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Sheila Suess Kennedy

This column was originally published by Sheila Kennedy on her blog, “A Jaundiced Look at the World We Live In.”

By Sheila Kennedy
March 29, 2025

The number of protests has been skyrocketing nationally. Does it matter?

I described the massive turnouts at Town Halls in Indianapolis last week to my youngest son; he responded “for all the good it will do,” dismissing the effectiveness of such events. But there is scholarship showing that non-violent protests by a sufficient percentage of the population have succeeded in overcoming autocracies elsewhere.

And what is a “sufficient percentage”? Three and a half percent of the population!

If turnout at the past week’s nationwide town halls is any indication, reaching three-and-a-half percent should be very do-able. According to Google, there were 340 million Americans as of 2024. Three and a half percent would mean that we need to turn out 11 million 900 thousand nonviolent protestors.

The pre-eminent researcher in the field of protest efficacy is Erica Chenoweth of Harvard, who co-authored the book, “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict.” In the linked interview, she explained why civil resistance campaigns that are non-violent attract many more people than violent insurrections like the horrifying one we saw on January 6th (as she notes, it’s in part it’s because there’s a much lower barrier to participation compared with picking up a weapon). It isn’t sheer numbers, of course–she explains the other factors that were necessary to successful resistances in the countries she’s studied.

There are four of them:

The first is a large and diverse participation that’s sustained

The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among
security forces in particular, but also other elites. Security forces are important
because they ultimately are the agents of repression, and their actions largely
decide how violent the confrontation with — and reaction to — the nonviolent
campaign is going to be in the end. But there are other security elites, economic
and business elites, state media. There are lots of different pillars that support the
status quo, and if they can be disrupted or coerced into noncooperation, then
that’s a decisive factor

The third thing is that the campaigns need to be able to have more than just
protests; there needs to be a lot of variation in the methods they use.

The fourth thing is that when campaigns are repressed — which is basically
inevitable for those calling for major changes — they don’t either descend into
chaos or opt for using violence themselves. If campaigns allow their repression to
throw the movement into total disarray or they use it as a pretext to militarize their
campaign,  then they’re essentially co-signing what the regime wants — for the
resisters to play on  its own playing field. And they’re probably going to get totally crushed.

As she notes–and as the emerging American resistance has found– protesting can take many forms other than street demonstrations.

People have done things like bang pots and pans or go on electricity strikes or
something otherwise disruptive that imposes costs on the regime even while
people aren’t outside. Staying inside for an extended period equates to a general
strike. Even limited strikes are very effective. There were limited and general
strikes in Tunisia and Egypt during their uprisings and they were critical.

Chenoweth cautions that preparation for most of these methods is essential, noting that successful strikes or other methods of economic noncooperation have often been preceded by months of stockpiling food, coming up with strike funds, or finding other ways to engage community mutual aid while the strike is underway. Here in the U.S., organizations like Indivisible have demonstrated that capacity for planning and organization, and together with other grassroots organization, they’ve proven their ability to turn out large numbers of citizens.

What is so encouraging about Chenoweth’s findings is that “large numbers” does not equate to “large percentages.” As she says,

a surprisingly small proportion of the population guarantees a successful
campaign: just 3.5 percent. That sounds like a really small number, but in absolute
terms it’s really an impressive number of people. In the U.S., it would be around
11.5 million people today. Could you imagine if 11.5 million people — that’s
about three times the size of the 2017 Women’s March — were doing something
like mass noncooperation in a sustained way for nine to 18 months? Things
would be totally different in this country.

April 5th should provide us with an initial indication of whether engaging that percentage will be possible. On April 5th, Indivisible and several allied   organizations are mounting a nation-wide Day of Action, telling this lawless administration “Hands off our healthcare, our social security, our democracy!” Here in Indianapolis, it will take place at the Statehouse, from noon to 4:00.

I plan to be there, and hope to see many of my local readers.