Erica Chenoweth
Summary
Erica Chenoweth is an American political scientist at Harvard Kennedy School; co-author (with Maria Stephan) of Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (2011), and the creator and director of the NAVCO Data Project that put civil-resistance research on an empirical footing. The book’s central empirical claim — nonviolent campaigns succeed at roughly twice the rate of violent insurgencies (53% vs 23% across the 1900–2006 dataset of 323 maximalist campaigns) — is the canonical evidence base for the wiki’s civil-resistance pillar [source: why-civil-resistance-works].
Key idea in this wiki
- The three-and-a-half-percent-rule concept page cites Chenoweth and Maria Stephan’s empirical finding as its source: no maximalist nonviolent campaign in the 20th/21st-century dataset succeeded without mobilising at least ~3.5% of the population in active participation [source: navco].
- The navco source page documents the dataset that supports the empirical claims; the civil-resistance concept page cites Chenoweth’s work as the contemporary practitioner reference [source: navco].
- The Women in Resistance (WiRe) Data Project extends the empirical analysis with gender-disaggregated findings on what helps campaigns cross the threshold; the wiki’s three-and-a-half-percent-rule concept page cites WiRe [source: wire-data].
- The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict framework underwrites the wiki’s strategic-effectiveness-method and strategic-capacity concepts.
Why campaigners read her
Campaigners read Chenoweth because the Why Civil Resistance Works dataset — maximalist campaigns in the 1900–2006 series, with the 53 % vs 23 % success-rate claim — is the empirical anchor that put civil resistance research on a respectable footing inside strategy and policy institutions, including defence and policy circles outside the activist left [source: why-civil-resistance-works]. The wiki uses Chenoweth in civil-resistance as the contemporary empirical reference for nonviolence-strategy claims, and in three-and-a-half-percent-rule as the canonical source for the participation threshold the rule states. The navco source page documents the dataset [source: navco]. The wiki pairs Chenoweth with thinkers/maria-stephan (her co-author), thinkers/gene-sharp, and thinkers/sidney-tarrow as the empirical-canon for movement strategy.
Related
- three-and-a-half-percent-rule
- navco
- civil-resistance
- nonviolent-direct-action
- strategic-effectiveness-method
- strategic-capacity
- methods-of-nonviolent-action
- research
- thinkers/maria-stephan
- thinkers/gene-sharp
Learn more
- On Wikipedia: Erica Chenoweth — CC BY-SA 4.0
Open Questions
- The Chenoweth research program is continuing to evolve (NAVCO 2.0, WiRe); the wiki’s current content cites the 2011 Why Civil Resistance Works claims; updated post-2010 thresholds are the natural extension.
Sources & verification
- sources/navco — primary reference
- sources/why-civil-resistance-works — primary work
- sources/wire-data — primary reference