Maria Stephan

The three and a half percent thing, you called it.

So Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, they built a data set of 323 major campaigns from 1900 to 2006 and compared violent and nonviolent ones.

Nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53% of the time, violent ones 26%.

That's just over double.

She wanted to know what actually works against entrenched repressive power.

Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, who is a close colleague of ours at the 22nd Century Initiative, built a data set of every major resistance campaign over more than a century.

And the finding was startling enough that it reshaped the field.

Nonviolent campaigns succeeded about 53% of the time.

The three point five percent, people have heard, have anybody...

Has people heard this rule generally? So there was a, very briefly summarized, two scholars, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, studied like a century of civil resistance movements all over the world and classified them between violent and nonviolent, um, movements to figure out what they could learn, and they were really actually trying to answer the question, are violent movements or nonviolent movements more effective? And what they found was that nonviolent movements that are trying to topple an autocrat generally or some kind of authoritarian government were twice as successful as, um, as violent movements.

Nonviolence, twice as successful as violence, so I guess I'm answering this first.

Why? They wrote a whole book about it.

Um, sometimes that's something more, uh, concrete and physical.

But it was important to us to expand the definition because the tools that we're talking about of what we call collective stubbornness, which is a term we got from Maria Stephan, who's a great political scientist, come from that risk-taking.

Now, I will say to your initial question, Kate, nobody who we talked to was comfortable being called a dissident.

[laughs]

This is the collective stubbornness thing that I was just talking about.

Yeah.

So there's this a- amazing political scientist named Maria Stephan who has this phrase, collective stubbornness.

Americans are really good at the stubbornness part, not so good at the collective part.