Okay, I watched their Ted talk. The red flag for me is the clean separation of revolts into either strictly violent or strictly nonviolent. It is my view that a more careful study of the history of all the revolts labeled successful and partially successful would reveal that many if not all of those revolts succeeded because of the complementary (if not collaborative) efforts of both nonviolent and violent protests. History glorifies the nonviolent protesters because they’re easy to lionize, without any of the ethical complexities that violent protests invite.
IMO it seems like they went in looking for a hypothesis and managed to spin the statistics to justify it. I’ll look into their research as I’m sure it goes into more detail, but I’m so far not convinced.
Okay, I watched their Ted talk. The red flag for me is the clean separation of revolts into either strictly violent or strictly nonviolent. It is my view that a more careful study of the history of all the revolts labeled successful and partially successful would reveal that many if not all of those revolts succeeded because of the complementary (if not collaborative) efforts of both nonviolent and violent protests. History glorifies the nonviolent protesters because they’re easy to lionize, without any of the ethical complexities that violent protests invite.
IMO it seems like they went in looking for a hypothesis and managed to spin the statistics to justify it. I’ll look into their research as I’m sure it goes into more detail, but I’m so far not convinced.