3.5% rule
Erica Chenoweth’s research found that when just 3.5% of the population engages in sustained resistance, authoritarians fall.
In this short video from 2013 Erica expands on this research to explain why it works, what to do when protests are met with violence, and why it’s the best path back to a democracy.
Learn more:
Today Erica Chenoweth is a professor at the Harvard Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, directing the Nonviolent Action Lab. The Crowd Counting Consortium is a project of the latter. She is also the author of Why Civil Resistance Works. We encourage you to browse any of these resources to learn more, but do start with the twelve minute video above, especially if you’re skeptical. Erica was too — she began her research expecting to prove violence was necessary.
Other resources:
- This is an Uprising contains case studies of the 3.5% rule in action.
- Freedom Trainers host a Non-Cooperation library to help you learn
- Princeton maintains a list of de-escalation trainings nation-wide
- Indivisible, which started as a Google doc in response to Trump’s first election, is now one of the largest distributed non-violent resistance groups in the nation. Find a local chapter, or start one.
