How do we center nonviolence in Catholic social teaching? The Vatican itself asked for ideas in its fall 2023 Synthesis Report for the General Assembly of the Synod on Synodality. Among the issues the report identifies for further examination are section 5.k’s appeal for “more reflection and formation in order that we can manage conflicts in a non-violent way,” and section 15.b’s inclusion of “non-violence and legitimate self-defense” among controversial matters within the Church that require more deliberation.
Drawing on the political science research detailed in my recent book, The Catholic Case Against War, I’d like to highlight some key factors–civil resistance techniques, greater global governance, and economic and political development– that can help us address these issues in ways that continue to move nonviolence to the center of Catholic social teaching. While questions about nonviolence are obviously relevant in different types of situations, including many interpersonal or smaller-group settings, I’ll limit my focus here to those involving larger political communities, especially sovereign states.
A good place to begin evaluating nonviolent methods of conflict resolution and self-defense is to establish a baseline comparison to violent ones. Many people assume that, in a world marked by competition for resources, terrorism, border disputes, insurrections, coups, and other threats, armed force is often the only effective option.
While the Vatican often makes statements such as John Paul II’s declaration, “Nothing is resolved by war,” it is important to note that military force does sometimes accomplish its user’s goals, at least in the short term. Waging war has at times secured control of contested resources, redrawn borders, ousted foreign invaders, and toppled oppressive regimes. Such cases, however, are the exception, and they often obscure war’s considerable downsides. It turns out that when weighing warfare’s costs, benefits, and odds of success, its overall record is surprisingly weak.
Even successful wars are ruinous. Warfare, of course, kills enormous numbers of people, including noncombatants. These civilian deaths are not an exception; over the long history of war, they account for around half of all those killed. And even aside from all the killing, warfare comes with terrible costs. Those with life-long physical and psychological wounds usually outnumber the dead. Mass rape almost always accompanies war. The same goes for refugees, famine, disease, violent crime, human rights abuses, infrastructure collapse, and environmental destruction. Warfare typically sets a country’s GDP and trade levels back decades and produces huge spikes in poverty. (Chapter 1)
Given warfare’s costs, can military methods of conflict resolution and self-defense still outweigh them? Overall, going to war has a poor success rate; most armed conflicts leave both sides worse off than before they started. While many extol the security benefits of having a large, expensive, and powerful military, it actually increases the likelihood that a country will experience warfare. It also makes no difference to the country’s ability to win such wars, since military strength has no predictive value on the odds of success in actual armed conflicts. And another downside to relying on militaries for national defense is that globally they are far more likely to threaten their own populations through coups, military-enforced autocracies, and campaigns of mass violence against vulnerable internal groups than to actually defend against external threats. (Chapter 2)
Consider some more specific findings. Based on hundreds of cases going back over a century, using armed force to overthrow domestic dictators or oust foreign occupiers succeeds only around 25% of the time, and this success rate has dropped below 10% over the last few decades. In the small number of cases where use of such armed force was successful, most saw warfare restart within a few years, and almost none produced successful democratic regimes.. Mass atrocities such as massacres, ethnic cleansing, or genocide almost always emerge out of the escalating violence in wars already underway; for instance, regimes facing armed insurgencies eventually react with mass violence toward civilians in around 70% of cases. Military interventions by outside forces in civil wars usually just prolong the conflict, one of the main reasons such interventions in the name of stopping mass atrocities have a poor record of success. (Chapter 2)
So, given the poor track record of military methods, how do nonviolent approaches to self-defense and conflict resolution compare?
Let’s start with an alternative way political communities can defend themselves. Nonviolent civil resistance uses techniques of popular protest, noncooperation, and disruption to undermine and remove the sources of public support that an oppressive regime needs to operate. Emerging over the last century, these methods of civil resistance have successfully overthrown domestic dictators or ousted foreign occupiers in around 50% of cases, making them twice as effective as violent ones. Civil resistance is also much more successful in defeating coup attempts. Like armed force, its success rate has dropped over the last few decades, but its decline has been less dramatic, making nonviolent civil resistance now three times more effective than warfare during this period. Civil resistance is also significantly less likely to prompt mass atrocities by the regimes it targets, even as its success rate is unaffected by the levels of violence those regimes deploy. Among successful campaigns, nonviolent ones are more likely to avoid subsequent civil wars, which also decreases the odds of future mass atrocities, and they produce democratic regimes around 60% of the time, which is over 10 times that of successful violent ones. Stunningly, even countries that experience unsuccessful nonviolent campaigns have a lower risk of subsequent civil war and are 4 times more likely to be democracies within 5 years compared to countries that experience successful violent ones. (Chapter 2)
For many people, it’s the prospect of a foreign invasion, such as Russia’s of Ukraine, that makes nonviolent civil resistance seem naïve. Fortunately, as we will see below, international norms and alternative forms of conflict resolution have made such invasions much rarer than they once were. When such invasions do happen, invaders may be able to capture territory, but they usually struggle to achieve their longer-term political objectives if facing an unwilling population. Here nonviolent civil resistance has an advantage over, say, armed guerrilla warfare, since it can deploy a wider array of techniques involving a larger cross-section of the population, making it more effective in denying occupiers the cooperation they need from everyday workers, civil servants, teachers, taxpayers, consumers, and others to manage the captured territory and achieve their goals for invading in the first place. (Chapter 2)
Of course, it is better to settle disputes before the point at which political communities take self-defensive action, whether violent or nonviolent. More effective conflict resolution means decisions about the best methods of self-defense become less pressing.
States once saw war as the primary way to resolve disputes with each other. Interstate warfare was the norm. The last century, however, has seen the rise of a thicker network of transnational institutions—intergovernmental bodies, nongovernmental organizations, international laws and treaties with enforcement mechanisms—that has facilitated more non-military negotiation and cooperation among states on a range of issues. This has not eliminated self-interested behavior by states, but it has created new norms around how to pursue those interests, including when to fight wars. This is why, for instance, states now almost never go to war to collect debts, something that was once routine. (Chapter 3)
The more a country participates in multilateral institutions, the lower its risk of war. Such institutions give states a range of non-military tools, both incentives and penalties, to shape each other’s behavior, which is why research confirms that diplomacy, negotiation, and mediation really can resolve disputes without resorting to war. These methods don’t always work—something obviously also true of military methods—but they have an underappreciated record of success. Scholars point to this process to explain the marked decline (though, unfortunately, not elimination) of wars to conquer territory and redraw borders, historically one of the most frequent and deadly forms of warfare. (Chapter 3)
With the decline of interstate war, most armed conflicts today are civil wars within states. And most of these are actually relapses of earlier ones; when civil wars end, most restart within 5 years. This pattern of chronic stop-and-start fighting is an opportunity for nonviolent conflict resolution that can reduce the number of wars around the world. Since military interventions in active civil wars tend to only prolong them, a more successful approach is to use the tools we saw in the last paragraph to pressure parties for a ceasefire, which provides the opening to push them toward a mediated settlement, which, in turn, can benefit from the presence of neutral third parties, especially unarmed aid workers and civilian protection teams, to help monitor it. This formula significantly reduces the risk of civil wars restarting, and the odds of success increase even more with greater participation by civil society groups and, especially, female community members in negotiating and implementing the peace process. (Chapter 3)
Another major focus of nonviolent conflict resolution goes even deeper, addressing the conditions of economic and political injustice out of which wars so often grow.
Here, for instance, are some key economic factors associated with lower odds that a country will experience warfare:
- Reductions in poverty brought by widely-shared economic development that, crucially, does not exclude ethnic, religious, or regional groups
- Greater openness to international trade and investment that produces broad-based economic diversification and reduces dependence on extracting resources such as oil or minerals
- Increased literacy and educational attainment, especially for girls
- Greater opportunities for women to participate in the labor-force
- Shifting resources from military spending toward human welfare, such as reductions in hunger, malnutrition, and infant mortality
Making progress in these areas can certainly be challenging, but there are proven non-military ways a range of actors both within countries and from the broader international community can successfully do so. (Chapter 4)
Similarly, on the political side, here are some key factors associated with lower odds of war:
- Democratic institutions that are inclusive, effectively integrating broad-based participation and representation across social groups (parliamentary systems with proportional representation, for example, have a better record than presidential systems)
- Greater female participation in government, particularly as representatives in legislatures
- Strong human rights protections, especially those that safeguard religious or language rights for minority groups
- Governing capacity sufficient to effectively deliver public services and the rule of law
- Mechanisms where average citizens can hold government officials accountable for corruption and poor governance
- A free and vibrant civil society
As with economic development, making progress in these areas is difficult, but here too there are proven non-military ways internal and external actors can do so successfully. (Chapter 4)
There is, then, a great deal of support in political science research for the greater effectiveness of nonviolent approaches compared to violent ones. This is true both for resolving political conflicts and for the options political communities have when defending themselves. I hope these findings can help shed light on these twin issues that the Synod’s Synthesis Report raises, especially in ways that continue to move nonviolence toward the center of Catholic social teaching.
