Nelson A. Rockefeller Center for Public Policy at Dartmouth

Internationally recognized authority on terrorism, nonviolent resistance, and counterterrorism to speak on the impact of nonviolent versus violent strategies to revolutionize a political system.


According to Professor Erica Chenoweth of Wesleyan University’s Department of Government and Program on Terrorism and Insurgency Research, history shows nonviolent resistance trumps violent tactics by transforming the political environment into durable, internally peaceful democracies.

• How does non-violence enhance resilience and innovation?
• How does resistance without violence cause civil disruption?
• How can one change his or her opponent’s loyalty without force?
• How does one transform current attitudes that non-violent protest is ineffective and ideologically unrealistic?

Erica Chenoweth, Ph.D., is currently a Visiting Scholar at both the Institute of International Studies at the University of California at Berkeley and the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Her books include: Why Democracy Encourages Terrorism (under contract with Columbia University Press); Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011) with Maria J. Stephan of the U.S. State Department; and Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict (MIT Press, 2010) with Adria Lawrence of Yale.

Prof. Chenoweth hosts a blog called Rational Insurgent and is an occasional blogger at The Monkey Cage and Duck of Minerva. Chenoweth teaches courses on international relations, terrorism, civil war, and contemporary warfare. She was honored as the 2010 recipient of the Carol Baker Memorial Prize for junior faculty excellence in teaching and research at Wesleyan.

Please join us for the final 2012 Martin Luther King Jr. Celebration event, Prof. Chenoweth’s talk, “Why Civil Resistance Works: Nonviolence in the Past and Future,” at Rockefeller 003 at 4:30 pm, February 3, 2012.