August 7, 2025. 12 PM EST
Effective Opposition and Civic Engagement
In this week's session, Rory will speak with Erica Chenoweth, a professor in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and one the country's leading experts on social movements and nonviolent resistance. Erica will speak about the state of the American pro-democracy movement and lessons for effective opposition.
Erica Chenoweth
Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment, Harvard University
Meet the Speaker
Erica Chenoweth is the Academic Dean for Faculty Development and the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School, Faculty Dean at Pforzheimer House at Harvard College, and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute. Chenoweth studies political violence and its alternatives. They have authored or edited nine other books and dozens of articles on mass movements, nonviolent resistance, terrorism, political violence, revolutions, and state repression, including Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (2021) and On Revolutions (2022). At Harvard, Chenoweth directs the Nonviolent Action Lab, an innovation hub that uses social science tools and evidence to support movement-led political transformation. Foreign Policy ranked Chenoweth among the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013 for their efforts to promote the empirical study of nonviolent resistance. Chenoweth received the Karl Deutsch Award, which the International Studies Association gives annually to the scholar under 40 who has made the greatest impact on the field of international politics or peace research. In 2022, Chenoweth was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Suggested Readings
TBA