(Photo credit: Andrew Stutesman, Unsplash)
Working for over a decade in communications, I’ve grown interested in how strategies and tactics influence the success or failure of social movements. There is likely no better expert on this topic than Erica Chenoweth, Ph.D., a Harvard professor who has spent years analyzing the features of non-violent social resistance throughout history. In their book, Civil Resistance, What Everyone Needs to Know, they outline four critical factors needed for transformative, durable change to occur. For anyone involved in purpose-driven social advocacy, this insight provides a reliable framework rooted in academic rigor and research. But also—and some would consider more importantly—it provides a valuable reference point for what not to do, and the pitfalls to avoid, in order to realize lasting systemic change. The latter is what I would like to focus on here.
Factor 1: Mass participation, drawing from all walks of Life
“The single most important influence on a campaign’s success is the scale and range of popular participation. The larger and more diverse the campaign’s base of participants, the more likely it is to succeed. Mass participation seriously disrupts the status quo; makes continued repression impossible to sustain; prompts defections from its opponent’s institutions and supporters… and constrains the power holder’s options.” (pg. 83)
Having a passionate yet poorly supported movement allows lawmakers to more easily ignore demands for change because they regard individuals within the movement as unrepresentative of the broader public. When groups are labelled “radical” or “fringe”—and lack large-scale support—they can be easily dismissed regardless of the causes for which they advocate. This can be seen in the North American drug liberation movement, which views illegal drug use as an issue of bodily autonomy. Many individuals within this movement want currently illegal substances like heroin more readily available to adults who desire it as a means of bodily pleasure and liken it to consuming alcohol. This view is largely rejected by mainstream society and the majority of doctors, legal professionals, and law enforcement. Because of this, strident calls for drug policy reform in the form of legal regulation and legalization of currently illegal drugs like cocaine and heroin have been consistently ignored by most politicians.
This speaks also to the importance of appealing to and persuading the general public; and from a communications standpoint, it underscores the need for crafting campaign messages based on the audience’s values rather than your own in service of that persuasion. For activists on both ends of the political spectrum, this means moderating messaging to appeal to the broader public. But this is often unpalatable to them and rejected as a strategic direction. For this reason, campaigns rooted in extreme activism (e.g., abolishing the police and prisons) will likely never gain the mass support needed to realize movement goals; and on a communications and persuasion front, such activists can therefore be considered authors of their own failure. Winning broad-based support through moderate messaging is critical to success, but this option is often taken off the table.
As social scientists and researchers have concluded, communicating based on the values of one’s audience rather than internal values is more effective at changing hearts and minds.
Factor 2: Shifting loyalties of the regime’s supporters
In practical terms, this means individuals changing their views and “switching ideological teams” after being persuaded by arguments or personal experience. If we continue the example from drug policy reform, it would resemble police, business owners, doctors, and politicians (in power) supporting progressive drug policy reforms such as decriminalization and legal regulation. However, “achieving this requires many different communities supporting it: women, youth, students, elderly, professionals, taxi drivers, merchants and small business owners, religious figures, civil servants, and more. The broader the array of supporters, the more likely the movement is to represent the full range of society with diverse spheres of influence—which means more ways to reach people situated within the opponent’s pillars of support.” (pg. 85)
In other words, one must be connected in some way to a dominant regime’s supporters to persuade them to consider alternative views. However, a structural weakness of many extreme activist communities is that they often insulate themselves (or are insulated) from mainstream society by virtue of their extreme views. To them, these views are completely normal and intuitive—they cannot register how anyone could think otherwise. This lack of self-awareness around how peripheral and outside the norm one’s ideological position is presents a significant barrier to building a broad and diverse base of support. Ideologically entrenched individuals build their social circles and form connections with others who share their views with equal vigor and purity. Not only does this create and reinforce echo chambers, it also limits opportunities to destabilize the other side’s “pillars of support” because one is less likely to share a connection with its supporters.
Factor 3: Using a wide variety of tactics, not just demonstrations
“Movements that shift among various tactics are more likely to succeed than movements that rely too much on a single method, like protests or demonstrations. Nonviolence campaigns that draw on their vast human capital to create new and unexpected tactics are better at maintaining momentum than movements that become predictable and tactically stagnant. When movements are especially large, they can afford to retreat from the streets so long as they impose other kinds of pressure.” (pg. 87)
In the context of communications strategies, this lack of diversity and imagination is often reflected in the routine use of open letters, e-petitions, and “public statements,” (all forms of digital advocacy documents) which lawmakers often summarily dismiss as they recognize that they are frequently signed by the same communities (advocacy groups and their supporters) and driven by special interests. Such digital tactics also lack any real weight or force of law. Their value is in the volume of signatories and their variety and social position, but all three factors are rarely present.
Social media has also created an illusory sense of impact that fuels its overuse as a vehicle for change. When special interest/activist accounts begin aggressively sharing social content to generate support, examining their profiles, followers, and posting histories will quickly reveal whether they are representative of the broader, mainstream public. If not, their social media content becomes much easier to ignore by policymakers as they realize such users exist in echo chambers with limited reach to new audiences that are persuadable. Real change happens in the real world, and the false sense of impact afforded by social media consumes valuable energy and capacity that could be channeled to more effective tactics.
Factor 4: Discipline and resilience in the face of oppression
“Movements tend to succeed when they develop staying power, which means cultivating resilience, maintaining discipline and sustaining mass involvement…The movements that manage to achieve this usually have clear organizational structures; succession plans in place… and contingency plans for how to respond when repression escalates… It is much tougher for regimes to get away with targeting civilians who are considered mainstream or even close to the regime’s social circles than it is to target smaller-scale crowds who are not perceived as representative of the society as a whole.” (pg. 89)
Many of the more radical activist organizations on both sides of the political spectrum often lack the resources and discipline to build the organizational framework required to sustain effective advocacy over the long term. They are often responding to—rather than proactively organizing against—institutional power and therefore often a step behind. Because their work is largely unpaid, participation is inconsistent and commitment wanes over time.
The second half of Chenoweth’s quote above is especially important. It articulates the value of appealing to the mainstream rather than the extreme fringes of society. The concerns of the former are much harder to ignore for regimes in power, and it is both their size and constituency that make them so effective at triggering policy change. Because activist organization are nearly always out resourced, out organized, and out messaged, it is all the more important for them to move away from extreme positions and try and win support from mainstream society. Becoming more radical will only exacerbate the weaknesses that have been preventing such movements from realizing their visions for change.