Mass nonviolent protest achieves change that terrorism cannot.

Evidence

The claim that terrorism works is also disputed. Mass nonviolent protest is a morally grounded strategy that is more likely to achieve sociopolitical change than the indiscriminate killing of innocent people. The power of mass nonviolent resistance that is aided by social modeling of strategies is graphically illustrated in the rapid toppling of oppressive regimes. For the first time in history, people worldwide watched on television as mass civil resistance brought the ouster of the repressive regime in East Germany. The power of overwhelming numbers could not be suppressed. People from East and West Berlin joined in demolishing the Berlin Wall. This dramatic success became a model of political change. Mass nonviolence resistance was quickly adopted by people in other Eastern European countries. They dislodged Soviet-backed rulers in Czechoslovakia, Romania, Hungary, and other nations (Braithwaite, 1994). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2142

Categorization

• SEED: An essay contrasting the strategic effectiveness of nonviolent resistance with violent means, using the 1989 East European chain of falls as the anchor case versus terrorism’s track record.
• XREF: Connects to Erica Chenoweth’s data on nonviolent campaigns outperforming violent insurgency, and to the broader psychology of moral disengagement in state vs. movement violence.