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Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 313. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 313.
That's what shifts the balance of power. That's why three and a half percent can do what it does because you don't, movements don't necessarily need to get the majority of people over to their side. They just need to get everybody one tick closer to their side and that shifts the balance of power.
My name is David McCraney. This is the You Are Not So Smart podcast. And in this episode, we are discussing the three and a half percent rule. That is the name of a crucial threshold, a measurement threshold.
A number, an outcome, discovered about a decade ago by Harvard political scientist Erica Chinoweth. That's who you just heard. And Erica is our guest on this episode because the three and a half percent rule has gone viral twice. Once a while back when Erica gave a TED talk about it and a second time right now at the time of this recording.
On TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, which is what I will always call that, Blue Sky, Facebook, thanks to a surge in recent protests. Respect! Respect! Respect! Respect! Tens of thousands of people have marched in dozens of U.S. cities. Yes, marching, protesting, holding signs, outside, shouting, chanting. And that first bit of audio that you just heard, that was in
Canada. So it's all across the globe. And on all of these platforms, people are discussing the three and a half percent rule. It has returned to public discourse among people who are doing the organizing and doing the commenting upon those protests. Everybody's heard this three and a half percent figure that's going around. My sister appointed me this morning to a very interesting study from Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth, who discusses
The 3.5% rule. Just 3.5% of the population need to buy in. The 3.5% rule that often has been referenced, especially in the last couple months. There's something called the 3.5% protest rule. What's the magic number? Just 3.5%. The 3.5% rule is about this. What is this?
The three and a half percent rule, or the 3.5% rule, as some people call it. Erica Chenoweth calls it the three and a half percent rule. I'm going to try to stick to that. And to make sense of it, let's begin with the foundation, which is researching civil resistance, working on a book about that topic. Maria J. Stefan and Erica Chenoweth discovered that, for one thing,
The success rate of nonviolent conflicts over the course of about the last 106 years was more than twice that of violent conflicts.
Nonviolent conflicts are twice as successful as violent conflicts. It was a big surprise to both of them. They started the study skeptical of the power of nonviolent methods compared to violent ones. But yes, it was true. The evidence was clear. The numbers were right there. Over that time range...
If you wanted to change your government, kick out a dictator, stop an occupation, get your politicians to listen to you, resist authoritarianism, change the laws, get your police to stop breaking those laws, the best strategy for the last 106 years has been not resorting to organized violence, not breaking stuff.
not using guns, not lighting fires, not breaking out into riots, not becoming violent, not blowing up things for sure. And definitely not shooting anyone, beating anyone or stabbing anyone. The more successful strategy twice as successful is,
was organized nonviolence. Things like strikes, sit-ins, boycotts, and showing up in person with signs, shouting and chanting, and protesting. They studied 323 violent and nonviolent movements between 1900 and 2006 and
They considered a movement a success if it fully achieved its stated goals within a year of its peak engagement and as a direct result of its activities, be they violent or nonviolent. And they found that violent campaigns succeeded 26% of the time, whereas nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53% of the time.
And they found there were two main reasons for this. One, governments, dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, they can easily justify defending their whole thing when they're defending it against armed insurgents, when they're defending it against violent rebellions, or even just rioters, people lighting fires and breaking windows.
It looks good for them on the news to see all of this stuff that they're protecting the populace against, protecting the state against. But violence by such a regime against peaceful protests full of people from all walks of life, that's a bad look overall. And it's more likely to backfire when it comes to public opinion.
That then results in a breakdown of obedience within security forces, the judiciary, and among civil servants. It starts a cascade, a feedback loop. And the second thing is that a potentially sympathetic public often sees a violent movement as having all or nothing goals. It's hard to buy in with them because if you disagree just a little bit,
It seems like you just disagree in total. However, with a nonviolent movement, it seems that that whole push, that protest, that organizing swell of something is happening, it seems to be amenable to concessions, to bargaining.
People can buy in a little bit. They can get on board a little, little bit, and then a little, little bit more, and then a bit more, then a bit more, until eventually they are in.
But here's the part that made all of this research go viral and then go viral a second time. Just 3.5% of the population need to buy in. Upon further inspection, Erica Chenoweth found that from 1900 to 2006, if the percentage of people showing up in person, physically showing up, marching, striking, refusing to cooperate,
If that number reaches 3.5% of all the people in the nation, it never failed.
In fact, many of the nonviolent movements that succeeded didn't get close to 3.5%. They reached their goals at 1% or 2%, but all the ones that reached 3.5% succeeded. No single campaigns failed during that time period after they'd achieved the active and sustained participation of just 3.5% of the population. And lots of them succeeded with far fewer than that.
Now 3.5% is nothing to sneeze at. In the US today that's like 11 million people. But get this: every single campaign that surpassed that 3.5% was a non-violent one. In fact, the non-violent campaigns were on average four times larger than the average violent campaigns. Not half the country, not a quarter of the country, not 10% of the country.
Three and a half percent. But there are some caveats, which is why I wanted to talk to Erica Chinneweth, why I wanted Erica to be a guest on an episode of this podcast. And we're going to talk to Erica all about these caveats, which include...
The fact that this is not a magic number, it's a measurement. So you must do the things that result in that many people participating in your movement for the movement to succeed. In other words, you can't just organize three and a half percent of the people in your nation to protest on the same day and expect that's all it's going to take for the opposition to throw up their hands or for a dictatorship to crumble.
3.5% is a measurement of an outcome that movements routinely reached over time. That level of participation, it must be sustained. And that leads us to the biggest caveat of them all. The people on the other side of protest movements today, the regimes across the world, the governments across the world opposing these protest movements, they know about the 3.5% rule and they have adapted to it.
And the strategy opposition to these movements most often uses is factionalization. Through social media and agent provocateurs and all manner of psyops tactics, they provocate the people within the resistance to begin fighting among themselves. In political science terms, they elicit defection. They get protesters and revolutionaries to break up into warring factions, camps who can't agree.
Because even though 3.5% is a much smaller number than you might have assumed, it's still very difficult to get that many people to stay united, nonviolent, and committed to a common goal. And they count on that. But if you're up against a dictatorship or an authoritarian government, that factionalization strategy, it works in the other direction as well. Authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, fascist governments, they're also just groups of people attempting to stay organized.
So, fomenting division, creating factionalization, infighting, polarization, balkanization, and schismization is something nonviolent movements are actually pretty good at. And when such movements encourage defection, the people who defect become part of the growing percentage of the total public in the resistance. It's one of the main reasons such movements are more than twice as likely to succeed compared to those who resort to violence.
It's difficult to justify your existence when the crowds that keep appearing remain unarmed, full of people of all ages and levels of physical ability, and demonstrate time and again that they are not a threat.
When security forces imagine violence against such groups, it prompts disobedience and defection among the state's goon squads. And once they lose their goon squads, the strikes and sit-ins and boycotts and rallies can grow so large that the crowds become daily mainstream national news.
And that tends to generate the cascade that leads to people feeling safe to join in. And so goes the feedback loop that gets you up to three and a half percent. As with anything involving human behavior, especially human behavior in mass, it's a bit more complicated than it seems at first glance. And we're going to get into all that complexity with the person who gave us this rule, Erica Chinoweth, right after this break.
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Check all of this out at kitted.shop or just click the link in the show notes. And now we return to our program. My name is David McCraney. This is the You Are Not So Smart podcast. And in this episode, our guest is the discoverer and namer of the three and a half percent rule, Erica Chenoweth.
Erica. Yeah. First of all, who are you? What do you do? And how did you become interested in this to the point that this is probably something you'll do for a very long time and it takes up all of your free time? Yeah.
So I am a political scientist. I happen to work at Harvard University, but of course, I'm here in my individual capacity. And here at Harvard, I have something that I direct called the Nonviolent Action Lab. And what we do is we collect data and do analyses about basically where and how movements around the world and in the United States are
are winning or being defeated and why that's happening. We try to produce timely analysis in a way that is informative for people trying to understand this stuff. The talk that I gave that was about the 3.5% rule was a TEDxBoulder talk that I gave in 2013. And the backstory behind how that came about is that my colleague Maria Stephan and I had together collaborated on a study that resulted in a book
And the study was the first to systematically compare the outcomes of armed and unarmed mass resistance movements in the 20th and into the beginning of the 21st century. And what we were trying to do is understand whether there was a significant difference in the outcomes of armed and unarmed mass movements that were against dictatorships or for territorial independence movements.
And we found that the nonviolent campaigns were like twice as likely to succeed from 1900 to 2006 as the violent ones, and that they were more likely to lead to democratic transitions than armed campaigns. So we published a book in 2011 called Why Civil Resistance Works. And over the course of the next couple of years, there were a lot of movements happening in the US. There was Occupy, there was the Arab Spring and the spring and summer before Occupy even.
And so there was a lot of interest in not just the finding that armed resistance movements were less likely to succeed than unarmed ones. And that seemed to be playing out pretty clearly, at least at that time in the Arab Spring cases, but also in the theory for why that was the case and the analysis we did about the difference between successful and failed nonviolent movements.
And one of the big theories is just that nonviolent movements are much better at getting very large numbers of people to participate from all walks of life than our armed movements. And that large participation is what elicits those defections, especially from security forces in key moments of the peak of the movement, basically.
And so what happened is that I was at a workshop with some activists and one of the activists asked me if there was like a, a critical threshold or critical mass. And I said, I don't actually know that. I I'm sure that it's just like more people are better. But there is a guy named Mark Lickbach and who's a political scientist. And he published a book called the rebel's dilemma. And in it, there's a note that he makes where he,
He basically speculates that something like 5% of the population revolting against the government would be sufficient to make it impossible for the government to survive. And so, you know, it's called sort of the 5% rule. And...
I actually can look at our data and tell you if that tracks. And so I opened the data set and I was like, oh, actually, I see here that none of the movements in our data set that surpassed three and a half percent of the population failed. So maybe it's, you know, because Mark Lickbach had already kind of made that speculation and then the number was higher.
around that ballpark, but a little lower, I thought that was an interesting source of sort of validating it. And so the talk that I gave and TEDxBoulder was sort of making clear that that was what was true in our data set. And it went from there. I guess you know this, but the 3.5% rule is very memed up to the point that
I told friends and family that I was going to talk to you and who don't follow any of this stuff, aren't nerds about it in any which way, shape or form. And they were like, and they knew what I was talking about. Wow. And the reason that I was like, Oh, I wonder if I could actually talk to them about this was I started seeing it pop up on Tik TOK and reels and YouTube shorts. I saw a, uh,
a newfound optimism forming from a lot of people who are like, what is the point? Like, what can one person do? And
I was, oh, well, is that a thing for real? Because I've heard about it and my immediate skepticism was like, I don't know. And I started looking at all your stuff and I was like, wow, there's like research and all these cool things. It's not just like a TED Talk that went viral. And I was like, I would love to talk to you about it. So are you aware of the massive new, like this new burst of virality? Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it is popping up in unusual places, including places that I am not, right? So I'm not on TikTok. I'm not on really any social media anymore, except for Blue Sky. And it pops up there too. And so I'm pretty aware of it, even in the last, I think on the April 19th kind of day of protests that took place.
at least one news outlet said that the organizers were explicitly aiming for 3.5% of the population to participate in that day. And they didn't make reference to the rule, but they made reference to the number of people, 11 to 12 million people is their goal, is what they said. And so I think that it is making its way around, for sure. How does that make you feel? Well, so I'll say that the...
that I understand why people are drawn to it. It looks like a magic number. It looks like a number that provides people with certainty and a guarantee. And it's also a surprisingly modest number. And I think that the way that people receive it and experience it is that, wow,
That's a smaller number than I would have guessed as being a critical threshold for toppling, you know, or pushing back on an authoritarian regime or an attempted democratic backsliding episode or things like that. So that's a smaller number than I expected, a totally doable number. And that gives people a sense of empowerment and, you know, a kind of metric to aim for. So I totally understand why people receive it that way.
I also think that there are no shortcuts. The three and a half percent rule is kind of a rule of thumb. It's not a guarantee guarantee.
for movements going forward for a number of reasons. One is that it's a descriptive number that is assigned to a historical database where people weren't self-consciously trying to organize 3.5% of the population. They were trying to organize as many people as they possibly could, but they'd also been building organizations and organizing people for sometimes years before some mass mobilization episode.
And that mass mobilization built over time, it built pressure over time, it induced defections from the opponent's pillars of support, and that's why they won. So it's not so much that three and a half percent of the people just woke up one morning, decided to go and protest, and their dictatorship fell. That's not how it played out at all.
And actually, we don't know what happens in the future for two reasons. One is just the sort of reality of if people are trying to organize and aim for that number, we don't know what happens when people are sort of self-consciously aiming for it. But the other thing that's happened is, you know, the talk that I gave that
first established, I guess, the figure, the three and a half percent rule I gave in 2013. And since then, there have been a lot of movements and a lot of governments that seem to have figured out how to either ignore them or subdue them, even when they've gotten pretty impressive numbers. And so I think there's been a lot of learning on that side too. And so we are in a little uncharted territory. So my next book is about that. It's about
effectively authoritarian learning about the fact that nonviolent resistance is a real thing and is threatening to authoritarian regimes. And they have figured out ways effectively to prevent defections among security forces in a way that they didn't really know to do in the face of mass protest 20, 30, 40 years ago. I didn't expect you to make me sad so quickly. Well, so let me...
Let me share some good news, okay? So I'll first start by saying what you said about the sort of divide and rule aspect of this is really important. Divide and rule is kind of one of the overarching kind of strategic frameworks for maintaining power in authoritarian regimes. But it's also useful as a way of understanding how movements win against them because movements win by dividing the regime.
right? So they divide and rule in both directions. Movements win by eliciting defections.
Defections are when people who are economic or business elites or state media or civil servants who previously were loyal and then aren't so sure anymore because they think everything is crazy and unstable and it's not good for them. People who are kind of on the day-to-day required to be loyal in order for the government to maintain its hold on power
when those people begin to stop cooperating is when, you know, movements have their breakthrough moments. Um, so if you think about the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, for example, the, the way that they won was by effectively compelling the economic and business community to urge the national party, which was the pro-apartheid party, uh,
uh, to elevate a reformer who was intent on doing business with the ANC and was going to unban them and negotiate with them and find a resolution to this standoff. And, um,
And it was the pressure that was built by people power movement that was largely organized out of black townships and imposed boycotts on white owned businesses, but also the general strike and used kind of labor and the social power that derived from it to put this massive economic pressure on the business class. And then there was also external pressure in that case that really squeezed the economy. And they basically shifted their
their orientation entirely like this, this has to change, we have to have a democracy here, there's no other way out. And so what's important there is just knowing that, like the numbers really do matter, right? But they matter because they provide the capacity to build that kind of pressure.
That's part of why what I see going on in the United States right now is very interesting, both because it is a lot of protest and in some cases, very large protests and large days of protests. My team at the Crowd Counting Consortium has tallied what we think is something like three times more protests this year between January 22nd and the end of March than we saw during the same time period in 2017.
So there's way more mobilization happening. And in some cases, very big days of protests like the April 5th protests, which were that was a massive showing.
So that's happening. But so is the development of like innovative techniques like economic non-cooperation. So this is where people are outside of Tesla showrooms. They are selling back their Teslas. They are not buying from retailers that they think are too closely aligned with the administration. And those things are taking a toll.
Like there's direct material impacts on those businesses and those who are interested in, and those businesses aren't even monolithic, right? So every corporation has, you know, the people in the C-suite, but it's also got the workers. It's got the ad folks. It's got the distributors. It's got the consumers. It's got the shareholders. All of those are not monolithic. They're just like the government where people have different loyalties. They're
kind of in it for their own interests, and they can shift as well. So like, those are all ways that movements shift people kind of one notch over in their loyalty. And that's what shifts the balance of power. That's why three and a half percent
can do what it does because you don't, movements don't necessarily need to get the majority of people over to their side. They just need to get everybody one tick closer to their side and that shifts the balance of power. Tell me where I'm wrong here. It feels like some of what you're saying is it's not about getting to this magical number. It's that this magical number is
the number that you see as the result of all the other stuff that's happening. Yeah. Do you, all these things, all these people working together and all these things organizing in the, the, this not being too, uh, factionalize doing what you're doing results in about this number of people, uh,
It's going in this direction, not the other direction is what I'm trying to say. This number is a measurement of something. It is not the number you're trying to get to to make a magical thing happen. Yeah, exactly. So I'd call it an indicator or a descriptive figure as opposed to a prescriptive figure. Okay. If we think about that hypothetical scenario where it's like, okay, a certain number of million people go to the streets for...
couple of weeks in a row. If you play out what that hypothetical looks like in reality, it's that if there's like no preparation, no, you know, preparation for repression, for example, no discussion about nonviolent discipline, no discussion about the importance of uniting behind some kind of common aim, then it's a lot of people exposing themselves to risk,
potential for infiltration, potential for real harm, encirclement, repression from the outside, provocations from the inside. And there's also, you know, there can be a phenomenon where
where it doesn't exactly meet the public where they're at either. So, the most powerful movements are ones that invite the public into a conversation as opposed to the ones that are like genuine nuisances to the public, right? Or perceived as nuisances. I mean,
movements that are very transgressive are going to come across as a nuisance at times, that's for sure. But they also shift their methods of resistance so that some of them are more inclusive and inviting to people that begin to really create those little shifts that I was talking about. So it's not all just going to the streets all the time. It's also innovating these techniques that are
basically winning the movement more and more friends over time and fewer and fewer enemies. Okay, well, the discipline thing, that makes sense to me. Your movement has to have discipline. You have to be prepared. You have to know what to expect. Stay organized. Stay unified. Stay on task. Stay together. The not frustrating people thing, that's a bit surprising to me because I'd always assume one of the powers of a nonviolent movement with boycotts and sit-ins and strikes is
is that you're gumming up the works in a way that makes you undeniable, undeniable.
Where am I wrong here? If it was a three and a half percent of the population, in most countries, that's a really large proportion, right? So most countries are not literally built to create public spaces for that many people to assemble, right? So it's visually striking. In many cases, it would basically bring a country to an orderly standstill.
That could have direct material impacts, right? That really could. And there are different ways to elicit defections. One of them is through kind of coercion or making life inconvenient for someone. And then they just calculate that, you know, if they stop doing what they're doing, their life is going to get better. And so they're going to stop doing what they're doing, not necessarily join the movement, but just not go along with this.
this thing they're told to do to suppress the movement, for example, like maybe they're not going to do that. And so that would be like a defection there. And that's more of kind of maybe a disruptive or sort of coercive way of doing it. But there are other ways of eliciting defections.
sometimes more effective in the long term for creating a really durable coalition. And that's things like persuasion, right? And kind of negotiation and dealing with people in a non-public way in order to encourage them to change the way they're thinking about a situation or something. And there's...
There's sort of different roles for different methods, and there are different roles for different people. And all of those are usually going on to some degree in movements that succeed. So it's not wrong that sometimes disruption inconveniences people so that they give up what they're doing, but it's not the only way that it happens. And it's usually not a sufficient mechanism for creating the type of coalition that most movements end up wanting to have.
After you did the research, after you had like all of it kind of laid out in front of you and you had the data and the evidence, what was the most surprising thing about it to you? Or were you surprised at all? I was surprised. I was surprised at the starkness of the difference. And I'll just tell you, going into the research, there had been a pretty important article published by a guy named Max Abrams called Why Terrorism Does Not Work.
And in it, he makes the argument that if you count up all of the different terrorist groups that were then on the sort of official lists and whatnot, and you look at how many of them actually achieved their goals, it was something like 7% of them. He said that's a very low success rate for coercive effectiveness. I mean, if you compare it against state armies or any other kind of violent formation, like that's a very low success rate. And then on the last page of his article, he says,
This raises questions about why terrorism happens at all, if it's so ineffective. And he said that maybe even at just 7% success, it's more effective than other forms of like nonviolent protest. So that was like what the general field thought of the possibility of nonviolent protests, I think, going into this study. So when the findings were that it was 20%,
twice as likely to have succeeded as organized armed resistance. That was very surprising to me. And then the other piece that was really an aha about it was because of the mass participation angle and the way that nonviolent methods of resistance are just so much more inclusive.
than methods of armed resistance for lots of reasons. We were able to sort of theorize that for the first time. And that theory is, I think, part of what has really clicked for a lot of people. And it tracks not just to the types of maximalist campaigns or revolutions that we were studying, it tracks to all kinds of different types of movements. And people seem to really resonate with this idea that
unarmed people using methods that don't hurt or threaten to hurt other people are what invites the public into a conversation.
And that as soon as the methods try to like threaten to hurt people or do hurt people, the public shuns them. And that plays out in survey experimental data. It plays out in all kinds of new studies that people have done, kind of testing those types of arguments out. And, you know, obviously there's some boundary conditions and things like that. But the general sentiment is that that dynamic is pretty general around the world.
It's just really important and understanding things like why movements need to build capacities for nonviolent discipline and training and preparation, organizing so that they can maintain nonviolent resistance even when their opponent is escalating against them. You're still doing a battle, but you're out thinking the opponent way ahead of time. Like you're out predicting, you're out modeling. Here's an important fact-checking question. No movement that's reached that 3.5% threshold has failed.
Is that a true statement? It was true with the data that ended in 2006. The data that end in 2014, there's an exception, and that is the Bahrain Arab Spring Movement, which we think achieved above the 3.5% threshold and did not win. There's also an armed movement, I think it's in Brunei in the 60s, that it turns out probably achieved that threshold and didn't win in the short term, but won like a year later.
So there are some exceptions, but they're both pretty specific. They're both small island or kind of small monarchies that had like major international backing. And so are kind of a very particular case. But yes, the general finding is that at least through the data that we have fully updated in 2014,
there was only one exception of a nonviolent resistance movement that failed after that, after meeting that threshold. And then with the updated data through 2021, I'm still working on it. So I don't know, but at least through 2014, yes. One of the things that's true too, and maybe is important to say is that a lot of movements win without getting three and a half percent. Most movements that win didn't get close to that threshold. And so, you know, Zoe Marks and I did a study
a couple of years ago with a guy named Andrew Hawking, where what we did was we tried to run through kind of computational methods, three different types of strategies. One is the strategy of just get as many people in the streets as early, as soon as you can and hope for the best. The second strategy is a pillar strategy where you,
There's a concerted effort to move protest in a way that would influence pillars in the society. So trying to get the defections. And then the third strategy is a pillar strategy, but it's enhanced by information, which means that the movement knows in advance which of the pillars is already the least loyal. And they go there first and they work on them to try to create a cascade of defections.
And what we found is that that third strategy is by far the most likely to succeed even with very small numbers.
And the get as many people to the streets as fast as possible and hope for the best strategy is the least likely to succeed, even with because it's just hard to get to the critical thresholds. And so if there's no strategy for inducing defections, huge numbers of people in the streets as fast as possible, especially when you're facing a repressive opponent, just doesn't always work, right? It just doesn't always work out to get as many people as a movement would want. And so that, again, directs our attention to this issue of
The reason why the numbers matter is because of how they change the balance of power among the pillars, not necessarily just because they reach kind of a critical threshold that then manifests some kind of change in the public mood or something. How did you get interested in this as like a career thing? Like, I understand that I've read about what little is available about this. I know you were interested in...
and, you know, change at the end of a barrel of a gun, that sort of thing. But before all that, like, how does young Erica decide this is what I'm interested in? How did you become interested in political science as a thing you wanted to go become a super expert in? It's something that I've just
just wanted to do as long as I was thinking about what I wanted to do in the world. You know, I was born in 1980. So 1989 and 1990, when the East European revolutions were happening, I remember my
my elementary school teachers talking about it. We watched when I took my first German class in middle school, my German teacher, I think the first week of class or something like that, wheeled a TV in and showed us the footage again of the Berlin Wall coming down. It was a really important formative moment in world politics and in my own political consciousness as a child. Then the wars in Yugoslavia,
were very affecting for me. There was a girl named Zlata Filipovic who wrote a diary called Zlata's Diary. She was a Bosnian Serb girl living in the siege of Sarajevo, and we are exactly the same age. And a British journalist had discovered her diary and figured out a way to get it published. She was sometimes called the Anne Frank of Sarajevo because it was a child's kind of narration of the devastation of the siege.
And my mom got it for me and I read it and I just could not understand how people could not figure out how not to kill each other in this conflict. And then interestingly enough, Bill Clinton thought it wise to have the peace talks and
for that conflict in Dayton, Ohio at Wright-Patt Air Force Base. And so it was on the, it was like the cover story of the Dayton Daily News that the Dayton Peace Accords were underway during my early teen years. And so I paid very close attention to it and, you know, with a sort of overall orientation to try to figure out how people could prevent this type of armed conflict from breaking out elsewhere.
And how they could bring it to an end where it was already active. And then it was interesting. I grew up in the summers living in Santa Fe because my dad played in the Santa Fe Opera Orchestra and my mom sometimes played there too. And so our family would live in this development of Santa Fe that had used to be federal property and we didn't know much more about it. But my brother and I used to dig holes in the sand during the day just to pass the time. And we found some pottery there.
And we had a beautiful garden and we found this pottery that was pretty deep down and took it to the Santa Fe Public Library, which is where you found out information back in the librarian. And she explained to us that our development had actually been one of the internment camps during World War II and that the pottery was probably from a Japanese family.
And so were probably a lot of the things in the garden. And so I learned about that history. And I learned about, I was very into World War I. I wrote my own like historical fiction novel about World War I. Like I was just like very consumed by history.
preventing big wars from happening and destroying people's lives. Like that, that was like my orientation from, as I mentioned, being a very young child. So when I went to college and I pursued courses of study that I thought would make, make me a good fit for either a diplomatic career or, you know, um, academic career, I wasn't really sure that I was going to be an academic, but I was open to it, but I really thought I would, you know, probably be some kind of diplomat. And then, um,
My senior year in college was when 9-11 happened in the fall. And so when I was writing my grad school applications, I really wrote about wanting to better understand global terrorism and its patterns and its impacts. And that kind of oriented my doctoral research. When I got into a PhD program, I just committed to study that. And my dissertation was actually about
why terrorism was so common in democratic countries, where there are so many other ways to express one's political opinions. It was a response to the Bush doctrine, which presumed
I thought probably wrongly that by spreading democracy around the world, even if it was in a coerced way, militarized spread of democracy was somehow going to eradicate terrorism. And I just didn't think there was any empirical support to suggest that that was going to be the outcome. So I undertook that research and built on some other existing research that was bubbling up at the time in my field.
about that and wrote my thesis about it. And it was just right at the end of my doctoral study that I attended a workshop where I met Maria Stephan and was introduced to the literature on nonviolent resistance. And I literally never encountered any of the readings or the questions they were asking or the assertions they were making through my whole PhD.
and found it very intriguing, but also wanted a bit more, wanted to understand more systematically whether some of the kind of theory and cases of nonviolent resistance that people raised were actually part of a broader pattern or whether they were exceptions to a general rule that like violence happens because people think it works, right? Which is like my overriding assumption.
doing that research with Maria was very important because my skepticism about nonviolent resistance was incorrect. Being surprised by finding like that does change, you know, what one is curious about and wants to pursue. And so I did spend a good number of years in my career, um,
like developing a pretty significant portfolio of setting terrorism and counterterrorism and armed insurgency and state repression. And like, I'm still very on that track to some degree, but I also have this very significant portfolio of work. That's better trying to understand where, why, and how nonviolent resistance is a realistic alternative. I first, I,
I love the idea that the fall of Berlin Wall, the ripples out from it hit you. And this conversation we're having and everyone who's going to hear this and everything else that you're doing is a further manifestation of all the things that took place as that wall came down. That is amazing to me. Stuff like that does change the world. Yeah. That's killer. Yeah.
Also, you are one of the strangest child nerds I've ever heard before. I've never heard of a child that was really into World War I. Not during our generation. I was born in 77, so...
But similarly, I saw the Challenger explode live. Yeah, me too. And that led to, that's what got me, basically. I made a memorial for the Challenger as a little kid, and they put it up on the wall, and it was there for like eight years. And that
Started my whole thing. Wow. So going to visit NASA was like an arc completion for me. So I feel this about you. You having that foundation leads to you being a better researcher on this topic. And so now you will give better advice on this topic because you've got that understanding of the thing that maybe a person who started here wouldn't even be looking at. They would need to go to a workshop first.
about terrorism and violent change for them to get the full circle. So I do want to know what made you go to that workshop? - So a colleague of mine who is something of a mentor in the terrorism studies field named Victor Assall forwarded me an email that he got from announcing the workshop. He forwarded it to me and said, "Here's the other side of the coin." And I had gone, I'd met Victor because I'd gone to a teaching workshop
about how to teach about terrorism and counterterrorism. 'Cause that was sort of like a, there weren't very many college courses about it. And I was a doctoral student hoping to go on the academic job market and be a credible person who could come into a new department and teach this subject well.
because it's, you know, like a lot of subjects in political science, very contested and can raise a lot of interesting kind of ethical questions in the course of teaching it. So I'd gone to this teaching workshop and I'd met Victor. And so he thought, oh, you know, you like that teaching workshop. Here's another one, but it's on a different topic. And so this one was called People, Power, and Pedagogy. And it was about trying to get
young early career professionals to be able to write a syllabus and teach a course about nonviolent resistance. And I was mostly interested in it, I'd say from the professional development angle, but it was also like, you know, networking, a new group of people, free books. I'm a sucker for free books. And so still, and so I think that
together is what motivated. And it was also very convenient. I was finishing my PhD at the University of Colorado, which is in Boulder. And this workshop was at Colorado College down the road. And so I applied and got in, you had to apply. And so when I got in, it was like, okay, this is another professional development opportunity. But I didn't think anything more than that. And when I was reading the books that they sent in preparation for it, that's when I was like developing some skepticism about the content that I was looking forward to discussing with people there.
And Maria Stephan had recently finished her PhD at the Fletcher School, and she'd written her thesis entirely about the topic, in particular, the question of what happens when, you know, there's like a secessionist movement that is trying to use nonviolent resistance, but it's like a small territorially kind of marginalized group and how they actually get the power in order to bring about the power shift. And so she'd written her thesis on what she called, you know,
extending the nonviolent battlefield. So getting third party actors from outside the country to support the movement like in East Timor or South Africa. So very interesting. South Africa was an accessionist movement, one in which they extended the nonviolent battlefield by bringing in external pressure. She was already a total expert in the field. And for that reason, and many others was
wonderful person for me to have to sort of raise the questions that I had about what had been done in the field. Like had anybody done this study where they lined up side by side comparable campaigns of armed and unarmed resistance over the course of history and figured out which one was more likely to have won. And she was sort of like, I don't think so. What do you think that is? What do you think that this is such a, before you got started, why is it such an underrepresented line of research in this field? Well,
You know, in sociology, there's a very large, there's a very large orientation toward data collection on protest and things like that. But they just, there hadn't been that much systematic look into like quantitative scholarship on whether unarmed or armed protest was more likely to succeed. They just mostly focus on protest and didn't focus on
the manner of it, for example. But there's a very large literature in sociology that could have done that and then since then has done that, right? It has started to look more at tactical choice and the impacts of that. And then the field of nonviolent conflict itself had a really interesting kind of origin and had been for a while quite theoretical, building on the work of Jean Sharp.
especially who published a really important kind of foundational treatise in the early 70s about it. And then a lot of other scholars had done case studies on nonviolent conflict, and then still others had sort of done comparative case studies to try to understand the
cases of success and failure, but less so direct comparisons with armed conflict. In my field in political science, there's a ton of research on armed conflict. Like if my field has like for decades have data sets called the correlates of war data and things like that, where we look a lot at fatalities and who wins and who loses and all that kind of stuff. There just was no comparable database for mass nonviolent movements. And I thought what we need is like a correlates of war data set, but for
people power movements so that we can actually do those types of assessments. What do you say to a person given all this stuff? I consider you the person to ask this question. I'm just one person. What can I do? So what would you say to a person who's feeling that and maybe even saying that or sharing that on social media? I'm just one person. What can I do? Yeah. One thing to do is just not forget how much power and agency you have. I mean, one
person with it has a lot of agency, and there are always choices to make. And, and that's true, no matter what's going on. And then the second piece is to try to do things together with others, because we do know that what people do really matters and what movements do really matters and kind of shaping the future direction of a country.
It's because of collective action, not necessarily because of what one person does, but because that one person brings their agency, their creativity, their sphere of influence, their ideas to a broader conversation and joins in a common effort with others.
All of the moments of progress that we've had in our country is because people did that. They sort of looked at what was going on around them and they made a decision to join in with others to try to improve the situation. And so just don't forget that that's how it works and that every one of us really does have such an important role to play and what transpires in the future. Also, you know that you are doing that. Every time you go out and give an interview and share and help clarify what you're talking about,
you're one of the engines of positive change, in my opinion. And I just want to thank you, like explicitly thank you for carrying through on the mission that you'd put yourself on as a young person going into this world. So thank you so much, David. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
so
That is it for this episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast. For links to everything we talked about, head to youarenotsosmart.com or check the show notes right there in your podcast player. My name is David McCraney. I have been your host. In those show notes, you'll find links to Erica Chenoweth's book and research paper,
where the three and a half percent rule first appeared. You'll also find a link to their TED talk, Q&A about the rule and more. You can find my book, How Minds Change, wherever they put books on shelves and ship them in trucks. Details are at davidmcraney.com. And I'll have all of that in the show notes.
as well, right there in your podcast player. On my homepage, davidmccraney.com, you can find a roundtable video with a group of persuasion experts featured in the book, talking all about it. You can read a sample chapter, download a discussion guide, sign up for the newsletter, read reviews, all sorts of things. For all the past episodes of this podcast, go to SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Audible, Spotify, or
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