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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Protests are rarely effectual

False

“Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change” [1].

Exhibit A: the same region, literally last month. First protesters in Bangladesh lead “to the ouster of the then-prime minister, Sheikh Hasina” [2]. Then Indonesia “pledged to revoke lawmakers’ perks and privileges, including a controversial $3,000 housing allowance, in a bid to ease public fury after nationwide protests” [3].

[1] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/35-rul...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_Revolution_(Bangladesh)

[3-] https://apnews.com/article/indonesia-protests-subianto-privi...

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I think when people, particularly in America, think "protest", they think of people walking around with placards and other such relatively low effort involvement. That article is talking about incidents where you have 3.5% of people (that would be 12 million people in the US) engaging in things like organized and real boycotts (as opposed to 'Yeah I'm boycotting [this place I've never even heard of, let alone shopped at]), strikes, and so on.

You could have tens of millions of students and otherwise unemployed individuals walking around with placards, and nobody's going to care. But get 50,000 truckers (let alone 12 million people) to go on strike over something, and the whole country will grind to a halt.

Then again, Canada had a whole convoy that tried to protest but that got stamped out.

> Canada had a whole convoy that tried to protest but that got stamped out

It was an anti-vax protest [1]. Canada isn't anti vax [2]. The protests were unpopular [3][4].

The convoy didn't go anywhere because it had nowhere to go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest#cite_not...

[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/measles-vaccination-poll-1.75...

[3] https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/15/politics/fact-check-canad...

[4] https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/two-thirds-of-canadia...

Sure it might have been unpopular and a silly cause. However that didn't stop the government from invoking the emergencies act and cracking down with impunity. There were even cases of finances being frozen.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...

It was an anti-lockdown protest. Canada continued to have extreme lockdowns well after the vaccine was available.

Are some of your comments automated?

> I think when people, particularly in America, think "protest", they think of people walking around with placards and other such relatively low effort involvement.

Growing up in Nepal and witnessing some large non-violent and violent protests, I was frankly, baffled to see people standing on the sides of the streets and holding sign boards as protests

Where's the rallies? Where is the mass involvement needed for a successful protest? where are the street blocks? non-voilent doesn't mean just standing there.

The first time I actually saw something worth being called a protest was during the Black Lives Matter movement. I think it exposed the American police system for what it was, and the system's inability to control protesters peacefully

I've seen a lot of protests around NYC on various topics

Recently more with Palestine

> You could have tens of millions of students and otherwise unemployed individuals walking around with placards, and nobody's going to care.

I think you're wrong here Do it for one day nobody cares Do it for a week, people notice Do it for a month, you've got regime change

The USA has an astonishly effective machine at stomping out protests for anything more than holding up a sign. BLM in Minneapolis was allowed to go on because the politician agreed with it. (Tim Walz's wife famously noted how much she enjoyed the smell of the burning tires.) []

When I was young and still under the illusion protests did anything, I recall going to a protest during the 'occupy' days. Obama was coming into town and we wanted him to be able to hear us chanting or see our signs.

My memory is pretty bad at this point on the context, but roughly how I remember it going was he was going to some sort of convention center. We started walking there, and about halfway there this mysterious but incredibly confident and authoritative person with a megaphone showed up and told us we had succeeded and the protest was over. About 90% of people actually believed that and left. The 10% of us that were like "who the hell is this lady and why would anyone listen to her" kept going. Then the police surrounded us and beat the shit out of anyone they could get to. We never got anywhere close to Obama's route.

[] https://nypost.com/2024/08/07/us-news/gwen-walz-said-she-kep...

> Do it for one day nobody cares Do it for a week, people notice Do it for a month, you've got regime change

Occupy Wall Street lasted longer than a month, and I'm not sure they achieved regime change. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupy_Wall_Street

You could argue that it's below the 3.5% of the total population threshold mentioned in the previous comments tho.

Far below. Occupy Wall Street was perhaps thousands of people. 3.5% of the US would be over 12 million people. 3.5% of New York City would be 350,000 people. In the street outside Wall Street. Yeah, that would have occupied Wall Street, to the point that workers would have had trouble getting in the door. Occupy Wall Street was nothing like that.

That study appears to be comparing violent protests to non-violent protests.

At 3.5% of the populace taking up arms (not in protest but in war), that would far outnumber armed government officials in most countries. I don't doubt that a government choosing to concede at the point those 3.5% signaled peacefully they are likely to get violence soon, since the government conceding before that happens indicates they are weak enough to not be able to fight it off. Of course, If you have 3.5% of the populace fighting you can defeat even a horribly asymmetric situation, as the Chechens showed when they gained independence in the first Chechen war against Russia where almost everything beyond small arms were obtained via capture from the enemy.

At best your study shows that a government that capitulates before violence is more likely to be defeated, which makes sense since both sides tend to pick violence when they actually think they can win -- and if both sides think they can win then odds are quite good the odds of winning lie somewhere closer to the middle of the odds if the actors are rational. Concession before violence is more likely to indicate the odds lie outside the middle.

> study appears to be comparing violent protests to non-violent protests

No. The 3.5% figure specifically refers to nonviolent resistance [1].

Would note that “new research suggests that one nonviolent movement, Bahrain in 2011-2014, appears to have decisively failed despite achieving over 6% popular participation at its peak” [2]. But the fact remains that it’s harder to identify ineffective mass protests than effective ones.

> which makes sense since both sides tend to pick violence when they actually think they can win

This assumes a lot more rationality than violent resistance (and corrupt governments) tend to have.

Instead, the evidence is that violent resistance fails more often than nonviolent resistance. In part because violent resistance helps the government consolidate power over its own violence apparatus in a way nonviolent protest inhibits.

[1] https://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/978...

[2] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr/publications/questi...

I listened to an interview with one of the article's authors, and she said the reason non-violent protests defeat a state willing to order violent crackdowns is because the soldiers performing those crackdowns are regular people. They are not the people who most benefit from an authoritarian state. So when they find themselves being told to beat up or shoot a nun sitting in the street, there's a good chance the soldier would defect.

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