Can nonviolent resistance survive COVID-19?

Abstract

When the COVID-19 pandemic arrived on the scene, the near-universal imposition of lockdowns and public health restrictions prompted many human rights advocates to sound the alarm regarding freedoms of assembly, expression, privacy, and movement. Even though they have not yet appeared to reduce the occurrence of protests in many countries, such restrictions may nevertheless diminish the ability of mass movements to effectively organize and win key concessions. In this article, I present new descriptive data on the outcomes of people-power movements, which suggest that, despite their heightened popularity, maximalist nonviolent campaigns are seeing their lowest success rates in more than a century. I describe how the diffusion of restrictions on peaceful assembly and expression accompanies a broader toolkit of authoritarian strategies that have become standardized over the past 15 years in response to people-power movements. I then turn to three tensions that present dilemmas for movements emerging from the pandemic and its associated lockdowns. I conclude by laying out key research questions that emerge from these trends and dilemmas that require sustained attention from scholars and practitioners of nonviolent resistance.

Note

Notes

1 Version 1.4; see the project’s site at Harvard Dataverse: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/navco.

Additional information

Funding

I thank Zesean Ali, Mayumi Cornejo, Michelle Poulin, and Hem Rizal for invaluable research assistance, and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy for supporting the data collection.

Notes on contributors

Erica Chenoweth

Erica Chenoweth is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. They study mass movements, nonviolent resistance, political violence, state repression, and democracy. At Harvard, Chenoweth directs the Nonviolent Action Lab, an innovation hub that provides empirical evidence in support of movement-led political transformation. Chenoweth maintains the NAVCO Data Project, one of the world's leading datasets on historical and contemporary mass mobilizations around the globe. Along with Jeremy Pressman, Chenoweth also co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium, a public interest and scholarly project that documents political mobilization in the U.S. since 2017. Chenoweth's latest book is Civil resistance: What everyone needs to know (Oxford, 2021).