Friday, MU sent students an email reminding them that the university’s policies encourage “free expression while setting time, place, and manner rules to avoid substantial disruption of University operations”. So, MU wants students to express themselves, but doesn’t want their operations disrupted.
On its face, it is a reasonable request, but it has consequences you might not realize, which brings us to the topic of one Erica Chenoweth (not to be confused with Kristin Chenoweth) and the book she wrote with Maria Stephan in 2011, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. If you are an organizer on the left or a Democrat (no, Democrats are not leftists), you should really have at least a rough working knowledge of this book.
As a community defense group, we are subjected to a lot of finger wagging from Democrats, and quite often that finger wagging is accompanied with references to Erica Chenoweth and that book. That book, however, is a multi-layered propaganda piece that purposefully obscures the path to effective action and replaces it with something that makes very wealthy people comfortable. I assure you, I am not going to advocate violence, but I am going to step you through the layers of deception in this book.
The Title
The name of the book — Why Civil Resistance Works: The Stategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict — is the only part of the book that most people will ever experience. There are words in that title that mean something different to Chenoweth than they do to normal English speakers, and so the title is the first and most important deception. To Chenoweth, “nonviolent conflict” and “civil resistance” mean something specific and different from what you would expect. The book briefly but explicitly explains that only disruptive actions are effective; it explains that permitted (in both the bureaucratic and more general sense) actions do not create change. This fact is so well-established in the literature, that the book doesn’t even examine whether non-disruptive personal expression is effective — it is not, and the book says so.
So, when the book says “civil resistance” and “nonviolent conflict” it means disruptive actions. Since disruption is not typically legal, this usually means illegal actions.
Does the book mean “nonviolent” in the common sense? Also no. Chenoweth defined an action and a campaign as nonviolent if very few people died. For example, if a thousand people were punched in the face, but only 3 died, then the action would be coded by this study as nonviolent. In the US over the past 5 years or so, we’ve had some incidences of what I would call street violence. There has been a lot of hand-to-hand fighting, and a few people have been shot or attacked with cars. But if Chenoweth were coding Trumpism’s campaign for fascism, she would code it as nonviolent because relatively few people have died. People carrying around rifles seems pretty violent to me, but again, very few people have died; this is “nonviolent” according to Chenoweth. Burning down buildings seems pretty violent to me; but that also does not count as violence in the book.
We usually think of both being civil and being nonviolent as the opposite of being disruptive. The intent of this deception is to keep people from being disruptive, and since an action that is not disruptive does not work, the intent is to stop you from getting anywhere.
Defining Mixed-method Movements as Nonviolent
In keeping with this theme, the next layer of deception employed by Chenoweth is the inclusion of somewhat violent movements in the “nonviolent” category. Again, I’m defining violent in the way normal English speakers define it, and would include physical destruction of property, carrying weapons, using weapons, assaulting people, and even showing up in great numbers as acts of violence. If you are home and 500 protesters show up in your front yard, are you not concerned for your safety? Once this intentional mis-coding of the data is complete, nothing else in their study matters because the data itself has been poisoned in support of the conclusion they want you to believe.
Defining Success and Failure
To determine whether violent vs. nonviolent campaigns succeed or fail, they obviously had to define success and failure. But there are degrees of success and failure and some successes are so meager that they are not worth mentioning. Regardless of this fact, Chenoweth coded each campaign as either a success or failure. In reality — a place where most of us live — a campaign with more leverage creates greater change than a campaign with little or no leverage, and that is why non-disruptive campaigns yield no appreciable change.
Assumptions
The book makes assumptions about the way the world works, and then uses those to explain the results (the results having already been contaminated with purposefully deception). For example, if a movement had an armed flank and succeeded, the book says it succeeded “despite” the armed flank not “because” of the armed flank or “with the help of” the armed flank. It also assumes that if a movement is violent it will become unpopular; you need only look at the quite popular Trump movement to see that the truth is much more complicated than that.
Violence Doesn’t Work, Except When it Does
The book is ostensibly all about violence not working, yet in every data point and case study explored in the book, the “nonviolent” side wins by gaining the support of agents of violence. At this point, the purposeful deception of the book should be clear, but this one might be hard to see, just as it is hard for a fish to notice water. Over the past couple hundred years, there has been a constantly droning message to people all over the world: Only the state can wield violence effectively.
The idiocy of this message is clear if you just stop to think about it — police and military are not grown in vats, living only to serve the state, and then liquefied to nourish the next generation of “boots on the ground”. No, they are human beings. They had human parents, they grew up in a neighborhood, they went to school with other children. They will retire from living lives of violence in service to the state, and they will come back to their communities broken and alienated, but they are still people. They are using tools that any human being can use — in fact, those tools keep becoming more accessible all the time.
There are well-known conflicts where the people successfully used violence to fight off oppression — and when I say success, I mean that they became fully free of that oppression, at least for a time. Most notably, the Vietnamese fought off at least two colonial powers. Did we all forget that happened? And let’s not forget the Battle of Athens (Athens, Tennessee – 1946). There are many examples, but I don’t want to spend a lot of time on this point.
Here are some alternate titles for the book:
– Violence Doesn’t Work, Except When it Does, Which is Always
– The State Will Always Win: You’ll Have to Beg Politely for What You Need
– Violence Only Works When the State Does It: Stop Resisting and Start Asking Nicely
In truth, violence is the final authority, but people who are both good and civilized choose not to use violence because it is immoral — unless they have no other recourse. People who are thoughtful understand when they have no other recourse but they also work hard to keep a social conflict from getting to that point.
Every political conflict is extremely complex and has multiple narratives, with some narratives being more true than others. How people interpret and react to those narratives affects whether or not they support a social movement. The Trump movement is very violent based on my definition of violence, and yet Trump enjoys an approval rating of over 43% today, according to fivethirtyeight.com — he still might even win this election. That’s because Trump supporters enjoy and support the violence of other Trump supporters, including violence that results in death. Explaining why requires us to really examine the narratives that Trump supporters believe to be true. To just assume that violence will make a movement unpopular requires you to completely ignore these narratives and the context in which they exist.
Conclusion
I’m not advocating for any particular type of action, and I’m certainly not advocating for violence. I’m not even advocating for disruption. For one thing, this is a general information piece and I don’t even know what the issue is that you’re trying to address. My intent is that you understand the complexity that you are dealing with when you are working for social change. When you are choosing a course of action, you must consider how the wider community will understand the narrative of that action, because you need those people on your side. If your action’s meaning is incoherent, or if the action itself is somehow repulsive (as would usually be the case with violence), then the action will not move you toward success.
It should be clear that although purely expressive demonstrations feel good and might be a very good way to build a movement, they are extremely unlikely to create change. It is only disruptive actions and disruptive movements that are likely to create substantive change. Disruption is a type of power, and it is ultimately power that matters.
Please make sure the narrative of your movement makes sense and is being communicated in a coherent way to people who have the power to make change — that, or find a way to wield power directly.
Here is a related article by Peter Gelderloos, author of several books including How Nonviolence Protects the State, The Failure of Nonviolence, and Anarchy Works.