As part of its mission to amplify the work of other scholars and activists, the Nonviolent Action Lab is building an annotated compendium of data sets relevant to the analysis of nonviolent action, other forms of contentious collective action, state responses to them, and their effects and effectiveness. In traditional fashion, each entry in the compendium will describe what the data set covers, how it was produced, and how to access it. More novelly, each entry will also apply lenses from critical theory related to gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and state-centrism to...
The Lab plans to provide up-to-date resources, information guides, and toolkits for people involved in activism, organizing, and dissent to help them protect their digital networks, accounts, and platforms
The Women in Resistance (WiRe) Dataset catalogues women’s participation in 338 maximalist resistance campaigns, meaning campaigns that call for the toppling of an oppressive government or for territorial self-determination. The dataset identifies both nonviolent and violent maximalist campaigns in every country in the world from 1945 to 2014, providing a comprehensive and systematic look at various dimensions of women's participation in both types of campaigns.
The WiRe dataset and supporting materials can be found on the project’s...
The Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) data project is the first of its kind to collect systematic data on both violent insurgencies and nonviolent civil resistance campaigns. The coverage is global, but it is limited to maximalist campaigns, meaning those which seek to overthrow an incumbent government, to expel a foreign military occupation, or to secede from an existing state.
NAVCO now has multiple published versions, as well as several others in progress. All versions and supporting materials can be found on the project’s...
The Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) turns publicly available information on protests, marches, demonstrations, rallies, strikes, and other political crowds in the United States into structured data.
The CCC emerged from a collaborative effort between Lab founder Erica Chenoweth and the University of Connecticut’s Jeremy Pressman to produce an accurate estimate of the number of people who participated in the Women's March on Washington and its affiliated Sister Marchers worldwide on January 21, 2017. Several of their colleagues expressed an interest in...
In early 2021, the Lab expects to launch an interactive dashboard that will allow users to explore historical and contemporary cases of nonviolent resistance around the world.
Producing and disseminating knowledge on nonviolent action
The Nonviolent Action Lab studies how people can create transformative social and political change without resorting to violence. In so doing, we produce public goods for activists, citizens, scholars, and students who want to know where nonviolent collective action occurs, and to analyze or learn about global trends in its forms, dynamics, and impacts.
Numerous regional and global crises—the global pandemic, climate change, structural racism and discrimination, economic...
