Nonviolent Protestors

7. Massively Parallel Roles & Tasks

Nonviolent protest is one of the strongest ways to fight back against injustice and other wrong-doing. Although many people think that nonviolence is weak and violence is strong, research has shown that the assumption that violence is more effective than nonviolence is incorrect. Nonviolent protest strategies are much more likely than violence to draw sympathy and understanding among the opponents. This is how the Freedom Marches of the 1960s civil rights era were so persuasive, and resulted in the passage of both the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

In Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan note that

between 1900 and 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts. Attracting impressive support from citizens that helps separate regimes from their main sources of power, these campaigns have produced remarkable results, even in the contexts of Iran, the Palestinian Territories, the Philippines, and Burma.

(One must note, of course, that those places did not stay nonviolent—far from it. But they might well have been better off if they had.)

Nonviolence is again being used in the United States, and indeed, worldwide as (for example) a way to protest against police killings (after the murder of George Floyd in 2020) and again in 2026 in response to Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE)'s brutal operations in Minneapolis, Minnesota in which two citizen protesters were killed. That nonviolent response eventually forced the Trump administration to recall ICE from Minnesota, and indeed, fire the Secretary of Homeland Security because of her destructive actions there (and elsewhere). But had the protests not occurred, that siege would likely have lasted much longer and been copied in other places. As it happens, public opinion is changing sharply on the immigration issue, and the Trump administration is having to change both its rhetoric and behavior as a result. Nonviolence does have power!