I've always been looking for more information about the effectiveness of protests and it's a subject I honestly don't have much knowledge of. I thought this would a good time to provoke a discussion after seeing Trump tweet about the protests taking place in Iran.
A study was done a few years, more about it below
https://www.fastcompany.com/3040831/peac...ate-change
The study claims that peaceful protests are more effective
"Their most striking finding: Nonviolent campaigns were successful against government repression 46% of the time, more than twice the success rate (20%) of their violent counterparts. Not only that, they found the success rate of violent insurgencies has actually been declining in recent decades, and that nonviolent resistance campaigns have a stronger tendency to lead to democratic governments and lasting peace later on."
Unfortunately, I remained unconvinced as the article also points out that is only using mass movements. Which could be categorized anyway the author wants to frankly.
"Their initial dataset in 2011 cataloged the outcomes of all such mass movements they could find from 1900 to 2006—adding to 323 nonviolent and violent movements in all, from Gandhi’s movement in 1919 to the coup that removed Thailand’s prime minister from power in 2006."
I will admit it's a difficult subject to study though. What exactly is a protest? Were the protests in Eastern Europe actually effective or did the Soviet Union just go bankrupt?
Personally, I would guess that violence would be a more effective solution for causing change, though frankly, I don't have any evidence.
The Indian independence movement led by Gandhi and the Americans Civil Right Movement are the main two examples of effective peaceful protests. However, the prevailing belief that these two movements worked because they were peaceful is a ludicrous one. They both worked because the governments that they were fighting were willing to use violence against peaceful people. MLK purposely choose areas where he thought the locals would resort to some level of violence to quell the protests.
Personally, I'm not sure peaceful protests are that effective. The best way to handle peaceful protests to simply ignore them (though some that have swelled to very large numbers have also worked since the government is usually unwilling to use violence against a really large amount of people)
The most recent peaceful protest in the USA that I can think of was the Women's march, which DT mostly ignored other than a few brilliant tweets.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-t...ople-vote/
And then everyone went back to work.
A study was done a few years, more about it below
https://www.fastcompany.com/3040831/peac...ate-change
The study claims that peaceful protests are more effective
"Their most striking finding: Nonviolent campaigns were successful against government repression 46% of the time, more than twice the success rate (20%) of their violent counterparts. Not only that, they found the success rate of violent insurgencies has actually been declining in recent decades, and that nonviolent resistance campaigns have a stronger tendency to lead to democratic governments and lasting peace later on."
Unfortunately, I remained unconvinced as the article also points out that is only using mass movements. Which could be categorized anyway the author wants to frankly.
"Their initial dataset in 2011 cataloged the outcomes of all such mass movements they could find from 1900 to 2006—adding to 323 nonviolent and violent movements in all, from Gandhi’s movement in 1919 to the coup that removed Thailand’s prime minister from power in 2006."
I will admit it's a difficult subject to study though. What exactly is a protest? Were the protests in Eastern Europe actually effective or did the Soviet Union just go bankrupt?
Personally, I would guess that violence would be a more effective solution for causing change, though frankly, I don't have any evidence.
The Indian independence movement led by Gandhi and the Americans Civil Right Movement are the main two examples of effective peaceful protests. However, the prevailing belief that these two movements worked because they were peaceful is a ludicrous one. They both worked because the governments that they were fighting were willing to use violence against peaceful people. MLK purposely choose areas where he thought the locals would resort to some level of violence to quell the protests.
Personally, I'm not sure peaceful protests are that effective. The best way to handle peaceful protests to simply ignore them (though some that have swelled to very large numbers have also worked since the government is usually unwilling to use violence against a really large amount of people)
The most recent peaceful protest in the USA that I can think of was the Women's march, which DT mostly ignored other than a few brilliant tweets.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/president-t...ople-vote/
And then everyone went back to work.