Does Non-Violence Work? Group Identity and the Efficacy of Nonviolent Protest

• In Event: The Dynamics of Civil Resistance

Abstract

In recent years, the world’s attention was gripped by mass protest movements agitating for social and political change. From the Arab Spring to the Black Lives Matter protests, large crowds mobilized to demand greater representation, equality, justice, and welfare. Inspired by such events, scholars of conflict processes have turned to the systematic analysis of the determinants and consequences of nonviolent resistance (Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011; Chenoweth and Cunningham, 2013; Nepstad, 2011). The central, oft-cited finding of this emerging literature is that nonviolent campaigns are more than twice as effective as violent campaigns in achieving their stated goals (Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011). The policy implications of this finding are significant: if nonviolence is a far more effective means of social and political change than violence, then reduction in violence becomes not only a moral but an empirical imperative.

The effectiveness of non-violent campaigns is posited to be a consequence of their greater public appeal. Nonviolent resistance, the logic goes, attracts more international and domestic support, winning over bystanders and causing defections among status quo supporters (Chenoweth and Stephan, 2011). Yet though the theory is compelling, there is little systematic evidence about public attitudes towards non-violent campaigns, and about the conditions under which campaigns receive public support. Much of the work in this area relies on aggregate, cross-national data, comparing the efficacy of campaigns across time and space. Such methods can reveal important correlations, but by nature they obscure the mechanisms and processes that drive campaign outcomes.

We argue that one such mechanism is the ethnic identity of the protesters, which can shape the extent to which protesters are perceived as violent, and consequently, whether they receive public support. An extensive literature on negative stereotyping in social psychology finds that members of stereotyped groups are perceived differently in a variety of domains. For example, black Americans are more likely to be associated with violent crime than whites (Hurwitz and Peffley, 1997) and are more likely to be perceived as deserving the death penalty (Eberhardt et al., 2006). These studies suggest that when marginalized ethnic groups engage in non-violent contentious behavior they may be perceived by observers as more violent than their dominant-group counterparts, especially if this involves confrontation with state security forces. Consequently, they may have limited access to the theorized benefits of non-violent resistance.

We employ a multi-method design to test this expectation. First, drawing on experimental evidence from the United States and Israel, we find that protests by minority groups are perceived as more violent and more likely to require police attention than identical protests by majority groups. Second, employing observational data on violent and non-violent campaigns, we find that the effectiveness of non-violent campaigns is moderated by group identity, such that non-violent campaigns by minority groups are significantly less likely to succeed than non-violent campaigns by majority groups. Together, these findings have important implications for both theory and policy, raising questions about the availability of nonviolent resistance practices to marginalized groups, and casting doubt on general, optimistic claims as to its efficacy.

Authors

• Devorah S. Manekin, Hebrew University

• Tamar Mitts, Columbia University