Steven Pinker Chooses Why Civil Resistance Works as a Best Book of 2011
The Guardian also asked Steven Pinker, most recently the author of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, who recommended Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan. In commenting on the book, Pinker wrote, “Gandhi was right, not just morally but empirically: nonviolent resistance is three times more effective than violence.”
Pinker also talked about the book in a recent interview with The Economist:
Q: Is there any statistical evidence to suggest that violence doesn’t work to provoke political change?
A study that was published too late to include in my book by two political scientists, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephen, looked at the success rate of violent and non-violent resistance movements. It found that the non-violent ones succeeded 75% of the time and the violent ones succeeded 25% of the time. So it’s not the case that violence never works, nor that non-violence always works, but that non-violence seems to have a better success rate.
