Does nonviolent action still work?

Over the past several years, we have found ourselves having the same conversation in remarkably different settings. Whether discussing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, democratic backsliding in Europe and Latin America, military rule in Burma, or the suppression of prodemocracy movements from Hong Kong to Belarus, someone eventually asks a version of the same question: Does nonviolent action still work?

We hear these conversations with growing concern because both of us have spent much of our professional lives studying, teaching and supporting strategic nonviolent action in the approach developed by Gene Sharp and advanced by scholars and practitioners around the world. Increasingly, we encounter not only skepticism about the relevance of nonviolent actions for particular campaigns, but skepticism about the approach itself and whether it remains relevant for today’s political realities.

In the last quarter century, even where mass mobilizations succeeded in removing leaders, many then struggled to produce durable democratic gains. The optimism that accompanied the “color revolutions,” the Arab Spring uprisings, and other popular movements has given way to skepticism. Georgia’s Rose Revolution in 2003, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution in 2004, and the 2011 uprisings that toppled longtime rulers in Tunisia and Egypt were once held up as proof of concept; several of those same countries have since backslid or reverted to a different flavor of authoritarian rule.

These doubts are understandable. Around the world, democracy is under pressure and authoritarian governments have become more sophisticated. Digital surveillance, disinformation and new forms of repression have transformed the environment in which movements operate. Meanwhile, the latest research only strengthens this perception. According to the V-Dem Institute’s 2026 Democracy Report, democracy has declined to levels last seen in 1978, effectively erasing the gains of the “third wave” of democratization. Today, nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives under autocratic rule.

For some, the conclusion is straightforward: Nonviolent action has become outdated. Authoritarian governments have learned too much, and technology has shifted the balance of power. The world has changed. We believe this diagnosis mistakes the symptoms for the underlying cause.

The fact that many contemporary movements have fallen short of expectations does not demonstrate that the fundamental theory of nonviolent struggle has failed. Rather, it reveals an innovation gap: While authoritarian regimes have invested heavily in adapting to the changing political environment, the field of nonviolent action has not evolved at a comparable pace. The result is not the failure of strategic nonviolent struggle as a technique, but a consequence of that widening gap between movements and the opponents they seek to challenge.

This distinction matters. If people conclude that nonviolent action no longer offers a realistic path to political change, they are left with two alternatives: resignation or violence. Neither offers much reason for optimism. Yet accepting the effectiveness of violence would be equally difficult to justify. Armed struggles, insurgencies and military interventions rarely achieve their political objectives, even when we justify the accompanying human cost, and often leave societies more divided, authoritarian and unstable than before.

The challenge, therefore, is not to abandon nonviolent struggle, but to improve it. Here, we make that case in four steps: diagnosing where the current model of nonviolent action has fallen behind, confronting directly the pull toward violence that this gap is producing, correcting how success itself is measured, and outlining what a modernized field would need to build.

Excerpt printed with permission from Journal of Democracy. Read the full article on Journal of Democracy’s website.