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Maria Stephan

Summary

Maria J. Stephan is an American political scientist and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council; co-author with Erica Chenoweth of Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (2011), and co-author with Sadaf Lakhani and Nadia Naviwala of the 2015 US Institute of Peace paper Aid to Civil Society: A Movement Mindset that gave the broader sector the term movement mindset. The 2011 book compiles 323 maximalist resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006 and reports the headline finding — nonviolent campaigns succeeded at 53% versus 23% for violent insurgencies — that anchors the empirical pillar of the wiki’s civil-resistance tradition [source: why-civil-resistance-works].

Key idea in this wiki

  • Co-author of the empirical findings the three-and-a-half-percent-rule and navco pages reference; the NAVCO dataset — the empirical evidence base Chenoweth and Stephan built — is the wiki’s primary source for the nonviolent-campaigns-outperform-violent-ones finding [source: navco].
  • The Movement Mindset paper (Stephan, Lakhani, Naviwala) is the foundational reference for the wiki’s [movement-mindset](sourcing target — source page pending) concept (where applicable) and the wiki’s recurring emphasis on aid institutions working with movements rather than on movements.
  • The Stephan-Chenoweth strategic logic of nonviolent conflict framework underwrites the wiki’s strategic-effectiveness-method concept.
  • Stephan’s movement-coaching research and writing (in collaboration with Rhize) connects the wiki’s movement-coaching concept to the broader civil-resistance research program.

Why campaigners read her

Campaigners read Maria Stephan because her co-authoring of Why Civil Resistance Works (2011) with thinkers/erica-chenoweth produced the 1900–2006 dataset of 323 maximalist campaigns, the 53 % vs. 23 % headline finding, and the 3.5% participation rule — together the empirical pillar of modern civil-resistance [source: why-civil-resistance-works]. The wiki uses Stephan-Chenoweth findings in three-and-a-half-percent-rule and navco as the canonical evidence base. Beyond the academic work, Stephan’s later writing on Movement Mindset (with Lakhani and Naviwala) is the practitioner framing for how should an aid institution work with movements — favouring with rather than on movements. The wiki pairs Stephan with erica-chenoweth and gene-sharp as the three-thinker empirical-canon for civil-resistance.

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Open Questions

  • A primary Aid to Civil Society: A Movement Mindset source page is not yet in the corpus; the framing here is grounded in the Why Civil Resistance Works source page and the wiki’s existing civil-resistance concept pages.

Sources & verification

Last verified: 2026-07-08