolent discipline - Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington. Every time violence entered the picture, it gave opponents ammunition to dismiss the entire movement.
The “good cop/bad cop” theory sounds intuitive but doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. What actually makes nonviolent resistance effective is mass participation, strategic planning, and moral leverage - not the threat of violence lurking in the background.
BrainInABox@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
The research is pretty clear on this:
Lol. What was the methodology on this “research”?
queermunist@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
You talk about research, so I’m curious: has any nonviolent campaign succeeded without an accompanying violent campaign?
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
are 2x more likely
Meaning, there can be instances where it’s true or not true.
spankmonkey@lemmy.world 9 months ago
66% of the time it works every time.
Battle_Masker@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
‘France’ has entered the chat
nialv7@lemmy.world 9 months ago
but YS(also)K: correlation does not equal causation.
a non-violent protest like the ones described in this article can only commerce, if it is not opposed by state sponsored violence. and that’s usually indicative of a government that’s already falling apart.
datalowe@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yes, thank you. It seemed bizarre to me as I was reading the article that this point is not brought up at all. Of course, it’s impossible to perform controlled realistic experiments to disentangle the effects. But to not even acknowledge this crucial limitation in the research makes the reporting and research deeply flawed. The research would really need to take into account each conflict’s preconditions, which is a very daunting task, to become more reliable. I understand it’s hard to do this research, but it’s only fair to demand that researchers temper their conclusions based on to the limitations. That kind of rigorous approach doesn’t sell as many books or lead to as many media appearances though, sadly.
JustJack23@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
Why Civil Resistance Works the book that 2x figure comes from has been implicated in cherry picking data.
If peaceful protests worked (as good as this article suggestions) the BBC wouldn’t be writing about them.
agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Peaceful protest works great under two conditions:
-
Just a metric fuckton of participants
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The implicit threat of violent protest (e.g. Malcom X behind MLK)
-
ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
The article pointedly says that non violent protests were more successful because a lot more people were involved than in the violent protests.
jonne@infosec.pub 9 months ago
Yeah, look at the Iraq war protests, they didn’t amount to anything because they were peaceful and easily ignored by the media.
Sylence@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
This was going to be my counterexample too. Millions protested in the US, UK, Australia, and elsewhere before any troops were committed and it still didn’t help. I dont have solid numbers but I’d be shocked if less than 3.5% of people were involved. They were the biggest protests ever at the time.
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I personally feel like a lot came out of it, though. The USA left Iraq for example.
favoredponcho@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
Claims without any supporting evidence aren’t that interesting.
JustJack23@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
How to blow up a pipeline has a chapter on the topic.
You can also read the original book and check the examples.
roguetrick@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Chenoweth has valid points worthy of debate but I have to say, I’m never going to get my political philosophy on direct action from the fucking beeb.
sqgl@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I want philosophy direct from the Monarch! /s
DerArzt@lemmy.world 9 months ago
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?
merc@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Okay but who’s the one defining a protest as violent?
The same people who write the history books. History is written by the winners, and when they write those books the protests that led to them winning are written up as being non-violent. It’s like “terrorists” vs. “freedom fighters”. If they succeed, they get to write the history books and they’re freedom fighters. If they lose, the other side writes the history books and they’re terrorists.
lmmarsano@lemmynsfw.com 9 months ago
Okay but who’s the one defining a protest as violent?
From the article
Perhaps most obviously, violent protests necessarily exclude people who abhor and fear bloodshed, whereas peaceful protesters maintain the moral high ground.
Chenoweth points out that nonviolent protests also have fewer physical barriers to participation. You do not need to be fit and healthy to engage in a strike, whereas violent campaigns tend to lean on the support of physically fit young men. And while many forms of nonviolent protests also carry serious risks – just think of China’s response in Tiananmen Square in 1989 – Chenoweth argues that nonviolent campaigns are generally easier to discuss openly, which means that news of their occurrence can reach a wider audience. Violent movements, on the other hand, require a supply of weapons, and tend to rely on more secretive underground operations that might struggle to reach the general population.
Violent protests seems to mean a violent campaign of armed, planned attacks.
I doubt that would include unplanned outbreaks of violence from people not organized for that purpose.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Cops are great at making any protest violent.
itsgroundhogdayagain@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
We can have a little violence. As a treat!
ragingHungryPanda@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
I don’t want to ask about the chocolate
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
This is an important question. I believe the research in question was defined by the predominant tactic used, even if there was a small amount of violence.
So protests like the anti-ICE ones in LA would probably count as non-violent in the research.
Rivalarrival@lemmy.today 9 months ago
History is written by the victors.
callouscomic@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Are you arguing “it’s just a few bad apples” in defense of protests?
This is awkward.
MotoAsh@lemmy.world 9 months ago
What us awkward is how you failed to realize how insanely dumb and context-free your logic is to come to such an assinine conclusion…
surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 9 months ago
You’re right. We should fire the bad protestors.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
I assume you’re comparing this to rhetoric around cops. Cops are ideologically and organizationally unified with top down command structure and they protect one another even in cases of wrongdoing or violence.
Most modern protests are just random people who chose to show up. These are totally different situations.
anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone 9 months ago
YES, protesters are freely associating members of the general public, whereas the police are vetted and trained professionals, payed by taxes to “uphold the law”.
They should be held to a higher standard!
dom@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Is this why the opposition always tries to escalate the peaceful movement into a violent one?
sin_free_for_00_days@sopuli.xyz 9 months ago
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.
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
I think the research was done prior to that event. It’s fairly old at this point.
Also, it’s a bit ambiguous how to count Hong Kong as a semi-autonomous region in China. Should you measure by percentage of Hong Kongers or percentage of Chinese? I might think the latter, since they’re subject to the force of that nation.
threeganzi@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Hong Kong was supposed to be free to control itself until 2048, democracy and free speech etc. China the decided that Hong Kong was starting to getting a little too free and started to tell the sitting president to shut the protests down.
China eventually took back control and instituted a national security law that could be used for pretty much anything after the crackdown didn’t quell the unrest.
I was actively following it live as it unfolded. It was very sad to see how much young people fought for basic freedoms and still lost it.
I remember being torn between my general non-violence stance and also understanding the protestors reciprocating the police violence.
fodor@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
I don’t think we can accept your argument, because in point in fact Hong Kong was an independent country. Certainly trying to disagree but now we’re getting into a definition question, but if that’s going to stop us from applying the proposed principle, then we can do that in every situation.
M0oP0o@mander.xyz 9 months ago
3.5% of the people work all the time if you cherry pick your data.
yeahiknow3@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
Maybe you’d need 3.5% of China’s population? Or are we counting Hong Kong as a military occupation? Well, I doubt if 3.5% of Ukrainians protested that Russia would just leave, so external occupations probably don’t count.
M0oP0o@mander.xyz 9 months ago
the Arab spring also springs to mind.