But how does he explain the failure of peaceful revolutions in Belarus or China?
My understanding of social dynamics is that being peaceful only works as long as it gains you more supporters than you lose by government action against the movement. Some governments give in but if not, at some point, the scale tips and violence or surrender are your only options.
In Belarus, I knew they were fucked as soon as I heard that police support the protests by putting down their guns and joining the protesters.
They gave up their ability to use violence and therefore became as irrelevant as the other protesters. They should have kept their guns. They should have tried to use their openly armed protest to incite other armed people to also join. At some point, the potential violence would materialize but hopefully at that point, enough of the armed people would be on the side of the protest.
Maybe the dictator would give up if he saw the situation spiraling out of control (and hopefully be executed as punishment anyway).
Maybe the dictator would try to flee and get caught and executed ("gunned down"). Maybe his bunker would get overrun.
Maybe someone close to him would try to get favor from the protesters and kill him.
But all of those potential outcomes were closed off if people opposing him didn't have enough guns.
The article discusses "efforts, in a sense, directed against the state itself, both violent approaches (what we might call ‘terroristic insurgency’) and non-violent approaches (protest)" (Id.).
> Maybe he addresses it somewhere in the article but I have yet to read it
"The ‘center of gravity’ – the locus of the most important strategic objective – for most insurgencies thus often becomes the political support that sustains a government, be that a body of key supporters in non-democratic regimes or the voters in democratic ones. That body of key voters or supporters, of course, is often not even located in the theater of operations at all: the Taliban ultimately won their insurgency in Afghanistan because they persuaded American voters that the war was no longer worth the cost, leading to the election of leaders promising to pull the plug on the war" (Id.).
> how does he explain the failure of peaceful revolutions in Belarus or China?
"All that said, there are very obviously regimes in the world that have rendered themselves more-or-less immune to non-violent protest. This isn’t really the place to talk about the broader concept of ‘coup proofing’ and how authoritarian regimes secure internal security, repression and legitimacy in detail. But a certain kind of regime operates effectively as a society-within-a-society, with an armed subset of the population as insiders who receive benefits in status and wealth from the regime in return for their willingness to do violence to maintain it. Such regimes are generally all too willing to gun down thousands or tens of thousands of protestors to maintain power.
The late Assad regime in Syria stands as a clear example of this, as evidently does the current regime in Iran. Such regimes are not immune to an ‘attack on will,’ but they have substantially insulated themselves from it and resistance to these regimes, if it continues, often metastasizes into insurgency or protracted war (as with the above example of Syria) because the pressure has nowhere else to go" (Id.).
> there are very obviously regimes in the world that have rendered themselves more-or-less immune to non-violent protest.
This sounds like a cop-out to the original blanket statement, or at least this is how I interpret it from your earlier quote. Regimes copy methodologies from others wherever possible and learn from failure to coup-proof themselves faster than the population can keep up. This is why most authoritarian regimes have endured for so long despite many being otherwise failed states, and almost always need some sort of external covert or military intervention to tip the scales.
It's like saying that you can hit the target every time by just meditating. And having a professional take the shot for you.
Institutional memory is longer than individual memory. What drove this point home for me was an article about how the police on London can predict whether a protest will turn violent and that they know how to corral people depending on which outcome they want.
But for now, institutions still at least rely on individuals to retain the experience/memories/skills and individuals have their own agency and can leave the organization or die.
No foreign superpower barged into the Civil Rights or the Indian independence movement. Not directly. (If we’re counting hypothetical foreign involvement that’s a geopolitical constant.)
> sounds like a cop-out to the original blanket statement
And no excerpt from an article will do a full reading justice. The article makes no blanket statements, its entire thesis is armed insurgency and protest are strategic twins.
The presumably US Civil Right movement wasn't happening in an authoritarian state. There's no question that non-violent protest works differently in democratic or well functioning countries. But what's the value of this comparison in practice? Under an authoritarian regime would you recommend writing letters to your representative just because this has been known to work in democratic countries?
> or the Indian independence movement
At least this example is on point. But one good example doesn't generally validate a theory. Look no further than the Syrian civil war you mentioned in your previous comment which required trillions of dollars worth of foreign military intervention. Or the countless failed protests and uprisings all around the world.
> The article makes no blanket statements
It's presented as a "recipe" of sorts, a scenario that flows naturally to the expected and described conclusion when it's anything but. Where's the data to back up such a claim, even if later qualified with a weak "of course it doesn't work all the time"? Any evidence that it works most of the time? A significant even if minor part of the time? Does critical thinking have to take a step back in favor of wishful thinking just because the latter gives you the feels while the former the chills?
Hopefully there's more about how these regimes have failed in the past and how to make them fail in the future. Because AFAICT at that point, violence is the only possibility apart from waiting for the dictator to die from natural causes and the system to disassemble itself as potential successors fight each other.
Does that need special explanation? Violent revolutions fail too ... revolution does not guarantee a success.
> Lots of Americans think the world revolves around us. The truth is we have less influence than we think. We didn't provoke these protests, though we did give them false hope.
Sorry, but you're just wrong in this case. The US president absolutely had a huge impact here. Meaning it wasn't just "hope": if he hadn't said and done what he did, the protests and deaths absolutely would not have occurred at the same scale. I'll post an article for reference, but you will find more on this if you look.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/18/why-protesters...
The Guardian interviewing a handful of people, one of whom is a random protester in Iran, doesn’t establish this absolutely in any serious framework. The fact that the protests have recurred should give pause to your hypothesis.
First, the fact that they have recurred while the US has been building up military forces there should give you pause on your hypothesis.
Second, just because a fire grows and shrinks after being started, that doesn't mean there was no initial fuel.
Third, nobody said they wouldn't have recurred. The sentence was "they wouldn't have occurred at the same scale."
Finally, I replied to your other comment to avoid duplicating the discussion, and this is going to be my last comment on the matter: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47117884
Did you read the article, or just my blurb before decicing the writings of "an ancient and military historian who currently teaches as a Teaching Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University" [1] are naive?
> Students were not merely arrested — they were gunned down en masse in the streets and even in hospitals
Non-violent doesn't mean peaceful.
People died in our Civil Rights protests. People died in the Indian independence and the Phillipines' People Power Revolution. Each of their leaders were gunned down. (Even if you only read the blurb, the state's violent overreaction is part of the parcel.)
> They were provoked by the U.S.
Lots of Americans think the world revolves around us. But the truth is we have less influence than we think. We didn't provoke these protests, though we did give them false hope.
> the U.S. secures resource access while leaving the existing system intact, and the student protesters are hunted down
Which opposition figure is being hunted down in Venezuela under Rodriguez?
[1] https://acoup.blog/about-the-pedant/