Renewing the tradition of non-violent resistance

Arendt + Fanon + Cool jobs + Musical delights + the Cosmological perspective

Feb 20, 2022

As authoritarianism rises across the world, the long lineage of nonviolent civil resistance is a crucial resource for pro-democracy forces. It is no coincidence that authoritarian regimes have disavowed nonviolent insurgent histories.

The tradition of nonviolent resistance, however, is here to stay and more relevant than ever. Moreover, it may be as old as human history. Some fascinating research in evolutionary anthropology argues that much of what we take for granted as humans — our capacity for egalitarianism and language, for example — originated in collective action by women thousands of years ago. By using sex strikes and withholding collective labor, the theory suggests, women brought domineering men to heel and laid the predicate for the egalitarianism of early hunter-gatherer civilizations. (If you want to go down a fascinating rabbit hole, check out Camilla Power’s “Gender Egalitarianism Made Us Human: Patriarchy Was Too Little Too Late.”)

This issue of The Platypus explores the crucial and provocative new book Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know by Erica Chenoweth, a leading scholar of non-violence.

Also in this issue:

Three announcements: 1) Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice is seeking an Executive Director. This is an incredible opportunity to shape a new institution with a mission to develop generations of organizers and activists, particularly people of color, women, and folks from low-income, working-class, and LGBTQ backgrounds (application deadline: March 1). We’ve also launched a wonderful mentoring program. If you’re interested in supporting early career activists, you can apply here (application deadline: March 11). 2) The School of Labor and Urban Studies (SLU) is also hiring a Career Counselor – Social Justice and Labor Organizations. 3) Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund is hiring a Research Director and welcomes applications on the candidate portal.
Encouraging polling shows that support for authoritarianism worldwide has declined under Covid. (There are some big downsides, notably that support for democracy is not increasing. Unfortunately, the U.S. is bucking global trends of decreasing polarization. And the percentage of people in the U.S. “who consider democracy a “bad” way to run the country more than doubled from 10.5% in late 2019 to 25.8% in late 2021.”)

In Reading Recommendations, we share insights from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s critical appraisal of Franz Fanon and a review by Seyla Benhabib of a new book about Hannah Arendt, a thinker for our time.

We end with some delights: the music of the great Indian playback singer Lata Mangeshkar, who died on February 6; the Khmer pop psychedelia of Dengue Fever; the Afrobeat joy of Soul Jazz Orchestra; an interview with physicist Brian Greene, who offers a salutary reminder of how brief our lives and civilizations are in the deep time of the Cosmos; and a new book and podcast by sociologist Daniel Harrison about the legendary blues club Jackson Station.

Takeaways from Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know, by Erica Chenoweth

We strongly recommend that you read Chenoweth’s new book, which summarizes the best academic research on nonviolent campaigns to topple dictators and transform society. Full of practical lessons and inspiring examples from countries around the world, it’s the closest thing we have to a “how-to-guide” for defanging Trumpism. Most of the campaigns profiled seek to defeat authoritarian regimes that have already taken power, but the insights are broadly relevant to people like us, who hope to prevent authoritarians from seizing power. Below, we lift up some key lessons from the book and offer additional comments (set off in parentheses and italics) from the vantage point of the contemporary U.S. situation.

Chenoweth defines civil resistance this way:

Civil resistance is a method of active conflict in which unarmed people use a variety of coordinated, noninstitutional methods—strikes, protests, demonstrations, boycotts, alternative institution building, and many other tactics—to promote change without harming or threatening to harm an opponent. In English, the term “civil” derives from the Latin civis, meaning “citizen.” In contemporary usage, the term “civil” conjures a sense of public responsibility, in which people collectively assert their rights and needs on behalf of their communities. The term “resistance” derives from the Latin resistere. Sistere is a strong form of the verb stare, “to stand.” The prefix re adds intensity to the word. Through civil resistance, people from all walks of life come together to take a stand, with great intensity and strength, and demand justice and accountability of others. (p. 2)

Some important takeaways:

Based on an analysis of “627 revolutionary campaigns” between 1900 and 2019, Chenoweth reports a conclusion that many find surprising: non-violent campaigns have historically been twice as successful as violent insurgencies against authoritarianism (p. 14). The choice of nonviolence is therefore a strategic choice for many rather than one about morality, and it does not presume that the opponent has any moral core to appeal to whatsoever.

Non-violent campaigns are not spontaneous — they are deliberate and premeditated and require a high level of coordination among key civil society actors. (This point seems particularly crucial in the U.S., where there are vast numbers of disparate groups organized around issues and constituencies, but not yet a central hub for the defense of democracy.)

Non-violent movements are not only or even mainly successful because of mass protest. Protests can grab headlines but may not do anything to challenge the functioning of authoritarian regimes. And protests can become predictable. Chenoweth’s research shows that successful movements use multiple techniques, “like demonstrations, strikes, stay-aways, blockades, the creation of alternative institutions, and other forms of noncooperation — sequenced intentionally to dislodge entrenched power.” (In the U.S context, protest has become a default response to outrages, but other forms of collective action that are more disruptive may ultimately be more important. We need to expand our tactical repertoire.)

The success of nonviolent movements depends on four factors:

1. Becoming large and diverse. Chenoweth developed a famous metric, arguing that no movements fail if they engage 10% of a country's population in their peak events, while most succeed if they engage at least 3.5% of the population.

2. “[S]hifting the loyalties of people within the adversary’s pillars of support” (p. 85). Every authoritarian regime depends upon groups and institutions — the military, religious or ethnic groups, corporations, etc. — to maintain power. Winning defections from that ruling coalition weakens and can ultimately topple the regime. This may involve moral appeals, but more often it requires changing the calculations of members of that coalition, for example by inflicting real economic harm on business elites causing them to break with the regime (an important tactic in the South African anti-apartheid struggle). (In the current U.S. context, the point about defections is critical. While it’s essential to mobilize the pro-democracy base, we also need to create on-ramps to draw in people who are disengaged, ideologically inconsistent, or even soft supporters of Trump — and there is increasing evidence that there are more of the latter than there used to be. In recent years, democratic forces have gravitated toward a culture of mobilization, which seeks to rally the already persuaded. What we need instead is to revive a culture of recruitment, which engages people who are not already converts. We also need to move beyond merely pressuring elected officials and also turn our energies toward challenging corporations who often enable or actively support the authoritarian insurgency. An excellent example of this approach is the Defend Black Voters campaign in Michigan.)

3. Using a wide variety of tactics, including unexpected ones — not just demonstrations. As Chenoweth puts it, “a strike, combined with collective support from a broad base of a population, can be truly threatening to a regime’s grip on power. [The Norway example] also shows how movements can prepare for such large-scale noncooperation by creating strike funds, stockpiling of food and water, and practicing other kinds of community self-reliance—all of which can make this approach durable. Such techniques are most effective when large numbers of people participate.” (p. 88)

4. “Discipline and resilience in the face of repression” (p. 88). As Chenoweth puts it:

[M]ovements tend to succeed when they develop staying power, which means cultivating resilience, maintaining discipline, and sustaining mass involvement even as the government cracks down on them violently. What’s most important is remaining organized, no matter what the regime throws at them—neither fighting back with their own counterviolence or reacting or retreating in disarray. The movements that manage to achieve this usually have clear organizational structures; succession plans in place in case a leader is imprisoned, killed, or otherwise sidelined; and contingency plans for how to respond when repression escalates. It also involves keeping a broad range of people, in mass numbers, involved even while coming under fire, because cracking down on a highly diverse movement is more likely to backfire against the opponent. It is much tougher (though not impossible) for regimes to get away with targeting civilians who are considered mainstream or even close to the regime’s social circles than it is to target smaller-scale crowds who are not perceived as representative of the society as a whole. (pp. 88-89)

(There is a long lineage in the U.S. of non-violent resistance, most notably the civil rights movement against racist repression. Deepak was lucky to be trained by Rev. James Lawson in non-violence, and we both saw UNITE HERE leaders teach these very same techniques to members and volunteers canvassing in Philadelphia after the 2020 elections as we prepared for potential confrontations at the site where votes were being counted. There is no reason to wait for the next flashpoint — we can and should begin training as many people as possible about how to respond to threats of violence in the future.)

A few other noteworthy points Chenoweth raises:

The importance of humor — “One way to show that an adversary can’t control all of the people all of the time is to joke about him . . . . [H]umor can bring levity, cheerfulness, and a carnivalesque mood to an otherwise antagonistic, grim, or grave situation. . . . Festive events can attract large numbers of people seeking refuge from monotony, hopelessness, and betrayal.” (pp. 45 – 46). (A broader emotional range, making more strategic use of humor, hope, and joy, rather than defaulting to righteous anger all the time would enliven our movement and attract more people to it.)

The importance of parallel institutions, like mutual aid, coops, and alternative news outlets in sustaining movements — Chenoweth writes, “The nonviolent resistance scholar and practitioner Michael Nagler argues that parallel institutions can help a fairly disorganized nonviolent campaign coalesce around common objectives. Parallel institutions can also help movements to survive when crackdowns become too severe and dissidents must go underground. Nagler argues that parallel institutions can give dissidents less risky options than direct and overt forms of resistance that might get them arrested, attacked, or killed.” (p. 52) (With many exceptions, there is a broad division in the U.S. between organizations engaged in mutual aid, cooperative and service work, and those engaged in the fight to change oppressive systems. It’s intriguing to consider how they might be woven back together.)

“the most consistent and influential predictor of nonviolent uprising was a country’s human rights record.” (p. 184). (As political violence escalates in the U.S., mostly driven by far-right groups, there may be openings for galvanizing moments of counter-reaction that can be planned for in advance.)

The success rates of all revolutions, violent and non-violent, have decreased in recent years (though nonviolent resistance has still proved far more successful than violent revolutions). Chenoweth attributes this to a variety of factors, including that nonviolent movements have become somewhat smaller over time (since 2010, the average peak participation has declined to 1.3%, far less than the 3.5% threshold Chenoweth found predicts success); they tend to over-rely on mass demonstrations at the expense of other techniques of mass noncooperation; the reliance on digital techniques has obvious advantages but disadvantages, too, notably reducing the capacity to strategize and plan; nonviolent movements have become more tolerant of violent fringes, which undermine public support and legitimize repression; and regimes have developed more sophisticated techniques of surveillance and repression, including infiltrating resistance movements.

Chenoweth concludes with four compelling lessons from her research:

[O]rdinary people should learn the right lessons from historical examples—that some basic patterns provide clear implications for contemporary movements. First, movements that involve careful planning, organization, training, and coalition-building prior to mass mobilization are more likely to draw a large and diverse following than movements that take to the streets before developing a political program and strategy. Second, movements that grow in size and diversity are more likely to succeed—particularly if they are able to maintain momentum. Third, movements that do not solely rely on protests, demonstrations, and digital activism, but also build power through parallel institutions, community organizing, and noncooperation techniques are more likely to build an effective and sustainable following. Fourth, movements that anticipate and develop a strategy for counteracting smart repression are more likely to succeed—this requires seeing and identifying repression tactics as they emerge and evolve. And finally, movements that develop tools and strategies for maintaining unity and discipline under pressure may fare better than movements that leave these developments to chance. (p. 251)

Chenoweth’s work is provocative for those of us working in the U.S. today. Extrapolating from Chenoweth’s deep analysis, we can identify several significant shifts that will be necessary in order to sustain a decade-long battle against authoritarianism, including

giving more emphasis to recruitment and base-building over episodic mobilization,
expanding the toolkit of noncooperation beyond protests to other forms of disruption and building alternative institutions,
thinking strategically about how to weaken the pillars of support for authoritarian politics
training thousands of people in the practices of nonviolent resistance, and
developing new ways to coordinate and plan activity across the vast numbers of groups working on disparate issues.

Unlike many provocations, Chenoweth’s essential book comes with a map.

Reading Recommendations

The Bennett Institute for Public Policy at Cambridge released a new worldwide poll and report “Support for populist politics ‘collapsed’ during the pandemic.”

A University of Cambridge team say there are clear signs of a turning tide for the “populist wave”, as the mishandling of coronavirus by populist leaders – along with a desire for stability and a decline in “polarising” attitudes resulting from the pandemic – starts to move public opinion. . .
They say that threats posed by the pandemic saw a “technocratic” shift in political authority worldwide, with increased trust in government, and in experts such as scientists and civil servants. Yet faith in the democratic process has continued to falter. . . .
On average, populist leaders have seen a 10 percentage point drop between the spring of 2020 and the last quarter of 2021, while ratings for non-populists – on average – returned to around pre-pandemic levels.
Electoral support also plunged for [populist] parties – seen most clearly in Europe, where the proportion of people intending to vote for a populist party* has fallen by an average of 11 percentage points to 27%.
Overall, across Europe, early lockdowns saw voting intention for incumbent parties increase. Yet all the continent’s governing populists – from Italy’s Five Star to Hungary’s Fidesz – bucked the trend with the largest declines in support. . . .
Researchers also found that political “tribalism” – fertile ground for populists – has declined in most countries. The percentage of party supporters expressing a “strong dislike” of those who vote for opposing politicians fell in most nations (although not the US) during the crisis.
“The pandemic fostered a sense of shared purpose that may have reduced the political polarisation we’ve seen over the last decade,” said CFD researcher and report co-author Dr Xavier Romero-Vidal. “This could help explain why populist leaders are struggling to mobilise support.”
Some of the ideas propagated by populists are losing ground. Levels of agreement with statements such as “corrupt elites” divide our nation or the “will of the people” should be obeyed fell in almost every nation surveyed.
For example, agreement with four such statements** fell on average by 9 percentage points in Italy to 66%, 10 points in France to 61%, and 8 points in the UK to 64%, between 2019 and 2021. . .
The consequence of populist decline has not been renewed faith in liberal democracy, say researchers. Perhaps tainted by the record of populists in office, support for democracy has also waned.
Instead, citizens increasingly favour technocratic sources of authority, such as having “non-political” experts take decisions.
By the start of summer 2020, belief that experts should be allowed to make decisions “according to what they think best for the country” had risen 14 points to 62% in Europe and 8 points to 57% in the US****.
While trust in government has steadily climbed since the pandemic hit, increasing by 3.4 percentage points on average right across the world’s democratic nations*****, faith in democracy as a political system barely changed. . . .
In the US, the percentage of people who consider democracy a “bad” way to run the country more than doubled from 10.5% in late 2019 to 25.8% in late 2021.

In her essay “Thinking Without Bannisters,” in the New York Review of Books, Seyla Benhabib reviews Dana Villa’s new book about Hannah Arendt, which provides a useful riposte to the “Don’t Tread On Me” politics in the U.S., Canada, and elsewhere:

In ordinary speech, we use freedom and liberty as synonyms denoting the capacity to choose one course of action over another, to express one set of preferences over another. I am “free” and at “liberty” to listen to jazz or classical music, to go for a walk or to read a book. For Arendt, however, freedom was not equivalent to such private liberties. True freedom was “public freedom,” the freedom of a community to give itself laws and imagine a new shared world.
Villa observes that “Arendt makes [public freedom] the centerpiece (along with public spirit and public happiness) of her analysis of the modern revolutionary tradition initiated by the French and American revolutions.” Public-spiritedness means devotion to the affairs of the community one shares with others, and public happiness is the joy one feels in acting in concert with others to build a new form of political life. . . .
Such engagement with the public world requires something from the political sphere that is the antithesis of classical liberal individualism. It requires vigilance in identifying and promoting the common good, and a readiness to accept the burdens of taking political initiative. Arendt regretted the passing away of public freedom and public happiness, which could be attained only in working with others to build institutions, and she rejected the growing materialism, consumerism, and privatization of life in modern capitalist democracies.”

Kwame Anthony Appiah’s takedown of Franz Fanon, “Liberation Psychology,” in the New York Review of Books is provocative.

When the FLN [Front de libération nationale, Algeria’s armed revolutionary group fighting French colonialism] established, for diplomatic purposes, a government in exile, Fanon became one of its emissaries. In gatherings of anticolonial leaders, he swiftly distinguished himself as the anti-Gandhi, rehearsing the arguments that he later published in his essay “On Violence.” Decolonization was, he urged, an inherently violent act. It was violent because something as valuable as a colony would never be relinquished without force; it was violent because it involved the liquidation of an entire social order, so that the first would be last and the last would be first; it was violent because colonialism was itself an effect of violence and its victims could not be made whole without more of the same. Where once he had piously disavowed the brutality that “some” were driven to, he now stressed its therapeutic effects. On the political level, he said, violence unifies the masses, by dissolving the partitions and segmentations that colonialism entrenches, while, on the individual level, it is “a cleansing force” that “rids the colonized of their inferiority complex” and “restores their self-respect.” . . .
Increasingly, his theory that decolonization was a project of immense violence had to contend with the reality that, for most African nations, it wasn’t. He was furious that Martinicans were insufficiently furious—they had voted in 1958 to remain part of France—and he was contemptuous when a lethal melee a year later in Fort-de-France failed to spread into a revolution. That colonies like Senegal and Ivory Coast gained their independence in a largely phased, bureaucratic manner was proof of its fraudulence. Ghana, where he spent time in the late 1950s, was especially rankling. Its liberation from the British should have been a bloodbath; instead, its Independence Day, on March 6, 1957, was a festival, attended not only by Martin Luther King Jr. and A. Philip Randolph but by the Duchess of Kent and Vice President Richard Nixon. Fanon knew in his bones that such independence was a sham. . . .
Theorists of revolution sometimes use the term “prefigurative politics” to warn that movements are not transformed in their character when they attain power: beware a group devoted to participatory democracy that is itself harshly autocratic. FLN insiders knew that their leaders had gravitated toward militarism and authoritarianism, that they zealously massacred rivals and dissidents. The state they created followed suit, as if bearing out the young Fanon’s warning that “the slave wants to be like his master.” . . .
And when an actual peasant uprising, inevitably Islamist in nature, occurred, it prompted what a psychoanalyst would call a repetition-compulsion—the reenactment of early trauma. In the “dirty war” that took place three decades ago, the FLN regime killed as many as 200,000 Algerians and tortured a great many others. The usual techniques included a variant of waterboarding, burns inflicted by blowtorch, electrodes applied to sensitive parts, the insertion of objects into orifices. Fanon, writing of violence as a cleansing force, must have known that the cleansing could itself leave a residue of violence.
Today, The Wretched of the Earth—mischievously presented, in HBO’s The White Lotus, as poolside reading at a high-end resort—has the status of the ubiquitous predigested text, the “campus classic” rendered almost illegible by the interpretations layered over it. “Dazzled alterities kill one another,” a character in Fanon’s verse drama Parallel Hands says. The poet and the propagandist vied within him, as did the teller of truths and the retailer of cant. It’s almost painful to recall the “final prayer” with which he concluded his first book: “Make me always a man who questions.” What would have happened, one wonders, had this prayer been granted?

Delights

In the On Being podcast episode “This Tiny Slice of Eternity,” Krista Tippett interviews physicist Brian Greene, who offers “a cosmic lens on living in the here and now.” In the midst of these tumultuous times, we found his perspective comforting.

Music recommendations:

Legendary Indian playback singer Lata Mangeshkar died on February 6th, and flags in India flew at half-staff for days. You can read about her here.

Ottawa, Ontario, deserves mention for more than anti-vax truckers. The city is also home to the Soul Jazz Orchestra, a “high-energy multicultural collective” that draws inspiration from Afrobeat, Ska, Cuban jazz, and more. We’ve been dancing obsessively to several tracks from their 2015 album “Resistance.”
As the lead female vocalist of a legendary Cambodian music family — think Jackson 5 but more psychedelic — Chhom Nimol has been called her country’s version of Janet Jackson. When she immigrated to Los Angeles and teamed up with an eclectic backup band, Dengue Fever was born. We saw them live at the Brooklyn Bowl and dearly hope they’ll return to NYC. Their album 2015 “The Deepest Lake” is a pure delight.

Harry’s old college friend Daniel Harrison is a sociologist who just published Live at Jackson Station, a loving portrait of the legendary Jackson Station R&B Club in the rural South Carolina town of Hodges. Owned by a gay couple, Jackson Station was “an oasis of tolerance and diversity in a time and place that often suffered from undercurrents of bigotry and violence.” The podcast Inside Jackson Station, co-produced by Harrisson and another college friend, Michael Palmer, features interviews with club regulars who recall all-night blues parties in an era before cell phones.