As a catalan actively involved in the 2012-2017 push for independence, I call bullshit.
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 1 month 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
Amberskin@europe.pub 1 month ago
Cattail@lemmy.world 1 month ago
there has to be a big ass asterisk on his post. generally things like the civil rights movement got partially undone and then success can be nebulous since even in a movement there are subset of goals that might not have been achieved
wpb@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This refers to Chenoweth’s research, and I’m somewhat familiar with their work. I think it’s good to clarify what non-violent means to them, as it’s non-obvious. For example, are economic boycotts violence? They harm business and keep food of the tables of workers. I don’t think that’s violence, but some people do, and what really matters here is what Chenoweth thinks violence is, and what they mean when they say “nonviolent tactics are more effective”.
At the end of “civil resistance: what everyone needs to know”, Chenoweth lists a number of campaigns which they’ve marked as violent/nonviolent and successful/unsuccessful. Let’s look at them and the tactics employed tonfigure out what exactly Chenoweth is advocating for. Please do not read this as a condemnation of their work, or of the protests that follow. This is just an investigation into what “nonviolence” means to Chenoweth.
Euromaidan: successful, nonviolent. In these protests, protestors threw molotov cocktails and bricks and at the police. I remember seeing a video of an apc getting absolutely melted by 10 or so molotovs cocktails.
The anti-Pinochet campaign: successful, nonviolent. This involved at least one attempt on Pinochet’s life.
Gwangju uprising in South Korea: unsuccessful, nonviolent. Car plowed into police officers, 4 dead.
Anti-Duvalier campaign in Haiti: successful, nonviolent. Destruction of government offices.
To summarize, here’s some means that are included in Chenoweth’s research:
- throwing bricks at the police
- throwing molotov cocktails at the police
- assassination attempts
- driving a car into police officers
- destroying government offices
The point here is not that these protests were wrong, they weren’t. The point is that they employed violent tactics in the face of state violence. Self-defense is not violence, and this article completely ignores this context, and heavily and knowingly implies that sitting in a circle and singing kumbaya is the way to beat oppression. It isn’t.
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Is there a list available?
At this point I’m curious what they consider violent. Straight up military uprising?
underline960@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
What does Chenoweth consider is violent?
Where’s the line where she would classify your movement as violent (and therefore likely to fail)?
wpb@lemmy.world 1 month ago
If I have to be completely honest with you, and this is and indictment of their research, it seems heavily dependent on what the protest is for or against.
yournamehere@lemm.ee 1 month ago
thanks. that was great.
MangioneDontMiss@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
boot licker post
sqgl@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
600k protested against the Iraq war in Australia 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?
ShinkanTrain@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
100k Australians are the cause of the Iraq War 😔
Womble@lemmy.world 1 month ago
No, if another 100k Australians had come out and then kept protesting day in day out for months they would have got the aus government to back down and not support the war.
Tiger666@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Name one non-violent protest that changed the material conditions of those protesting, I’ll wait.
Klear@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The Velvet Revolution.
Pandoras_Can_Opener@mander.xyz 1 month ago
The 1989 East German monday demonstrations.
Bloomcole@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Vote harder! Interpretative dance and ask nicely.
That’s how real change happens.And look at this fed (and my answer):
lemmy.world/post/31384291/17679569Could it be they are scared of actual change and started a social media campaign?
Coincidentally also the same message from Bernie the sheepdog.
x.com/BernieSanders/status/1932148252800905415AnalogNotDigital@lemmy.wtf 1 month ago
Pick up a rifle and do something then.
You guys who want violence are chomping at the bit for someone else to fucking do something and yet you do nothing.
The ‘far left’ in this country are a bunch of fucking pussies who do nothing but complain on the internet.
Tiger666@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
Can’t answer my question. I’m not surprised.
Liberals never live in reality that is why they allow fascism to happen.
Looks like you are the one being violent with your rhetoric.
Wolf@lemmy.today 1 month ago
Are you seriously unable to differentiate between someone saying that we shouldn’t be so quick to take violence off the table, and “I have a plan and the means to immediately begin using violence this second?”
Violence and Non Violence are tools, you don’t throw out your screwdriver when you get a hammer and you don’t try hammering in a screw without trying the screwdriver first.
You can prefer to resolve things peacefully while recognizing that it likely won’t work at the same time.
If someone says 'I think all people should have healthcare" do you respond with 'Go become a Doctor then!"
The far left are pussies for not taking action, and the Liberals are far worse because they are half the reason we are in this mess. Y’all want to prop up Capitalism and Corporations, this is what you get. It doesn’t matter if you asked the ruling class to play nice with the power you handed them or not, it’s not our fault you are so naive.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month 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 1 month ago
who knew that standing around shouting and basically doing nothing of any really effect would have… no real effect.
antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month 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.
Octagon9561@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
This is complete utter propaganda, especially considering it’s coming from the BBC. History has shown us time and time again that the ruling class never gives up its power peacefully.
sommerset@thelemmy.club 1 month ago
That’s horseshit made up statistics.
RandomMouse@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
A movement is a defined and coordinated event. It isn’t wanting something. The stats are not made up, but they have a lot of context that isn’t shared in the single sentence for sure.
jj4211@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I think it’s not “3.5% of people want an outcome” but “protests of significant magnitude to have 3.5% actively on the streets pushing” correlate with a very very large population that agrees, but not enough to be out on the streets.
So even if 40 million people want single payer, there are not 12 million in the streets.
But again, this is based on a scant handful of “movements”, so it’s pretty useless on specifics. Most I can see as a takeaway is perhaps that a violent movement may be too high stakes for people and a largely non-violent movement can attract more people and more people usually matter more than more violence.
WraithGear@lemmy.world 1 month ago
And that pushing apparently includes activities the report defines as “nonviolent”
TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Quoting System of a Down: “Why don’t you ask the kids at Tiananmen Square…”
throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Tbf they didn’t reach 3.5%, did they?
1989 population was 1 billion and they only managed to have 1 million protestors which is like 0.1%
TheEighthDoctor@lemmy.zip 1 month ago
Of you crush every 0.1% that shows up you will never reach 3.5%, or the alternative is to not protest until you have the numbers
nialv7@lemmy.world 1 month 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 1 month 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.
Gladaed@feddit.org 1 month ago
A lot of violent protests have succeeded too. Such as the suffragettes gaining the right to vote for women or unions gaining the right to exist, and the 8 hour work day.
K1nsey6@lemmy.world 1 month ago
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.
jj4211@lemmy.world 1 month ago
On the one hand, most of those incidents cited were in the face of a regime that also didn’t want to care. Just hard to ignore circumstances if 3.5% of your people are out on the streets and likely most of the people off the streets agree with them.
On the other hand, they base this on very few instances, so it’s hardly a statistical slam dunk, it’s vaguely supportive of some concepts, but anyone taking note of specific numbers is really overextending the research beyond what it can possibly say.
jj4211@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Based on the article “no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of a population has ever failed” has the caveat of “we only look at 3 of them, and those 3 worked”.
So their overall sample size is small, and the 3.5% sample size is just 3. Further, those 3 had no idea someone in the vague future would retroactively measure their participation to declare it a rock solid threshold.
I think the broader takeaway is that number of people seems to matter more than degree of violence, and violence seems to alienate people that might have otherwise participated.
ameancow@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Also, the “no violence” thing has a LOT to do with what the mobilizing group is trying to accomplish.
Changing policies and ousting leadership that isn’t performing? Hell yeah, peaceful marches and protests all the way.
Want to remove a hostile and oppressive militarized regime? That shit is NEVER pretty, and turns even the best of people into monsters by necessity.
xor@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
feels awfully close second one… especially now that i found out they’re deputizing bounty hunters to impersonate federal officers, with masks on… and paying them >$1,000 per brown person they kidnap…
i mean i knew it something extra odd was happening but a lot of these guys are contractors… and ofc white supremacists…
psychadlligoat@piefed.social 1 month ago
lol of course this garbage bootlicker propaganda is left up on .world, a classic example of their quality modding skills
glad to see the comments calling it out for what it is
sommerset@thelemmy.club 1 month ago
Bogus unsupported stats
Objection@lemmy.ml 1 month 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 1 month 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.
VampirePenguin@midwest.social 1 month ago
It’s about resistance, not violence per we. Choosing the right kind of resistance for the situation is how change is made. Non violent protesting is for raising awareness and building solidarity. Violence is purely for defense and to show when a line has been crossed. Otherwise your movement will just become the next police state regime, if it doesn’t get crushed outright. People advocating for violence on social media are either bots or bad faith actors trying to stop the movement. Anyone seriously considering violence against the state sure as shit aren’t posting about it on Lemmy.
hungryphrog@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
I’d say that being distruptive is what we should be discussing about. Strikes or boycotts, when organized well, can be examples of non-violent can actually work, while holding a sign in a park doesn’t do anything.
VampirePenguin@midwest.social 1 month ago
Agree. But also, holding a sign in a park with 20 other people that you coordinated with is not nothing. It’s community building and solidarity, which are both essential.
Battle_Masker@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 month ago
‘France’ has entered the chat
Raiderkev@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Idk, that French deal seemed to work out pretty well.
ameancow@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Because they were trying to topple the entire system, not voice disapproval or change policies.
There’s no peaceful way to do that without a level of coordinated effort that we will NEVER get from groups of humans. To say nothing of the fact that even after the revolution, you have to share space with the people and sympathizers of those ousted, so sending a message of severe, popular consequence for regression is almost a necessity for lasting change.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 month ago
Phony liberal bullshit for controlling the masses.
Ledivin@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Er… Hong Kong?
Googledotcom@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Hong Kong wasn’t 3.5% of Chinese population
GreenKnight23@lemmy.world 1 month ago
“more likely” not “will work”
haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 1 month ago
In a capitalist system, all protests are violent because the capitalist system is violent by definition.
As long as we industrially murder people all around the globe, protests have not been successfull.
And nobody cares if women got the right to vote in this system. Its like making a party about women being able to join the NSDAP.
We are imperialist. We need to be stopped by any means necessary.
skisnow@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
The problem when it comes to the current situation in the US, is that these protests already came baked in to the Project 2025 plan from the start.
They’re not going to change their minds on anything as a result of the protests because they already knew there’d be mass protests before Trump signed a single order.
13igTyme@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The US population is about 340 million. So we would need 11.9 million to protest.
MangioneDontMiss@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
the US is too spread out and too stupid to mount consistent Ent protests in those numbers.
roguetrick@lemmy.world 1 month 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 1 month ago
I want philosophy direct from the Monarch! /s
OmegaLemmy@discuss.online 1 month ago
Non violent protests work on a platform of sympathy, violence is fear, a lot of people lack any sympathy for no kings protests and those against it don’t seem to fear it
How are you going to demand change when a ragtag militia force can stop it?
RandomMouse@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
Economic tactics. The general strike is more powerful than people seem to realize.
Bloomcole@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Thanks Bernie the sheepdog.
Make sure the sheep don’t make waves.
And don’t forget to say pissrahell has aright to defend itselfaxh@lemmy.world 1 month ago
no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of a population has ever failed
US police: hold my riot gear!
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 1 month ago
George Floyd protests had more than that (closer to 8%) and they didn’t really change anything.
RandomMouse@slrpnk.net 1 month ago
Movements are not the same as protests, movements have leadership that has explicitly defined asks that the followers agree with. iirc the organizers had challenges with this, so their default asks were awareness and they got that.
WraithGear@lemmy.world 1 month ago
So then by any reasonable metric it was a failure. Just that the failure was at the leadership level and had zero chance at success because of that no matter what happened
ameancow@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Most of that I put on our ineffectual Democratic leadership who are supposed to represent the people. We had a mandate of millions and I don’t remember a single, actual dramatic effort to reshape policy by our elected leaders.
At that time, many people still believed Democrats were actually the opposition group to conservative fascism, and not the checked-out wine-mom getting alimony checks every month from the right.