Protest is the bedrock of democracy. But why do people take to the streets, and how do protestors achieve change? At the Ash Center, we’re working to answer these questions.
From the Boston Tea Party and the U.S. civil rights movement to contemporary climate action demonstrations, civil protest is a fundamental tool for influencing political change. While protest movements are an indelible part of contemporary political life, little is often understood about what motivates people to take to the streets and how they achieve nonviolent political goals.
Our scholars analyze protest movements, learn from protestors themselves, and develop tools to help understand why some protests succeed and others fail.
Podcast
In a two part episode of AshCast, Archon Fung and Khalil Gibran Muhammad discuss campus protests, civil disobedience, and the role speech and democracy as universities across the country grapple with how to respond to this latest wave of protest activity.
Commentary
New Crowd Counting Consortium analysis from Nonviolent Action Lab Program Director Jay Ulfelder sets the record straight on arrests numbers and claims of violence stemming from protests sparked by the war in Gaza.
Commentary
In a new essay, Archon Fung looks at this current wave of campus protests and asks if civil disobedience is permissible, and how much disruption should be tolerated at universities today.
Podcast
In the second episode of the Nonviolent Action Lab Podcast, Désirée Weber describes what 1,300 days of protest and political pressure looked like in Wooster, Ohio in 2020
Podcast
Host Jay Ulfelder sits down with Professor Erica Chenoweth for the first episode in the new podcast series.
The imminent famine in Gaza shows up in Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) data as a sharp increase in references to hunger and starvation in protesters’ chants and signs.
Video
Panelists from the Nonviolent Action Lab discuss their experiences, lessons learned, and perspectives on their respective struggles, nations, and roles have evolved during their time at Harvard.
Commentary
To make it easier to find up-to-date information on pro-Palestine and pro-Israel protest activity in the United States since October 7, 2023, the Crowd Counting Consotium recently created a pair of interactive data dashboards separately covering the two.
Video
On Tuesday, December 5th, 2023, experts from the Crowd Counting Consortium, a network of researchers tracking political demonstrations across the U.S., shared their most recent data on the multitude of pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protests held nationwide since October 7.
Commentary
Since October 7, the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC) has recorded nearly 2,300 U.S. protests, rallies, marches, caravans, demonstrations, vigils, banner drops, and direct actions in support of Palestine or Israel, with hundreds of thousands of total participants on different sides of this mass mobilization.
Commentary
Over the past few weeks, the burst of pro-Palestine protests, rallies, demonstrations, vigils, and direct actions in the U.S. that followed Hamas’ October 7th attacks on Israel and Israel’s military response to them has swelled into a sustained wave that is almost certainly broader and larger than any previous pro-Palestine protest wave in U.S. history.
Commentary
Over the past 10 days, the wave of U.S. street activism supporting Palestine has accelerated. Since October 7, 2023, when Palestinian militants launched attacks on Israel that killed more than 1,400 people, CCC has logged 420 pro-Palestine rallies, protests, demonstrations, and vigils in more than 180 different cities and towns across 46 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam.
Commentary
Since the October 7 attacks on Israel, the U.S. has seen hundreds of vigils, rallies, demonstrations, and protests in response to those attacks and the political and military reactions to them.
Commentary
Commentary
In a new article for The Conversation, Bruce Schneier and Nathan Sanders highlight some of the reasons to feel skeptical towards AI.