The Difficulty of Successful Non-violent and Violent Protests

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Many people wonder why there are not more people who protest and rebel against controlling regimes and injustices related to however is abusing the power of the current regime. Well, there are many complex reasons why someone might continue to accept living under an authoritarian regime or accept injustices and one of them is probably the difficulty of having a successful protest. For their 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan collected data from the last decade and looked at over 300 political campaigns, both violent and non-violent, to try to see what the rate of success is.

Non-violent protests had a higher chance than violent protests, but even the odds of a peaceful protest succeeding was only fifty-three percent. While that seems like pretty good odds and they are considering how difficult a revolution is, that still means that around half the time, the current regime in power wins and successfully destroys whatever protest is going on. If your revolution is violent well I have even more bad news: the success rate is only 26% for violent protests according to the book. So if things get violent, you will probably only succeed one-fourth of the time, and 74% of the time, whoever was already in charge wins and simply uses the protestors as an example of why you should not oppose them. I am not saying protests should not be attempted or be respected though - on the contrary. Knowing these odds, in my opinion, should make people more impressed by those willing to risk everything for a revolution even with uncertain odds of success - as well as other factors I will get into later that can derail a revolution...