Erica Chenoweth, Ph.D.
erica_chenoweth@hks.harvard.edu
Full Professor
Harvard University
Year of PhD: 2007
Country: United States (Massachusetts)
About Me:
Erica Chenoweth is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Chenoweth's research focuses on political violence and its alternatives. Foreign Policy magazine ranked them among the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013. They 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. Chenoweth’s book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2021), 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. Their next book, with Zoe Marks, explores the impact of women’s participation on the outcomes of mass movements. In addition to exploring why women’s participation makes movements more likely to succeed, Marks and Chenoweth explore how frontline women’s participation leads to progress in women’s empowerment in some cases and reversals in others, as well as how gender-inclusive movements impact the quality of egalitarian democracy more generally. Chenoweth’s other books include Civil Action: Dynamics of Violence in Conflict (Oxford 2019) with Deborah Avant, Marie Berry, Rachel Epstein, Cullen Hendrix, Oliver Kaplan, and Tim 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. Chenoweth has published dozens of articles in scholarly journals and edited volumes, and her research has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR’s Morning Edition, TEDxBoulder, Vox, and elsewhere. Along with Jeremy Pressman and Jay Ulfelder, they co-direct the Crowd Counting Consortium, a public interest project that documents political mobilization in the U.S. since 2017. Formerly, Chenoweth co-hosted the award-winning blog Political Violence @ a Glance, hosted the blog Rational Insurgent, and blogged occasionally at The Monkey Cage. Before coming to Harvard, they taught at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and in the Government Department at Wesleyan University. They hold a Ph.D. and an M.A. in political science from the University of Colorado and a B.A. in political science and German from the University of Dayton.
Research Interests
Political Violence
Conflict Processes & War
Terrorism
Non-Democratic Regimes
Comparative Democratization
Foreign Policy
Protest Politics
Nonviolent Resistance
Repression
Contentious Politics
Social Movements
My Research:
Chenoweth’s research program involves three main questions: why do state and non-state groups use political violence, what are the alternatives to political violence, and how can these alternatives be promoted? Overall, they are interested in questions about the causes and effects of insurgency, terrorism, and strategic nonviolent resistance. Chenoweth’s book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2021), 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. Chenoweth’s other books include Civil Action: Dynamics of Violence in Conflict (Oxford, 2019) with Deborah Avant, Marie Berry, Rachel Epstein, Cullen Hendrix, Oliver Kaplan, and Tim 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). Chenoweth has published dozens of articles in scholarly journals and edited volumes, and their research has been featured in The New York Times, They New Yorker, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR’s Morning Edition, TEDxBoulder, Vox, and elsewhere. Formerly, Chenoweth co-hosted the blog Political Violence @ a Glance, which won numerous awards. In addition, Chenoweth won an individual OAIS blogging award for Best Blog Post of 2014. They hosted a blog called Rational Insurgent and occasionally contributed at The Monkey Cage and Duck of Minerva. And along with Jeremy Pressman of the University of Connecticut, Chenoweth founded the Crowd Counting Consortium, a collaborative public interest project that collects data on the size of political crowds protesting within the United States.