Double Standards in Comparisons of Violence and Nonviolence.

• Author: Dobos, Ned

In the fifty years that have passed since the publication of Gene Sharp's The Politics of Nonviolent Action, empirical evidence for the effectiveness of nonviolence has grown considerably. The most compelling example is Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's Why Civil Resistance Works (2012). It turns out that between the years 1900 and 2006, political campaigns that included the use of violence were actually outperformed, by a ratio of almost two to one, by those that did not. Purely nonviolent movements did often fail to achieve their objectives over this period (half the time), but those that employed violence failed even more often (three-quarters of the time). In the words of folk musician Joan Baez: "Nonviolence is a flop. The only bigger flop is violence" (quoted in Chenoweth and Stephan, 220).

Despite this, wherever there is resistance to aggression or oppression, the outcome is presumed to depend primarily on which side deploys armed force more effectively; everything else is mere sideshow. Take Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Early in the resistance there were widespread reports of Ukrainian civilians using several of the nonviolent techniques that Sharp recommends (Christoyannopoulos 2022). Some people stood in front of Russian tanks so they could not advance. Others confronted Russian soldiers in the street with verbal tirades and reprimands. Road signs were removed to confuse the invaders; amnesty and money were offered to any Russian soldier willing to desert; and cyberattacks were launched against various Russian targets. The world looked on with admiration, and sometimes amusement, but nobody seriously entertained that such tactics might ultimately drive out the Russians. The real resistance, as far as the international community was (and is) concerned, has been the war effort, and accordingly this is where we continue to channel the bulk of our resources.

Since February 2022 Ukraine has received military aid valued in the tens of billions of dollars, including everything from small-arms ammunition, to missiles, armored vehicles, air defense systems, drones, howitzers, weaponized helicopters, laser-guided rocket systems and more. Meanwhile, the nonviolent part of the resistance has received almost no material support from the outside world. After some initial uptake of the Ukrainian government's offer of money and amnesty to Russian deserters, the American economist Bryan Caplan (2022) devised a way for wealthy Western countries to sweeten the deal and vastly increase the number of Russian soldiers responding to the incentive. Despite the low cost of Caplan's plan, no country has volunteered to finance it, or any other aspect of the nonviolent struggle for that matter.

This suggests a blind and stubborn faith in the superior effectiveness of violence when it comes to dealing with foreign aggressors; one that cannot be dislodged by evidence contradicting it. How do we account for this? Sharp hinted at one possible answer in a 2005 interview:

Guerrilla warfare has huge civilian casualty rates. Huge. And yet Che Guevara didn't abandon guerrilla warfare because people were getting killed. The same is true in conventional war, of course. But then they say if you get killed in nonviolent struggle, then nonviolent struggle has failed. (Engler 2013)

Essentially Sharp is suggesting that violence and nonviolence are held to different success conditions. If violence provokes counterviolence we accept that this is par for the course and it has no bearing on our determination of whether a violent campaign has "worked." That depends entirely on whether the ultimate political objectives of the campaign come to fruition. When it comes to nonviolence, on the other hand, we do not similarly postpone judgment until the final results come in. Instead, success or failure is determined by whether the tactic is reciprocated by its target. If nonviolence fails to instantaneously pacify and is met with violence, that apparently is sufficient to conclude that the nonviolent strategy has failed and need not be pursued any longer.

This is not the only double standard that contaminates the debate, however. Even where everyone admits that a violent campaign has failed, that is not taken to prove the ineffectiveness of violence per se; it is only taken to show that violence can be used ineffectively. Where nonviolence fails, by contrast, that is treated as proof that nonviolence is ineffective. On the flip side, where a nonviolent campaign succeeds, there is a reluctance to infer from this any generalization about the effectiveness of nonviolence. But there is no such reluctance when it comes to inferring the effectiveness of violence from examples of its effective use. Call this the effectiveness asymmetry.

This paper is in three parts. First, I illustrate the effectiveness asymmetry with some examples. Next, I consider several possible explanations for the pervasiveness of this double standard. Flaving shown that violence and nonviolence are held to unequal success conditions, as Sharp alleged, the final section of the paper draws attention to some of the adverse downstream effects of this. The effectiveness asymmetry is not an innocuous intellectual error. It can make unjust wars seem just, and it obstructs humanity's progress to the more peaceful future Sharp envisaged.

The Effectiveness Asymmetry

Most Americans are prepared to admit that the war in Afghanistan was a failure (Santhanam 2021). It is difficult to see how anyone could resist that conclusion. Whether the purpose of the war was to depose the terrorist-harboring Taliban regime, to deliver democracy and human rights to the Afghan people, to increase the security of the American people, or to shore up America's global leadership and hegemony, the operation did not do what it was supposed to. Twenty years and trillions of dollars' worth of military force did not "work" on this occasion. But these results have not led to a collective reappraisal of the belief that military force works. Instead, the failure has been largely attributed to inadequate civilian support for the military, in the form of insufficient resourcing, lack of political will, too many legal and ethical constraints, and even popular apathy. Almost immediately after the Biden administration withdrew the last remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan, a headline in The Atlantic told readers: "Afghanistan Is Your Fault" (Nichols 2021).

This is part of a more general pattern. With regard to most any social institution, our assessment of its competence naturally varies depending on its performance: institutions gain or lose public trust by succeeding or failing in their aims. There is one notable exception to this rule, however, and that is the institution of violence. In "Gaining Trust While Losing Wars" (2017), David Burbach of the U.S. Naval War College shows that military failure no longer leads the American public to lose confidence in the military establishment. Expectations about future performance have been effectively severed from appraisals of past performance.

This disconnect produces the most prevalent form of the effectiveness asymmetry. Whenever violence fails we say that is because it was used ham-fistedly, or not used for long enough. The tool is not the problem; the operator is. Hence the solution is to plan wars more carefully and to train for them more thoroughly and to fight them more patiently so that the effectiveness inherent in the method can be fully realized. That is why we have military academies, war games, tactical and strategic analysts, and so on. When nonviolence fails, on the other hand, the problem is the method itself, rather than its incompetent application, inadequate funding, or premature termination. Any effort to make it more effective is putting lipstick on a pig. Examples of violence failing tell us nothing about the effectiveness of violence, but...