Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia Studies in Terrorism and Irregular Warfare) Paperback – December 11, 2012

My Catholic school asked me to create a course on nonviolence during Vietnam, which has been evolving and growing ever since.Chenowith and Stephans book is probably the first, most rigorous, and side-by-side, statistical analysis of the results of all revolutions, violent as well as nonviolent, in the 20th century. The results are even more encouraging than I had expected. They also devote considerable analysis to teasing out the various factors that have contributed to the successful revolutions, and the relative contribution of each.I am familiar with most of their statistical techniques, except for their regression analyses. But their extensive textual explanations explain the significance of all their statistics. I will be studying this storehouse of insights for a long time.

I was impressed at how may ways the authors looked at civil resistance campaigns to see if civil resistance indeed works better than violent resistance. Not matter which dimension they used to evaluate a campaign's efficacy, Chenowith and Stephan always came up with the same conclusion: disciplined nonviolence works!I also enjoyed learning about all the elements needed for a nonviolent campaign to be truly successful, short-term and in the long run.Randy Converse

This book has a very good review for the related research in the subject. It gives an overview of civil resistance and the reasons for its success. It goes in some detail. It also has a very interesting statistical study on civil resistance movements.The only thing that I didn't like is that there is over simplification of the statistical data. Civil resistance against repressive regimes cannot be compared to civil resistance against democratic regimes. The data could have been dug into deeper than that.

This is a brilliant book on a very timely subject. It's a must read for anyone interested in learning about effective ways of waging struggle and actually winning. With all the so-called "force" of the U.S. military, we haven't exactly been doing too much winning in the last 50 years, now have we? This book shows how to change that and provides a path to dominance for those people and nations that learn these valuable lessons.

An absolutely amazing book that really breaks down civil resistance and the steps that go into it. This was one of the main books that I used for the writing of my senior thesis in college and I still find myself picking it up to refresh myself in this area. If you are at all interested in strategic nonviolence, you won't regret reading this book!

so easy to understand while also learning a ton! the authors use so many real world examples that it helps to situate their theories into real world scenarios.

makes strong points, but bends towards the academic and wanders towards the repetitive

Erica Chenoweth's book revolutionizes our understanding of strategic nonviolent action and supercharges the case for nonviolence over violence. This is absolutely a "must read" for anyone interested in this topic.