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Transcript:
Look, I’m going to be honest with you: normally, I would not be making this video. Because this video is the third one in a month that is more or less about the same topic, and generally I find that boring for me and boring for you, the viewer. I’m making this video anyway for three reasons: one, it’s Christmastime. I still have holiday cards to send out to friends, family, and patrons who signed up after the first batch went out, I have cookies to frost, I have presents to wrap, and I have delightful little Christmas markets to visit. I don’t feel like being picky about my video topics right now.
Reason 2: I was going to just leave it in a comment on my previous video but screw it–I already spent so much time on what I’m about to talk about, it gets to be a video.
And reason 3: I’m beyond annoyed and I want to VENT.
Big sigh. Okay. After the election last month, I talked about my feelings and how I was currently in the middle of reading a book I found very interesting: Why Civil Resistance Works by Chenoweth and Stephan. I talked a little bit about the research that went into that book, which I found in-depth and compelling.
Many people in the comments told me that this work was NOT in fact scholarly, that the research was cherry picked and ridiculous, and was used by naive pacifists to support tactics that don’t actually work to create change.
I found that surprising because of how impressive I found the work, but it wasn’t out of the question. I was still in the midst of reading it, and to be fair I hadn’t specifically searched for criticism of it, which I usually try to do when citing research like this, which has been around for a decade, long enough to be thoroughly studied and criticized by peers. So with that in mind, I did just that: I specifically sought out and read criticisms of the work. After all, you know I love a good debunking of popular science.
But interestingly, what I found mostly just made me MORE impressed with Chenoweth and their colleagues. In the years since that book was published, they’ve continued to update and refine their database of resistance movements, and in interviews Chenoweth has gone to great lengths to highlight the constraints of their research, to caution against using this historical data to determine future actions, to stop people from taking things like the “3.5% rule” as law. That’s the finding that civil resistance movements tended to only need 3.5% of the population actively involved to find success, but after more research Chenoweth identified several prominent examples where that was not true, so they updated their findings.
That sort of missing data was the weightiest of the criticisms I found, and Chenoweth et al responded to them appropriately: by acknowledging that their initial dataset was incomplete, and adding these new points to it and rerunning their analysis to see how it changed. That’s how science works.
A number of people in the comments on that first video also mentioned Peter Gelderloos’ How Nonviolence Protects the State, written in 2007. A lot of you like it, but I’m sorry, I found it boring and completely devoid of any actual evidence. It’s basically an opinion piece, which honestly I find understandable because it was written before most of this critical research on civil resistance was done. That’s why I didn’t mention it in my follow up video this week, but a lot of you commented again recommending it so I’m mentioning it now and of course as always, links to everything I discuss are found in the transcript on Patreon and Skepchick if you’d like to go read it for yourself.
People also recommended How to Blow up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm, which I have not read in full yet but I don’t see much to disagree with. He is a climate activist who argues that Chenoweth and Stephan’s data comes from wildly different political revolutions and isn’t applicable to climate activism, which I think they’d agree with. After all, Chenoweth is on record saying that we shouldn’t even use their data to predict what will happen in future seemingly identical political revolutions! Malm also argues that many revolutions use a mix of violent and nonviolent tactics, which Chenoweth and Stephan also freely admit. In many cases, it’s impossible to tell whether a particular nonviolent campaign would have succeeded without a concurrent violent campaign.
Like I said several times, I have no moral quandary with violent resistance to authoritarian rule. None. And as I said, I don’t think that Chenoweth’s research precludes the use of violence, against property (which Malm champions) or even against people.
So! Having read as much criticism as I could find of Chenoweth’s research, and with current events making it particularly relevant, I made my more in-depth video about it last week. (By the way, I say “Chenoweth’s research” as a shorthand because Chenoweth has worked with various authors on this topic. I don’t mean to diminish their contributions to the field or to imply that Chenoweth is the only one working on this stuff, just that it’s Chenoweth who seems to be doing the biggest, most interesting research to me. I have a lot of respect for the many other researchers who have pointed to gaps in their research, who replicated the findings, or who contributed additional research.)
And I felt pretty confident in sharing more of that research in the second video, as well as sharing what the authors have said it does and does not mean. Like, they aren’t anti-violence, they acknowledge that this is messy historical data that they need to simplify in order to study, etc.
But again, the comments were filled with people claiming that this research was bunk. For instance, user 5arrows said that Chenoweth and Stephan’s data is “cherry picked and incomplete. It stumbles massively when confronted by serious historical analysis. Like I’m sorry, but that work is just really easy to argue against in a wide range of ways. It’s an opinion piece that many people have heavily disputed.”
When I asked for some citation to read from a critical expert, I was told that was an “odd appeal to authority,” and that “Chenoweth and Stevens (sic) are not experts in the history of India and post war British occupation. They are not experts in the Vietnam war.”
I’ll pause here to note the irony: asking for a peer-reviewed citation is not, in fact, an appeal to authority. That’s just asking for quality evidence that would illuminate the issue. But dismissing research for the explicit reason that the authors are not “experts” IS, in fact, an appeal to authority. You are literally saying “I do not accept this data because the person presenting it is not an authority.” You’re free to do that in your personal life–I do it! It saves me a lot of time!–but it is not a logical argument.
When I explained that, and asked for specific details of what Chenoweth got wrong, 5arrows didn’t reply, but another commenter, PanEtRosa, jumped in to say, “5ive was very specific about what they are arguing Chenoweth et al. are not experts in. and others in these comments have already pointed out the problems with the research in those areas, such as categorizing the Vietnamese revolution as “non-violent”, which is obviously absurd.”
Aha! Finally, a specific point. And one that made a lot of sense to me: how could we trust research on nonviolence when the researchers categorize the Vietnamese revolution, of all things, as “nonviolent?”
And again, I need to stress this point: I am not in any way personally invested in this research being correct! I LOVE finding out that something I thought was right is actually wrong, because then I get to learn something and share it with others!
So I pulled out my edition of “Why Civil Resistance Works,” which conveniently happens to be a digital edition that allowed me to do a simple search. And I immediately found this passage on page 99:
“WHEN VIOLENT CAMPAIGNS SUCCEED: SOME KEY OUTLIERS It is worth noting that there are some important deviations from our assumption that violent campaigns attract only limited numbers of participants. The Russian Revolution (1917), Chinese Revolution (1946–1950), Algerian Revolution (1954–1962), Cuban Revolution (1953–1959), and Vietnamese Revolution (1959–1975) come to mind as major examples of violent conflicts that did generate mass support sufficient to bring about revolutionary change.”
Well that seems pretty cut and dry: the authors clearly state that the Vietnamese Revolution was a violent conflict that worked. They don’t even say “mostly violent,” or “violent in addition to nonviolent.” Just “violent.”
So I replied with that, and I waited. Pan had answered pretty quickly with the first reply, but a full day passed with nary a peep.
But look, guys, it bothered me. Because there’s no way that someone would just randomly assume these authors categorized the Vietnamese Revolution as nonviolent, right? I’m missing something. I HAVE TO BE WRONG about something. This is why I fall down rabbit holes. This is why I am insufferable at parties.
So I scrolled through other comments to find more information. I went back to a comment I had seen previously from guntherhermann6179, who had said, “Chenowith’s study is cherry picked, arbitrarily classified, and includes among “nonviolent” movements the Iranian Revolution and the **Vietnam War**.” I had asked which page of the book that was on, and I realized now that he had responded, “It’s not in the book. Chenoweth’s NAVCO database is hosted at Harvard dataverse.”
Holy shit, I hadn’t even thought to check the raw data! As I mentioned, that data has been continually updated over the past 12 years since the publishing of Why Civil Resistance Works. In that time, they must have changed their categorization of the Vietnamese Revolution!
So I was off to Harvard’s “Nonviolent and Violent Campaign and Outcomes Data Project,” which IS in fact available in full to anyone who wants to have a peep. I love that!
I downloaded the data, saw all the code names, and immediately went back to check the legend because there are MANY MANY variables. Luckily, they spell it out for dummies like me: the column I was looking for was the binary “prim_method,” which “Denotes the primary type of resistance method used in a campaign year. 0=primarily violent campaign and 1=primarily nonviolent campaign.”
So then I just had to set the column headers, sort by country, scroll down to Vietnam, delete a bunch of columns to make it easier to see, and there we have it: ten campaigns in Vietnam, all of them marked with a “0,” which again, means a “primarily violent campaign.”
Huh.
Well, gunther also mentioned the Iranian Revolution. So I scrolled back up to that, and here’s what I found: nine campaigns, of which six were classified as “violent” and three as “nonviolent.” Which sort of seems like at best, that would be a mixed bag, but yeah, primarily violent. One of the nonviolent campaigns notes with a 2 under “resis_meth” that this campaign changed from violent to nonviolent, and a “2” under “violent_flank” which indicates this campaign did have a violent flank with an intensity of “3,” which means they did use lethal violence. The scope of that violence was isolated, and it is unknown how the nonviolent participants responded to the violence. The document includes citations to the historians and political scientists who described this information if you’d like to follow up and see the details.
That certainly does not sound to me like people who don’t know what they’re talking about simply categorizing the Iranian Revolution as “nonviolent.” In fact, they don’t do that at all: they simply found that two out of nine campaigns during that revolution utilized nonviolent tactics. That’s careful, nuanced research.
At the end of the day, I have no idea where these commenters got the idea that Chenoweth and Stephan labeled violent campaigns as nonviolent when they quite clearly did not. I don’t think these commenters are knowingly lying. But I do think someone knowingly lied to them, and they accepted it without thought. The fact that one of them even tried to direct me to the database that clearly proves them wrong is astounding, and I wonder if that’s how they got fooled: “oh yeah, they said the Vietnamese Revolution was nonviolent! Don’t believe me? Here, read their entire book about it. Or here, go look at their data!” Most people won’t bother. They’ll just assume that the authority telling them that must be telling the truth. Why bother to do all the work of downloading a spreadsheet and looking up some codes?
At the end of the day, this is hardly the worst misinformation spreading around. But it’s clearly spreading in MY audience, and it’s getting in the way of actual evidence-based discussions on how people in a variety of situations can find empowerment and enact change. There is evidence that violence works in certain situations, and it’s time for people to admit that there is also evidence that civil resistance works in certain situations. And again, because I know there will be more comments saying stupid shit like “you can’t ask politely for your freedoms,” “civil resistance” is nasty. It is not nice. It is down and dirty, it is about fucking shit up and hurting the enemy in all ways except physical violence. That’s it.
So. Please stop spreading misinformation that will only push us apart when we desperately need to come together. And especially stop doing it in my comment section. If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to put colorful sprinkles on gingerbread cookies. For the revolution.
