Erica Chenoweth

Erica Chenoweth (born April 22, 1980) is an American political scientist as well as a faculty member and Ph.D. program co-director at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies.^[1] Chenoweth is also the Director of the university's Program on Terrorism and Insurgency Research and a researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). Within the international relations community, she is known for her work on civil resistance movements and political violence.

Education

Chenoweth received her B.A. at the University of Dayton, followed by an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Colorado. She previously taught at Wesleyan University until 2012 and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University and the University of Maryland.^[1] Chenoweth joined the University of Denver faculty in 2012.^[2]

Work and awards

Together with Maria J. Stephan of the U.S. Department of State, Chenoweth co-wrote the book, Why Civil Resistance Works. Chenoweth and Stephan organized an international team of scholars in identifying all the major violent and nonviolent governmental change efforts of the twentieth century. They translated the results into a theory of civil resistance and its success rate for political change compared to violent resistance.^[3]

Their team identified over 200 violent revolutions and over 100 nonviolent campaigns. Twenty-six percent of the violent revolutions were successful, while 53 percent of the nonviolent campaigns succeeded. Moreover, looking at change in democracy (Polity IV scores) indicates that nonviolence promotes democracy while violence promotes tyranny.

In addition every campaign that got active participation from at least 3.5 percent of the population succeeded, and many succeeded with less. All the campaigns that achieved that threshold were nonviolent; no violent campaign achieved that threshold.^[4]

In 2012 Why Civil Resistance Works won the American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award for "the best book published in the U.S. during the previous calendar year on government, politics, or international affairs."^[5]

Chenoweth, along with Stephan, also won the 2013 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas for Improving the World Order.^[6] Past winners of this award include Mikhail Gorbachev and Robert Keohane.^[7]

In December 2013, Foreign Policy named Chenoweth one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of the year "for proving Gandhi right," noting her work on providing evidence for the efficacy of nonviolent political movements.^[8] In 2013, Erica also won the Karl Deutsch Award (International Relations) for being "judged to have made the most significant contribution to the study of International Relations and Peace Research by the means of publication."^[9]

Chenoweth was also awarded the International Studies Association award for "Best Group Blog of the Year". It was awarded the blog "Violence @ a Glance", which she founded with Barbara F. Walter.

Bibliography

• Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict (2010)
• Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (2011)

References

External links

• Faculty page, University of Denver