Can We Save American Democracy?
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Civil Protest
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.
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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.
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The Latest News, Research, and Resources
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: An Empirical Overview of Recent Pro-Palestine Protests at U.S. Schools
Crowd Counting Consortium data show more than 3,700 days with pro-Palestinian protest activity at over 500 U.S. schools since October 7, 2023, including encampments at more than 130 of them.
Podcast
Episode Three: The SCOTUS Marches
In episode three of the Nonviolent Action Lab podcast, host Jay Ulfelder talks with two people at the heart of DC-area protests against the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Podcast
AshCast: Civil Disobedience and Democracy on Campus with Archon Fung and Khalil Gibran Muhammad
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
Crowd Counting Consortium: Three Things the Pro-Palestine Movement Is Not
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
Campus Protests and Police Force: An Ethical Framework
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
Episode Two: 1,300 Days of BLM Demonstrations in Wooster, Ohio
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
Episode One: Meet the Nonviolent Action Lab
Host Jay Ulfelder sits down with Professor Erica Chenoweth for the first episode in the new podcast series.
Commentary
Crowd Counting Consortium: U.S. Protest Rhetoric Tracks Looming Famine in Gaza
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
Confronting Dictators: Lessons from Egypt, Russia, and Venezuela
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
Crowd Counting Consortium: Israel/Palestine Protest Data Dashboards
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
Crowd Counting Consortium – Data on Pro-Israeli and Pro-Palestinian Protests in the U.S.
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
Crowd Counting Consortium: Update on Israel/Palestine Protests
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
Crowd Counting Consortium: Pro-Palestine Wave Persists and Grows
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
Crowd Counting Consortium: Pro-Palestine Wave Accelerates
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
Crowd Counting Consortium: Recent U.S. Protest Activity in Support of Israel and Palestine
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.