The Role of External Support in Nonviolent Campaigns

Erica Chenoweth

Erica Chenoweth is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, Faculty Dean at Pforzheimer House at Harvard College, and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute. Chenoweth studies political violence and its alternatives. They have authored or edited nine other books and dozens of articles on mass movements, nonviolent resistance, terrorism, political violence, revolutions, and state repression, including Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (2021) and On Revolutions (2022).

Chenoweth’s current book project investigates the puzzling decline in the success of civil resistance movements in the past decade, even as the technique has become more popular worldwide. Along with Zoe Marks, Chenoweth is also the author of the forthcoming book that explores how women’s participation impacts mass movements.

At Harvard, Chenoweth directs the Nonviolent Action Lab, an innovation hub that uses social science tools and evidence to support movement-led political transformation. There they maintain the NAVCO Data Project, one of the world’s leading datasets on historical and contemporary mass mobilizations around the globe; the Women in Resistance (WiRe) Dataset, which catalogues the gender composition of such movements (with Zoe Marks); and the Crowd Counting Consortium, a public interest and scholarly project that documents political mobilization in the US (with Jeremy Pressman).

Foreign Policy ranked Chenoweth among the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013 for their efforts to promote the empirical study of nonviolent resistance. Chenoweth received the Karl Deutsch Award, which the International Studies Association gives annually to the scholar under 40 who has made the greatest impact on the field of international politics or peace research. Chenoweth’s book Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (2011) with Maria J. Stephan won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, and the Best Book Award from the American Political Science Association. In 2022, Chenoweth was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Maria J. Stephan

Dr. Maria J. Stephan’s career has bridged the academic, policy, and non-profit sectors, with a focus on the role of civil resistance and nonviolent movements in advancing human rights, democratic freedoms, and sustainable peace in the US and globally. She most recently directed the Program on Nonviolent Action at the U.S. Institute of Peace, overseeing cutting-edge research and programming focused on the nexus of nonviolent action and peacebuilding. Stephan is the co-author (with Erica Chenoweth) of Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011). She is the co-author of Bolstering Democracy: Lessons Learned and the Path Forward (Atlantic Council, 2018); the co-editor of Is Authoritarianism Staging a Comeback? (Atlantic Council, 2015); and the editor of Civilian Jihad: Nonviolent Struggle, Democratization and Governance in the Middle East (Palgrave, 2009). From 2009-14, Stephan was lead foreign affairs officer in the U.S. State Department, serving in Afghanistan and Turkey. She later co-directed the Future of Authoritarianism initiative at the Atlantic Council. Stephan has taught at Georgetown University and American University. She received her BA from Boston College and her MA and PhD from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. Stephan, a native Vermonter, is a lifetime member of the Council on Foreign Relations.