The Strategic Misology of Non Violent Conflict

Logic means reasoning, more particularly reasoning based on rules regarding valid inference. What does 'Strategic logic' mean? I suppose, it refers to reasoning in a situation where the outcome is dependent on the strategy used by a rival or one with a different goal. In other words, this is a game theoretic concept. Violent conflict's 'strategic logic' has to do with 'threat points' where massive harm is inflicted. 'Nonviolent Conflict' can only be about withdrawal of Cooperation or the creating of a nuisance. However, Cooperation can be coerced and nuisances can be curbed by the infliction of draconian punishment. Doing so may initially be expensive. However, the technology of coercion can be improved and scale and scope economies can be exploited such that the thing become cheaper and cheaper. Moreover, it can be used to curb other nuisances or failures of cooperation or coordination.

The alternative to 'Nonviolent conflict' is not 'violent conflict' because violence is a learned skill. Rather the alternative is more profitable collaboration- at a price. The problem here is that those engaged in nonviolent conflict may be neither skilled in violence nor have anything valuable to bring to the table. This means they are doomed to be a nuisance. They may prevail by sheer weight of numbers and their ability to degrade the productive capacity of the territory. But the price of their victory is their inheritance of a shithole they will themselves want to flee.

 'The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict' must take into account the negative payoff associated with victory. Failure to acknowledge this possibility is the reason that Nonviolent Conflict fails even when it prevails. By contrast, plain and simple Conflict- one with no ideological baggage- can always be resolved if it pays to do so.

If games are non zero-sum or the payoff matrix is radically uncertain- i.e. Knightian- then 'Conflict' may actually be a hidden type of cooperation or coordination. Consider the 'war on Crime' or 'the war on Drugs'. A particular type of Policing and Penal regime may help Organized Crime to flourish by increasing the monopoly power of Crime bosses while taking the small fry off the streets. Jails are the University of Crime. They are the place where Prisoner's Dilemma is defeated and norms of hierarchy and omerta are enforced. The Drug Enforcement Agency may cause more, better quality, drugs to be circulated than would otherwise be the case. It may make the market more profitable and 'customer friendly'.

The problem with any given Strategic Logic is that if games are not actually zero-sum, then such Logic can be gamed. There may be a meta-game or a meta-meta game. Those at the 'front-line' may discover they were 'useful idiots' whose sacrifices enabled a repugnancy market to flourish. This may breed cynicism. It can induce a paranoid type of suspicion.

In Economics, the notion of Muth Rational Expectations- i.e. the statistical convergence to expectations founded upon common knowledge of the correct Structural Causal Model- gets rid of this cynicism or suspicion. In theory at least it enables people to pursue competing agendas without necessarily creating a situation of greater uncertainty featuring 'McKelvey chaos' arising from multi-dimensional decision spaces where 'Agenda Control' gains salience. Djikstra type 'concurrency deadlock' or 'livelock' are replaced by 'local arbitrage'. There are saltation events based on tipping points but these are relatively frictionless and hysteresis free. One may speak of this as pragmatic, or 'common sense', political thinking. But politics is not pure pragmatics. It may be valued as a semantics endowing lived life with meaning. It may not be seen as involving 'common sense' but rather operatic or tragic values of a sublime or soteriological type. What consequentialists dismiss as 'noise' may be music to the ears of those who object to signals of a gross, material, kind.

It seems to me that Chenoweth's work may arise from an intuition of this type.

WCFIA: In your co-authored book, “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,” you explain clearly why civil resistance campaigns attract more absolute numbers of people — in part it’s because there’s a much lower barrier to participation compared with picking up a weapon.

Obviously, this would only be the case if Civil Society is, well, Civil rather than armed to the teeth and prone to sticking a knife in your guts if you look at it sideways.

Based on the cases you have studied, what are the key elements necessary for a successful nonviolent campaign?

CHENOWETH: I think it really boils down to four different things. The first is a large and diverse participation that’s sustained.

Open markets have large and diverse participation. But where they arise, coercion is off the table. In this context 'Non Violence' is meaningless. We don't speak of our shopping in the bazaar as 'non violent acquisition of goods and services'. It would be bizarre to do so unless ours is a society which believes Theft alone is property. It is infra dig to buy and pay for stuff you covet.

The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other elites.

The scenario here may apply to a large and diverse participation which is not sustained but rather wholly spontaneous or such as arises after a 'tipping point'. True, some may claim to have sustained the campaign in the dark days before the tipping point. But others may equally claim that the critical actors were precisely those who had not sustained any similar belief or desire.

Those in the security forces or who are high up in the elite may have a different view. They may say there was no 'tipping point'. Such and such magnate or apparatchik made a particular more or less Machiavellian move. The outcome made a particular clique in the nomenklatura very rich. The masses exist only to be fooled in one way or another.

Security forces are important because they ultimately are the agents of repression,

for a price. But their own selfish motives can impose a 'Price of Anarchy' on Society. The Masses may, reasonably, wish for them to be disintermediated. 'Defund the Police' is a cry we are now hearing. But Security forces have a vested interest in keeping Society's 'Price of Anarchy' high enough to afford themselves a good living.  Rent extraction can make for curious bed-fellows.

and their actions largely decide how violent the confrontation with — and reaction to — the nonviolent campaign is going to be in the end.

Indeed. They can decide to let the thing build up till more butter is applied to their bread. Of course, they may miscalculate or 'Murphy's law' may operate- their bread falls in the dirt, butter side down.

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 'Price of Anarchy' and choke points for 'rent extraction' have to be maintained at some cost to society. It is naive to speak of 'support' rather than opportunistic accommodation. Where an 'elite'- i.e. agents with much greater power than the average man- is 'disrupted' or 'coerced', power has flown away from it. They are scrambling for a place in a life-boat and, if genuinely of superior cunning, may regain their former position.             

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.

Big Corporations do indeed use a wide array of marketing tools to build brand value. If 'non violent campaigns' are a brand and 'resistance' is a commodity then, sure, on open markets, there are going to be 'guerilla campaigns' and well paid Instagram 'influencers' as well as mainstream Madison Avenue type pitches directed at the Median voter in some mythical Peoria.

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.

At one time, in the Seventies, the Pedophiles wanted to get legal protection of the sort gained by Homosexuals. Mercifully, they failed. But they did not disappear. They were not crushed though what they did involved violence of the most repulsive sort. They went underground. In parts of Europe some operated with impunity thanks to their infiltration of Academia. In West Berlin, a psychology Professor named Helmut Kentler was able to get the State to pay pedophiles to foster homeless kids. This continued for thirty years. No doubt, other countries can point to similar scandals involving venerable Institutions. The fact is violence against the regime is not necessary to prevail. The safer bet is violence against those the regime does not care about or lacks the means to protect.

WCFIA: Is there any way to resist or protest without making yourself more vulnerable?

Yes. Go after weaker targets. Make money while doing so. You may not be able to get legal protection for your racket, but you can still get it subsidised by the State. The Ku Klux Klan considered itself a resistance organization. It had its Non Violent side- which faced those who could suppress it- while it busily got on with its bloody business. Where the Klan forgot this vital principle, as in Oklahoma in the early Twenties there was a swift reaction. An Anti-Mask Bill was passed in 1923.

On the other hand, preference intensity is revealed by costly signals. But this isn't 'resistance' or, indeed, 'protest'. It is preference revelation- or Hirschman 'Voice'- nothing more. However, ultimately it is 'Entry' and 'Exit' which determine outcomes.

CHENOWETH: 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.

Because they were spontaneous. Had the Brotherhood been behind Tahrir square Mubarak's goons would have been prepared. The Army would have stood by him.

WCFIA: A general strike seems like a personally costly way to protest, especially if you just stop working or stop buying things. Why are they effective?

They are not. Britain's General Strike collapsed. Both the Labour Movement and the power elite realized that confrontation would empower the lunatic fringe- crazy Lesbian Fascists on the Right and crazy but dull non Lesbians on the Left.

CHENOWETH: This is why preparation is so essential. Where campaigns have used strikes or economic noncooperation successfully, they’ve often spent months preparing by stockpiling food, coming up with strike funds, or finding ways to engage in community mutual aid while the strike is underway.

Then they lose it all and see this was not a smart thing to do. Labour needs to labour in order to remain Labour rather than an unemployable rabble living on welfare. Financial Capital doesn't have to finance anything in the real economy to remain Capital. Entrepreneurs may go out of business but Capital does not cease to exist. It moves into riskless assets. The British General Strike of the Twenties failed. 'Capital Strikes' succeed. If you don't risk your money, you still have money. If you price yourself out of the labour market you end up living on charity.

 By contrast, spontaneous self-interested action can bring about what appears to be 'revolutionary change' in a bloodless manner. A stupid East German apparatchik made a mistake during a TV Press Conference. He said the Commies had completely lifted travel restrictions. Everybody rushed to the exits. The border guards didn't have permission to fire so they let everybody through. Communism had just committed suicide on live TV. Stupidity achieved what Strategy could not.
What made the Soviet collapse so peculiar is that they were considered to have the upper hand in the European theater. Hawks thought it might have a soft underbelly in its Muslim South. But no one thought it was vulnerable on its Western border.

By contrast, South Africa was under pressure. Rhodesia had been bled white and had gone over to the majority in 1979. In Angola, the Apartheid regime was fighting Cubans which they didn't like at all. They began to scratch their heads and feel sorry for themselves.

One good example of that comes from South Africa. The anti-apartheid movement organized a total boycott of white businesses, which meant that black community members were still going to work and getting a paycheck from white businesses but were not buying their products.

Coz businesses which don't have any revenue still pay their black staff out of the goodness of their hearts.

Several months of that and the white business elites were in total crisis. They demanded that the apartheid government do something to alleviate the economic strain.

What the Government did was impose a State of Emergency. Three years later there was a big General Strike- but it only lasted 3 days. It emphasized the asymmetric nature of economic interdependence

With the rise of the reformist Frederik Willem de Klerk within the ruling party, South African leader P.W. Botha resigned. De Klerk was installed as president in 1989, leading to negotiations with the African National Congress [ANC] and then to free elections, where the ANC won overwhelmingly.

Barnard, a former Professor of Poli Sci, who became the Intelligence Chief of the Apartheid regime, reached out to Mandela in 1982. Why did Botha select this 30 year old whose research on the Algerian Independence struggle had convinced him of the futility of racist repression?  Perhaps, he hoped the idealist would turn into a hardliner after having to deal with ANC terrorism. But, it is equally likely that Botha wanted a young academic open to new ideas who could set up back-channels to the ANC.

The question remains- was it a coincidence that Botha's Ministers began talking directly to Mandela towards the end of 1985? Or did the boycott have an effect? The answer to this question scarcely matters. In 1988 Reagan and Gorbachev came to an agreement on Namibia. The Cold War in the region was over. Botha had to go. By the end of 1989 the Iron Curtain had collapsed. Two years later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The world had become unipolar. People like Barnard, who saw Intelligence must be about National Security, not protecting a particular Regime by fair means or foul, wholeheartedly supported the Constitutional dismantling of Apartheid. However, there was another side to this. In the new unipolar world, only dollar flows mattered. Black or White, all serve the greenback. Back channel negotiation turned out to be not about improving National Security- which arises when Governments serve the people- but about people in Government getting massive overseas bank accounts.

The reason I bring the case up is because organizers in the black townships had to prepare for the long term by making sure that there were plenty of food and necessities internally to get people by, and that there were provisions for things like Christmas gifts and holidays.

But all this preparation would have been for nought if Reagan hadn't proved, to everybody's surprise, one smart dude, while Gorbachev turned out to be an utter fool.
It may be that if the end of Apartheid had been delayed by the continuance of the Cold War, the ANC would have turned into an effective grass roots organization able to lift the masses out of poverty. Instead it turned out to be exactly the sort of organization a Machiavellian Intelligence chief has back channels with for a more or less corrupt purpose.

WCFIA: How important is the overall number of participants in a nonviolent campaign?

None at all. The biggest campaigns fail- Not in Our Name, The Women's March for Justice, CND, BLM, etc, etc- all were and will be farcically impotent to avert the outcome genuinely to be feared and loathed.

By contrast spontaneous actions by self-interested members of the masses can succeed spectacularly. But it helps if the Regime is represented by cretins. Gunter Schabowski, the guy who brought down Communism in Europe, believed that 'anyone who speaks German and who can read out a note correctly' was perfectly fitted to conduct a live TV Press Conference. He was wrong. Apparently, he'd been taking a cigarette break when the Note he was reading out was discussed. So he blathered whatever nonsense came into his head. Even the Stasi were no match for Stupidity- against which Schiller says even the immortal Gods battle in vain.

CHENOWETH: One of the things that isn’t in our book, but that I analyzed later and presented in a TEDx Boulder talk in 2013, is that a surprisingly small proportion of the population guarantees a successful campaign: just 3.5 percent.

Cool! So if White South Africans demand the restoration of Apartheid, they will get it provided all of their adults take to the streets.

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.

So if all ex-cons come out on the streets to demand the defunding of the Criminal Justice system, they are bound to succeed in abolishing Prisons and Courts and Police forces. Things would certainly be totally different in America. That's why a lot of Americans might want to relocate somewhere nice and sunny, like Saudi Arabia, where, at least in theory, habitual thieves could have their hands chopped off.

WCFIA: Is there anything about our current time that dictates the need for a change in tactics?

Yes. We must have a social media footprint of startling inaneness. This is difficult to achieve. To attract attention to my anti-Iyengar Jihad, I tried twerking with the neighbor's cat wearing a cute top hat perched on my head. Instead of becoming a Tik Tok sensation, I ended up with a badly scratched scalp.

CHENOWETH: Mobilizing without a long-term strategy or plan seems to be happening a lot right now, and that’s not what’s worked in the past.

There has always been mobilization of people who enjoy that sort of thing on the basis of plans of various degrees of lunacy. Having a long term strategy is a good idea if this involves tactical careerism, opportunism, and rent extraction. The Scientologists did have a long term strategy. So did the Maharishi. But neither has had the political impact of David Icke who appears innocent of any such thing. On the other hand, the genius Donald Trump definitely did have a very well thought out long term strategy. It is not true that he just makes shit up as he goes along.

However, there’s nothing about the age we’re in that undermines the basic principles of success.I don’t think that the factors that influence success or failure are fundamentally different. Part of the reason I say that is because they’re basically the same things we observed when Gandhi was organizing in India as we do today. There are just some characteristics of our age that complicate things a bit.

Gandhi's movement grew out of the Khilafat campaign. Islam was fighting back against European Imperialism. British military power was at its lowest ebb. The Chief of General Staff advised the Cabinet in 1920 that Ireland, Egypt, India, Baku, former Ottoman territory, could not all be simultaneously held. Indeed, even England could not be held with existing troop levels- i.e. a Communist insurgency could succeed. This was a wholly unprecedented situation. What was the upshot? Ireland gained freedom. Egypt's unilateral declaration of independence was accepted after General Allenby threatened to resign. Kemal Ataturk defeated the Allies. The Labour Party came to power in England. India alone got nothing. Why? Gandhi lost his nerve and called off the Non Cooperation Movement. Worse, he conceded that the extreme Tories were right. India was not ready for independence. Indeed, he stipulated impossible conditions for its readiness. The British must remain for at least a century. This was an extraordinary outcome. Non Violent Conflict had admitted that it was completely useless- indeed, it was a nuisance. Gandhi pleaded guilty to sedition and went happily off to jail. But then he had always been a cretin. In South Africa he had stirred up a campaign against the Pass Law. He mocked people who begged to be released after 6 months of hard labour. But once jailed himself, he came out after a few weeks. He said 'Carrying a Pass is a good thing. Indians want to carry a Pass. My complaint against the Government is that they made the thing compulsory. We are not Zulus who become alcoholics unless the Govt. imposes liquor laws. We will voluntarily carry passes because passes are a good thing.' Naturally, some of his disillusioned followers beat the fuck out of him. Gandhi then realized one should stay in jail for at least a year after having screwed up. This is not to say that local people could not secure needful reforms of a parochial type under Gandhi's banner- but these reforms were minor and would have been secured in any case.

Still, Indians rightly venerate Gandhi because long spells in prison helped generate esprit de corps among Indian 'barristocrats' and this helped unify the country after Independence. But, Gandhian ideology ensured that India would turn into a shittier shithole than it had previously been. The country couldn't feed or defend itself. There had been massive ethnic cleansing. Minorities saw a steep decline in their power and influence. Smart people emigrated.

Non Violence, it turned out, was a nuisance. Violence, by contrast, was a learned skill. Getting into Violence means, sooner or later, you have to embrace modern technology and systems of social organization. What is won by the sword is retained by the fighter jet to pay for which better 'mechanism design' is needed. That which Non Violence wins by pi-jaw turns out not to be worth having. Moreover, everybody spends all their time talking holier than thou nonsense.

WCFIA: You make the surprising claim that even when they fail, civil resistance campaigns often lead to longer-term reforms than violent campaigns do. How does that work?

Longer-term reforms occur because they boost productivity. Ideologues of Non Violence are not interested in raising productivity. They want everybody to waste all their time sitting through boring speeches about how like stabbing people is naughty. Don't stab people. Have a cold shower or play a nice game of shuttlecock. OMG what is wrong with you people? Why are you stabbing people all the time? Enough with the stabby, stabby! Come, let us pray that you stop being such a fucking psycho stabby stabby guy.

CHENOWETH: The finding is that civil resistance campaigns often lead to longer-term reforms and changes that bring about democratization compared with violent campaigns.

The demand for Democracy may indeed lead to Democracy. But Democracy is likely to do the same sort of stuff that the ideologues of Non Violence disapprove off. These nutters are not interested in helpful and needful reform which makes life better for everyone. What they want is to talk stupid shite and pose as great Saints and Martyrs. But to do so they have to tell stupid lies. The result is that sensible people think they are stupid liars. 

Countries in which there were nonviolent campaigns were about 10 times likelier to transition to democracies within a five-year period compared to countries in which there were violent campaigns — whether the campaigns succeeded or failed.

The problem here is that every non-democracy had both violent and non violent struggles. They also had people who struggled against the regime by masturbating, farting, eating chocolate and pretending to be a panda. All may equally claim to have contributed to an outcome which was actually caused by the stupidity of the regime. 

This is because even though they “failed” in the short term, the nonviolent campaigns tended to empower moderates or reformers within the ruling elites who gradually began to initiate changes and liberalize the polity.

Speaking generally, the reverse is the case. Moderates want 'Civil Society' support. But various different types of self-promoting nutters take over public spaces till the public recoils in disgust. Lads from the villages recruited into the Army and the paramilitary gladly shoot or beat the fuck out of the nutters. But sometimes the orders never arrive. Stupidity has led to regime change-  but change is often for the worse.

One of the best examples of this is the Kefaya movement

which was sparked by the Second Intifada and the US invasion of Iraq

in the early 2000s in Egypt. Although it failed in the short term, the experiences of different activists during that movement surely informed the ability to effectively organize during the 2011 uprisings in Egypt.

But what was the outcome? First the Ikhwan takes power and screws up. Now the Army are back in the saddle. 

Another example is the 2007 Saffron Revolution in Myanmar, which was brutally suppressed at the time but which ultimately led to voluntary democratic reforms by the government by 2012.

Cool. Pogroms are now 'democratic'. But the Army is still in charge. 

Of course, this doesn’t mean that nonviolent campaigns always lead to democracies — or even that democracy is a cure-all for political strife. As we know, in Myanmar, relative democratization in the country’s institutions has been accompanied by extreme violence against the Rohingya community there. But it’s important to note that such cases are the exceptions rather than the norm.

No. They are the norm. 

And democratization processes tend to be much bumpier when they occur after large-scale armed conflict instead of civil resistance campaigns, as was the case in Myanmar.

Myanmar has always had armed conflict. It isn't a peaceful part of the world. 

WCFIA: What are your current projects?

CHENOWETH: I’m still collecting data on nonviolent campaigns around the world. And I’m also collecting data on the nonviolent actions that are happening every day in the United States through a project called the Crowd Counting Consortium, with Jeremy Pressman of the University of Connecticut. It began in 2017, when Jeremy and I were collecting data during the Women’s March.

The largest such demonstration in history. Yet it fell apart after it was captured by the anti-Semites. What Obama calls 'the circular firing squad' had struck again. 

Someone tweeted a link to our spreadsheet, and then we got tons of emails overnight from people writing in to say, “Oh, your number in Portland is too low; our protest hasn’t made the newspapers yet, but we had this many people.” There were the most incredible appeals. There was a nursing home in Encinitas, Calif., where 50 octogenarians organized an indoor women’s march with their granddaughters. Their local news had shot a video of them and they asked to be counted, and we put them in the sheet. People are very active and it’s not part of the broader public discourse about where we are as a country. I think it’s important to tell that story.

But a story is all it is.  Why call the Women's March 'non violent'? What else could it have been? This is not to say that it is not in all our interests that Women get to decide what is best for them. Why? They have superior knowledge. If Women flourish everybody benefits. If some sociopathic misogynists, or crazy Religions nutters, harm women, we are all harmed. This is also true of any other group previously considered 'lower' or 'sinful' or whatever. The problem with viewing desirable change as a sort of quasi military, or marketing, campaign, is that the methods are bound to put off a lot of people. Furthermore, we are fearful that nutters will gain political power and thus get a chance to screw up the economy.