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Erica Chenoweth is an assistant professor of government at Wesleyan University and a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. She is co-author, with Maria J. Stephan, of the recently published Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. She hosts the blog Rational Insurgent and is on Twitter @EricaChenoweth.
Governments in the Middle East and North Africa have long relied on repression to intimidate, harass, and punish political opponents. During the Arab uprisings, dictators under threat have all ordered and used violence against peaceful protestors as a way to maintain power. But this repression has had widely divergent effects on the course of the different conflicts.
