313 - The 3.5 Percent Rule - Erica Chenoweth

You can go to KITTED.shop and use the code Smart50SMART50 at checkout and you will get half off a set of thinking superpowers in a box. If you want to know more about what I'm talking about, check it out, middle of the show. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast. Episode 313. That's where it shifts the balance of power. That's why 3.5% can do what it does because you don't 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 McRainey. This is the You Are Not So Smart Podcast. And in this episode, we are discussing the 3.5% rule. That is the name of a crucial threshold, a measurement, 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 3.5% 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. 10s of thousands of people have marched in dozens of US cities. Yes, marching, protesting, holding signs, outsides, 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 3.5% 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 3.5% figure that's going around. My sister appointed me this morning to a very interesting study from Harvard Political Scientist Erica Chinoweth 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 is something called the 3.5% protest rule. What's the magic number? Just 3.5%. The 3.5% rule is about this. What is the 3.5% rule? Or the 3.5% rule? As some people call it, Erica Chinoweth calls it the 3.5% 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 Chinoweth 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. 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 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. 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 the 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 than 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. Upon further inspection, Erica Chinneway 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 nonviolent one. In fact, the nonviolent campaigns were on average 4 times larger than the average violent campaigns. Not half the country, about a quarter of the country, not 10% of the country. 3.5%. But there are some caveats, which is why I wanted to talk to Erica Chinner with. Why I wanted Erica to be a guest on an episode of this podcast. 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 3.5% 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 turns, 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, non-violent and committed to a common goal. And they count on that. But if you're up against the 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 non-violent 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. So 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 goons quads. And once they lose their goons quads, the strikes and sittings in 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 and 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 Eric Achinaweath right after this break. The School of Thought. I love this place. I've been a fan of the School of Thought for years. It's a non-profit organization. They provide free creative commons, critical thinking resources to more than 30 million people worldwide. And their mission is to help popularize critical thinking, reason, media literacy, scientific literacy, and a desire to understand things deeply via intellectual humility. So you can see why I would totally be into something like this. The founders of the School of Thought have just launched something new called kitted thinking tools, k-i-t-t-e-d thinking tools. And the way this works is you go to the website, you pick out the kit that you want, and there's tons of them. And the School of Thought will send you a kit of very nice, beautifully designed, well-curated, high quality. 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That's Smart50 at checkout. 5% of the profits will go back to the school thought, so you're supporting a good cause that distributes free critical thinking tools all over the world on top of receiving a set of thinking superpowers in a box. Check all of us out at kitted.shop or just click the link in the show notes. And now we return to our program. And in this episode, our guest is the discoverer and nameer of the three and a half percent. Rule, Erica Chinoweth. Erica. Yeah. First of all, who are you? What do you do? And how did you become interested in this, the point that this is probably something you'll do for a very long time? 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 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 three and a half percent rule was a TEDx Boulder talk that I gave in 2013. And the backstory behind how that came about is that my colleague Maria Stefan 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. 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. Paces 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 critical threshold, a critical mass. And I said I don't actually know that. I'm sure that it's just like more people are better. But there is a guy named Mark Likbach and who's a political scientist and he published a book called The Rebels Dilemma and in it there's a note that he makes where 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 could 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 no the movements in our data set that surpassed 3.5% of the population failed. So maybe it's you know because Mark Likbach had already kind of made that speculation and then the number was 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 TEDx Boulder was sort of making clear that that was what was true in our data set and and then went from there. I guess you know this but the the 3.5% rule is very meamed up to the point that I've 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 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 TikTok and Reels and YouTube shorts. I saw a a new found optimism forming from a lot of people who are like what is the point? Like what can one person do and I was well that is that is that a thing for real because I've heard about it and my immediate like you know skepticism is 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 this new burst of virality? 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 three and a half percent of the population to participate in that day and they didn't make reference to the rule but they made reference to like the number of people 11 to 12 million people is their goal is what they said and so I think that it's 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 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 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 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 three and a half percent of the population right they were trying to organize as many people as they possibly could but they'd also been building organizations and organizing people for you know sometimes years before some mass mobilization episode and that mass mobilization built over time it built pressure over time it induced defections you know from the opponents 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 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 if people are trying to organize an 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 that 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 affections 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 I so let me let me let me let me share some good news okay so I'll first start by saying what what you said about this 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 listening to factions defections are when you know 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 you know people who are it kind of on on the day to day required to be loyal in order for the 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 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 is the pro apartheid party to elevate a reformer who was intent on doing business with the ANC and was going to unband them and negotiate with them and find a resolution to this standoff and 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 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 you know they basically shifted their their orientation entirely like this does 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 then we saw during the same time period in 2017 it's 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 you know 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 sea 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 loyalties 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 power. Tell me where I'm wrong here if it feels like you're 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 is the result of all the other stuff that's happening yeah it you're all these thing all these people working together and all these things organizing in the this not being too uh factionalized doing what you're doing results in about this number of people that's it's not it's going in this direction not the other direction is what I'm trying to say like 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 like a descriptive figure as opposed to a prescriptive figure okay if we think about that hypothetical scenario where it's like okay uh certain number of million people go to the streets for a couple of weeks in a row if you play out what that hypothetical looks like in reality it's that if you if there's like no preparation no at you know preparation for repression for example uh 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 uh you know that there there can be a phenomenon where where it doesn't exactly meet the public where they're at either so um the most powerful movements are ones that invite the public into a conversation as opposed to the ones that are like genuine nuces to the public right or perceived as nuces is I mean movements that trend 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 uh that begin to really you know 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 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 tasks 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 like boycotts and sit-ins and strikes is that you're gumming up the works in a way that makes you undeniable uh unignorable we're not wrong here if if it was a three and a half percent of the population in most countries that's a really large proportion right so um 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 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 um 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 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 and 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 the way what was the most surprising thing about it to you or were you surprised at all hmm I was surprised I was surprised at the starkness of the difference and and I'll just tell you what going into the the research there'd 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 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 achieve their goals it was something like seven percent 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 that's a very low success rate and 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 seven percent 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 I felt when when when the findings were that it was twice as likely to have succeeded as organized armed resistance that was very surprising to me and then the other piece that that was really the an aha about it was because of the 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're 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 so and it and it tracks not just to the types of like maximalist campaigns or revolutions that we were studying it tracks the 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 as the methods try to like threaten to hurt people or do hurt people the public shuns them and that 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 it's you're out thinking the the opponent way ahead of time like you're out predicting you're out modeling uh here's an important fact checking question no movement that's reached that 3.5 percent threshold has failed is that is that a true statement um it was true with the data that ended in 2006 data that ended in 2014 there's an exception and that is the Bahrain Arab Spring movement which we think achieved above the 3.5 percent threshold and did not win there's also an armed movement um 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 one 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 that had like major international backing and uh and so are kind of a very particular case but yes the the general the general finding is that at least through the data that we have fully updated in 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 it maybe is important to say is that a lot of movements win without getting 3.5 percent if most movements that win didn't get close to that threshold and so you know Zoe Marx 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 um 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 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 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 terrorism and you know how 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 and 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 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 European revolutions were happening I remember my you know my middle school elementary school teachers talking about it I you know 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 wielded TVN and showed us the footage again of the Berlin wall coming down I mean it was like a really important formative moment in world politics and then and in my own kind of political consciousness as a child and then the wars in Yugoslavia were very affecting for me. There was a girl named Lata Filippowicz who wrote a diary called Lata'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 for that conflict in Dayton, Ohio at Wright Pat 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 the 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 and so our family would live in this development of Santa Fe that 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 during the day just to pass the time and we found some pottery 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 this is the both the librarian and she explained it to us that our development had actually been one of the internet camps during World War II and that the pottery was probably from a Japanese family and so we're 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 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 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 diplomatic and then my 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 so many other ways to express once 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 right at the end of my doctoral study that I attended a workshop where I met Maria Stefan 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 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 role 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 curious about and wants to pursue and so I did spend a good number of years in my career 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 a very significant portfolio of work that's better trying to understand where why and how nonviolent resistance is a realistic alternative. I first I love the idea that the the fall of Berlin wall the ripples out from it hit you and it can like this this conversation we're having and everyone who's going to hear this and everything else that you're doing is a further you know manifestation of all the things that took place was that wall came down that it's amazing to me the stuff like that does change the world yeah that's killer and also you are one of the strangest nerd a child nerds I've ever heard before that I have the first I've never heard of a child that was really in the World War one not during our generation I wasn't born in 77 and so but similarly I I saw the challenger explode live and that led to that's that's what got me basically like that I made a memorial for the challenger as a and as a little kid and they put it up on the wall and it still was there for like eight years and that started my whole thing so going going to visit NASA was like it was like an arc completion for me but so I feel this about you that you having that foundation leads to you being a better researcher on this topic and so now you 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 about terrorism and violent change for them to get the full circle also 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 Assault for to me an email where that he got from announcing a workshop he forwarded it to me and said here's the other side of the coin and and I had gone I'd met Victor because I'd gone to a teaching workshop about how to teach about terrorism and counterterrorism because that that was sort of like it 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 and political science very contested and can raise a lot of interesting kind of ethical questions in the course of teaching it so 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 so this one was called people power in pedagogy and it was about trying to get young early career professionals to be able to write a syllabus and teach a course about non-violent 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 and so I applied and got in you have 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 the people here and in Maria Stefan 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 extending the non-violent battlefield so getting third party actors from outside the country to support the movement like an East Timor or South Africa so very interesting in South Africa was an assessed sessionist movement which was 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 a 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 have armed and unarmed resistance over the course of history and figured out which one was more likely to have one 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 get started why is this 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 and 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 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 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 as like for decades have data sets called the correlates of poor 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 like I consider you like 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 they're always choices to make and and that's true no matter what's going on and then the second piece is to try to 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 and it's because of collective action and 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 and all of the moments of progress that we've had in our countries 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 so just don't forget that that's that's how it works and and that every one of us really does have such an important role to play and and what transpires in the future also well you know that you are doing that every time you go out and give an interview and share and re 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 (upbeat music) (upbeat music) - 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. 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 for at DavidMcRainey.com and I'll have all of that in the show notes as well. Right there in your podcast player. On my homepage, DavidMcRainey.com you can find a round table 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 YouAreNotSoSmart.com. 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