Erica Chenoweth, Ph.D.
erica_chenoweth@hks.harvard.edu
Harvard University
About Me:
Erica Chenoweth is Professor of Public Policy 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. 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. Chenoweth’s 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. 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 Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR’s Morning Edition, TEDxBoulder, and elsewhere. She co-hosts the award-winning blog Political Violence @ a Glance, hosts the blog Rational Insurgent, and blogs occasionally at The Monkey Cage. Along with Jeremy Pressman, she co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium, a public interest project that documents political mobilization in the U.S. during the Trump Administration. Chenoweth is currently affiliated faculty at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. She is also a Research Associate at the Peace Research Institute Oslo and a Term Member at the Council on Foreign Relations. Before coming to Harvard, she taught at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and in the Government Department at Wesleyan University. She holds 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, she is interested in questions about the causes and effects of insurgency, terrorism, and strategic nonviolent resistance. Chenoweth’s 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. 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 her research has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, The Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR’s Morning Edition, TEDxBoulder, and elsewhere. Along with Barbara F. Walter of UCSD and Joseph K. Young of American University, Chenoweth hosts the blog Political Violence @ a Glance, which won an OAIS Award for Best Group Blog in 2014 and Most Promising New Blog in 2013. In addition, Chenoweth won an individual OAIS blogging award for Best Blog Post of 2014. She hosts a blog called Rational Insurgent and has been an occasional blogger 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.