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The rebellion in
Libya stands out among the recent unrest in the Middle East for its
widespread violence: unlike the protesters in Tunisia or Egypt, those
in Libya quickly gave up pursuing nonviolent change and became an armed
rebellion.

And while the
fighting in Libya is far from over, it’s not too early to ask a
critical question: Which is more effective as a force for change,
violent or nonviolent resistance? Unfortunately for the Libyan rebels,
research shows that nonviolent resistance is much more likely to
produce results, while violent resistance runs a greater risk of
backfiring.

Consider the
Philippines. Although insurgencies attempted to overthrow Ferdinand
Marcos during the 1970s and 1980s, they failed to attract broad
support. When the regime did fall in 1986, it was at the hands of the
People Power movement, a nonviolent pro-democracy campaign that boasted
more than two million followers, including labourers, youth activists
and Catholic clergy.

Indeed, a study I
recently conducted with Maria J. Stephan, now a strategic planner at
the State Department, compared the outcomes of hundreds of violent
insurgencies with those of major nonviolent resistance campaigns from
1900 to 2006; we found that over 50 per cent of the nonviolent
movements succeeded, compared with about 25 per cent of the violent
insurgencies.

Why? For one thing,
people don’t have to give up their jobs, leave their families or agree
to kill anyone to participate in a nonviolent campaign. That means such
movements tend to draw a wider range of participants, which gives them
more access to members of the regime, including security forces and
economic elites, who often sympathize with or are even relatives of
protesters.

What’s more,
oppressive regimes need the loyalty of their personnel to carry out
their orders. Violent resistance tends to reinforce that loyalty, while
civil resistance undermines it. When security forces refuse orders to,
say, fire on peaceful protesters, regimes must accommodate the
opposition or give up power – precisely what happened in Egypt.

This is why the
Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, took such great pains to use armed
thugs to try to provoke the Egyptian demonstrators into using violence,
after which he could have rallied the military behind him.

But where Mubarak
failed, Muammar Gaddafi succeeded: what began as peaceful movement
became, after a few days of brutal crackdown by his corps of foreign
militiamen, an armed but disorganized rebel fighting force. A widely
supported popular revolution has been reduced to a smaller group of
armed rebels attempting to overthrow a brutal dictator. These rebels
are at a major disadvantage, and are unlikely to succeed without direct
foreign intervention.

If the other
uprisings across the Middle East remain nonviolent, however, we should
be optimistic about the prospects for democracy there. That’s because,
with a few exceptions – most notably Iran – nonviolent revolutions tend
to lead to democracy.

Although the change
is not immediate, our data show that from 1900 to 2006, 35 per cent to
40 per cent of authoritarian regimes that faced major nonviolent
uprisings had become democracies five years after the campaign ended,
even if the campaigns failed to cause immediate regime change. For the
nonviolent campaigns that succeeded, the figure increases to well over
50 per cent.

The good guys don’t
always win, but their chances increase greatly when they play their
cards well. Nonviolent resistance is about finding and exploiting
points of leverage in one’s own society. Every dictatorship has
vulnerabilities, and every society can find them.

Erica Chenoweth, an
assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University, is the
coauthor of the forthcoming “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic
Logic of Nonviolent Conflict.”

New York Times