The critique is seductive in its simplicity: If the state ultimately rests on violence, and nonviolence forswears violence, doesn't that leave state violence unchallenged? If protesters apply for police permits and cooperate with authorities, aren't they legitimizing the very system they claim to oppose?
This argument, most prominently articulated in Peter Gelderloos's book How Nonviolence Protects the State, has gained significant traction in activist circles. It claims that commitment to nonviolence reinforces state power by ensuring a state monopoly on violence, preventing truly revolutionary change, and channeling dissent into manageable forms.
The critique has rhetorical force. But it rests on fundamental misunderstandings about how power actually works, what strategic nonviolence actually does, and what the historical record actually shows.
Confusing Strategic Nonviolence with Cooperation
Gelderloos treats nonviolent resistance as essentially collaborative with state power—pointing to activists who apply for permits, coordinate with police, or limit themselves to symbolic protest. But he's describing liberal protest theater, not strategic nonviolent resistance.
Actual strategic nonviolence aims to make systems ungovernable.
When Swedish and Norwegian workers went on massive strikes in the 1920s–30s, they weren't asking permission—they were shutting down the economy until the ruling class was forced to negotiate. When Indian independence activists engaged in mass non-cooperation, they weren't legitimizing British rule—they were systematically withdrawing the consent and cooperation that made colonial governance possible.
Gene Sharp's taxonomy of nonviolent action, developed through decades of research on successful resistance movements, includes three categories: protest and persuasion (marches, petitions), noncooperation (strikes, boycotts, tax resistance), and intervention (sit-ins, blockades, occupations). Gelderloos focuses almost entirely on the first category while ignoring the more coercive methods that actually create political crises.
Mass strikes don't protect the state—they threaten its economic base. Occupations of government buildings don't legitimize authority—they challenge it directly. Workers refusing to load weapons shipments bound for Israel, or dockworkers blockading military cargo don't preserve state power—it directly disrupts the logistics of empire. These tactics don't require violence, and they're hardly cooperative.
Why Violence Is Actually a Gift to the State
Gelderloos's core assumption is that violence poses a greater threat to the state than nonviolence. But this inverts the actual strategic dynamics.
States are organized for violent confrontation. They have overwhelming advantages in weaponry, training, logistics, intelligence, and legal authorization to use force. When movements engage the state in violent conflict, they're fighting on the state's preferred terrain—where it's strongest and most prepared.
This is why states often want movements to turn violent.
Consider how J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO operations used armed revolutionary rhetoric to justify surveillance and repression against the entire Black liberation movement, including explicitly nonviolent groups. Armed groups proved easier to infiltrate, easier to isolate from public support, and easier to justify crushing with overwhelming force.
The Black Liberation Army, despite genuine revolutionary commitment, achieved nothing comparable to what the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement won—the Voting Rights Act, fair housing laws, the legal dismantling of Jim Crow segregation. The BLA was largely destroyed by state repression by the early 1980s, with many members dead, imprisoned, or in exile, while their actions were used to justify attacks on the broader movement.
Nonviolent mass movements, by contrast, create dilemmas the state struggles to resolve. When hundreds of thousands of peaceful protesters fill the streets, violent repression generates what Sharp calls "political jiu-jitsu"—backfire effects that shift public opinion, trigger defections within state institutions, and invite international pressure. When workers refuse to cooperate en masse, the state can't simply arrest or shoot its way to a functioning economy.
The Evidence Is Clear
Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's comprehensive research on 323 violent and nonviolent campaigns from 1900 to 2006 found that nonviolent campaigns succeeded roughly 53% of the time, compared to 26% for violent campaigns. This wasn't because nonviolent movements faced nicer opponents—many succeeded against brutal dictatorships.
The pattern held because nonviolent campaigns could mobilize broader participation (since anyone can join, not just young men willing to fight), maintain that mobilization over time, trigger defections within opponent institutions, and generate third-party support. Chenoweth's research also identified the "3.5% rule"—no government in their dataset remained in power when 3.5% or more of the population engaged in active nonviolent resistance.
Brian Martin, in his detailed critique of Gelderloos's book, documented a pervasive pattern of double standards. When nonviolent movements achieve partial victories, Gelderloos dismisses them as failures because they didn't achieve total revolution. But when violent struggles produce the same limited outcomes—or worse—he doesn't apply the same standard.
Gelderloos claims nonviolent movements in Eastern Europe merely replaced communist dictatorships with capitalist ones, not achieving true liberation. But violent revolutions in Russia, China, and Cuba also replaced one authoritarian system with another—often more brutal. If the standard is "didn't achieve libertarian socialism," both approaches failed. If the standard is "created space for democratic participation and improved people's lives," nonviolent resistance has a better track record.
The Grain of Truth
Gelderloos is right about one important thing: liberal reformism that channels dissent into symbolic protest does serve to manage opposition without threatening fundamental power structures. Protests that carefully coordinate with police, stay within designated "free speech zones," and limit themselves to expressing grievances rather than exercising power—these can indeed function as pressure valves that protect the system.
But that's not strategic nonviolent resistance. That's domesticated protest—precisely what serious nonviolent theorists and practitioners critique.
The solution isn't to abandon nonviolence for armed struggle. The solution is to understand nonviolence as more than symbolic protest—as the strategic withdrawal of cooperation, economic disruption, mass non-cooperation, and the building of alternative institutions that make existing power structures obsolete.
What Actually Threatens Power
Here's the deeper irony: The approach Gelderloos advocates actually does protect state power—just not in the way he imagines.
When movements limit themselves to vanguard violence, they exclude the mass participation necessary to make systems ungovernable. A few dozen or even a few hundred armed militants can be infiltrated, isolated, and destroyed. Millions of people engaging in sustained non-cooperation cannot be.
When movements prioritize armed confrontation, they give the state exactly the justification it needs for emergency powers, martial law, and wholesale repression. The state is good at violent suppression—that's what it's designed for. Forcing confrontations on that terrain advantages those in power.
When movements romanticize armed struggle over the harder work of mass organizing, they avoid building the broad coalitions, alternative institutions, and sustained commitment that actually transform power relations. It's tactically easier to smash a window or ambush a police officer than to organize a general strike or build a cooperative economy—but the latter creates lasting change while the former typically generates repression and backlash.
When workers strike, they're not "cooperating" with the state—they're exercising collective power that threatens its economic base. When communities build mutual aid networks and parallel institutions, they're not legitimizing existing authority—they're making it irrelevant. When millions refuse to obey, the state's monopoly on violence becomes increasingly meaningless—because you can't shoot or arrest your way to a functioning society.
This is what actually threatens state power. Not isolated acts of violence that confirm the state's narrative about "domestic terrorism" and justify repression. But mass movements that make systems ungovernable while building alternatives that demonstrate power can be organized differently.
For further reading: Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works (Columbia University Press, 2011); Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Porter Sargent, 1973); Brian Martin, "How Nonviolence Is Misrepresented," Gandhi Marg Vol. 30, No. 2 (2008).
KEEP OUR LIBRARY FREE
$5/month keep us freely available to all. No paywalls for 99% of content, no ads, just people-powered media.
Subscribe here.