NAVCO Data Project (Chenoweth)
https://ash.harvard.edu/programs/nonviolent-and-violent-campaigns-and-outcomes-data-project/
Body
The NAVCO (Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes) Data Project is the world’s leading dataset on the characteristics and outcomes of nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns, hosted at Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation [source: navco]. The latest version covers 627 mass mobilisations across every country in the world from 1900 to 2021; coverage is global but excludes maximalist campaigns (those seeking to overthrow an incumbent government, expel a foreign military occupation, or secede) [source: navco]. The NAVCO dataset has multiple published versions, with others in progress, and is the data backbone for the Why Civil Resistance Works line of research (see why-civil-resistance-works) [source: navco].
Coverage: the project codes each campaign along a detailed event structure - participants, tactics, regime type, peak mobilisation size, outcome, success/failure status, geography - and exposes the data via the Harvard Dataverse, which is the canonical ingest path for downstream research [source: navco]. The dataset has been used in hundreds of academic papers and policy reports; it is the standard reference dataset in the strategic-studies literature on civil resistance [source: navco]. The associated Why Civil Resistance Works book by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan is the popular-audience counterpart to the dataset and remains the field’s most-cited single publication [source: navco].
A campaigner reaches for the dataset when wanting to support a strategy claim with cross-national statistical evidence (“nonviolent campaigns have a higher success rate than armed ones in this period”), or when sourcing the Harvard line of civil-resistance-strategy research for a practitioner argument [source: navco]. Cite the dataset, the published NAVCO working papers, and Chenoweth’s book for the underlying arguments. Treat as link-only. [source: navco]
Use it for
Sourcing the quantitative evidence base on nonviolent-campaign success rates; finding the 3.5%-of-population threshold.
Related
- boycotts-and-strikes
- civil-resistance
- constructive-programme
- nonviolent-direct-action
- pillars-of-support
- power-mapping
- theory-of-change
- three-and-a-half-percent-rule
Open Questions
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