Erica Chenoweth

Erica Chenoweth is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University. They study political violence and its alternatives. At Harvard, Chenoweth directs the Nonviolent Action Lab. Chenoweth has authored or edited nine books and dozens of articles on mass movements, nonviolent resistance, political violence and state repression, including the recently published Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (2021). Chenoweth maintains the NAVCO Data Project, one of the world’s leading datasets on historical and contemporary mass mobilizations around the globe. Along with Jeremy Pressman, Chenoweth also co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium, a public interest and scholarly project that documents political mobilization in the US since 2017. Chenoweth’s research has been featured in The New Yorker, The New York TimesThe Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR’s Morning Edition, TEDxBoulder and elsewhere. They co-host the award-winning blog Political Violence @ a Glance, host the blog Rational Insurgent, and blog occasionally at The Monkey Cage channel at The Washington Post.

Visit Professor Erica Chenoweth

Most non-violent revolutionary movements in one decade

The decade 2010–19 saw the rise of 96 non-violent civil-resistance mobilizations globally, more than any other decade on record. The year 2019 alone witnessed 15 new campaigns, with 24 others continuing by the close of the year, representing the most non-violent revolutionary movements in one year. Notable uprisings in the 2010s include the series of anti-corruption protests in North Africa and the Middle East that came to be called the Arab Spring (starting in Tunisia in 2011); the emergence of Black Lives Matter in 2013 in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman who fatally shot Trayvon Martin the previous year; the world's largest women's rights and LGBTQ marches which took place in the US cities of Washington, DC, and New York City in 2017 and 2019, respectively; and the Global Climate Strike in 2019, spearheaded by the Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.