A Force More Powerful

A Force More Powerful is a book that argues that non-violent civil disobedience is a more effective way of bringing about desirable political change than armed insurrection. I read the first chapter, which covered the sad story of Russia in the early part of the twentieth century. I am now reading the second chapter, which deals with the case of India.

This is a story that really stands out. Political theorists have noted that countries that are either poor and have a lot of economic disparity are less likely to become democratic. See Democracy and Redistribution, for example. And yet India has been relatively poor, had a rather uneven distribution of income and has been democratic for the greater part of a century.

The idea of nonviolent protest and political mobilization is not the only possible explanation. Deepak Lal has suggested that Hinduism is responsible. He argued that this religion contains a cosmology that, unlike Christianity and Islam, supports inequality. Hence people in India have a greater tolerance for inequality. I'm very suspicious of this claim. There isn't really that much data to support the claim. There are only about two predominantly Hindu countries in the world, India and Nepal. Nepal does not have an extensive history of democratic governance. It seems that tolerance for inequality could be used just as easily to explain the success of autocratic rule, but there is little evidence to back up this claim either.

Thus far the book only has brought up only anecdotal evidence to support its thesis. As such, it seems like this is a good starting point for further investigation. If we wanted to improve the case for the thesis we would need to have some way of measuring the extent to which a movement was nonviolent and compare nonviolent movements to violent ones in order to see which ones did better.

The point that the book is trying to make is that nonviolent conflict can succeed if its supporters can connect their movement with the everyday concerns of large numbers of people and distance themselves from protesters who want to use violence. What measures could we have for these two variables? How could we measure the extent to which a movement had separated itself from the violent extreme? Likewise, how could we determine the extent to which it had connected with the everyday concerns of many people?