Erica Chenoweth (born April 22, 1980) is an American political scientist as well as a faculty member and Ph.D. program co-director at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies. Chenoweth is also the Director of the university's Program on Terrorism and Insurgency Research and a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Within the international relations community, she is known for her work on civil resistance movements and political violence.
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Together with Maria J. Stephan of the U.S. Department of State, Chenoweth co-wrote the book, Why Civil Resistance Works. Chenoweth and Stephan organized an international team of scholars in identifying all the major violent and nonviolent governmental change efforts of the twentieth century. They translated the results into a theory of civil resistance and its success rate for political change compared to violent resistance.
Their team identified over 200 violent revolutions and over 100 nonviolent campaigns. Twenty-six percent of the violent revolutions were successful, while 53 percent of the nonviolent campaigns succeeded. Moreover, looking at change in democracy (Polity IV scores) indicates that nonviolence promotes democracy while violence promotes tyranny.
In addition every campaign that got active participation from at least 3.5 percent of the population succeeded, and many succeeded with less. All the campaigns that achieved that threshold were nonviolent; no violent campaign achieved that threshold.
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