Summit on Nonviolent Resistance Today 

Date: 

Thursday, November 12, 2020, 11:00am to 4:00pm

Location: 

Virtual Event (Registration Required)

On November 12, 2020, the Nonviolent Action Lab convened a summit featuring scholars and practitioners of nonviolent action. The event featured a keynote speech from the Rev. Stephen Green of Faith for Black Lives, several panels featuring new research on nonviolent resistance, and focused discussion among dozens of scholars, practitioners, and Topol Fellows from Harvard, Tufts, Brandeis, University of Massachusetts-Amherst, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Boston Latin School, and elsewhere.

This Summit, convened by the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, is made possible by the support of Sidney Topol and the Topol Family Foundation.  

See the full Summit Report (PDF).

Click here for more information about the Topol Research Fellowship at HKS.

Summit Chair: 

Dr. Erica Chenoweth | Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs; Director, Nonviolent Action Lab

Erica Chenoweth is the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her research focuses on political violence and its alternatives. Foreign Policy magazine ranked her among the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013. She also won the 2014 Karl Deutsch Award, given annually by the International Studies Association to the scholar under 40 who has made the most significant impact on the field of international politics or peace research. Her next book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2020), explores in an accessible and conversational style what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance. Professor Chenoweth’s other books include Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence (Oxford, forthcoming 2019), with Deborah Avant, Marie Berry, Rachel Epstein, Cullen Hendrix, Oliver Kaplan, and Timothy Sisk; The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism (Oxford, 2019) with Richard English, Andreas Gofas, and Stathis N. Kalyvas; The Politics of Terror (Oxford, 2018) with Pauline Moore; Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011) with Maria J. Stephan; Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict (MIT, 2010) with Adria Lawrence; and Political Violence (Sage, 2013). Her book (with Maria J. Stephan) Why Civil Resistance Works won the 2013 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order and the 2012 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, the American Political Science Association's best book award.

Virtual Event Details

This event will be livestreamed on YouTube Live. Attendees registered for this event (link below) will receive a reminder for the livestream fifteen minutes before the event along with a link to the YouTube page where you can participate in the live chat and ask questions during the event.

View our Summit Report (PDF):

Nonviolent action lab summit report (pdf).

Registration Closed