Erica Chenoweth is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School and a Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.
Chenoweth’s research focuses on political violence and its alternatives. Foreign Policy magazine ranked them among the Top 100 Global Thinkers in 2013 for their efforts to promote the empirical study of civil resistance. Chenoweth's book, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford, 2021), explores in an accessible and conversational style what civil resistance is, how it works, why it sometimes fails, how violence and repression affect it, and the long-term impacts of such resistance.
Chenoweth’s other books include Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence (Oxford, 2019), with Deborah Avant, Marie Berry, Rachel Epstein, Cullen Hendrix, Oliver Kaplan, and Timothy D. Sisk; The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism (Oxford, 2019) with Richard English, Andreas Gofas, and Stathis N. Kalyvas; The Politics of Terror (Oxford, 2018) with Pauline Moore; Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict (MIT, 2010) with Adria Lawrence; Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2011) with Maria J. Stephan; and Political Violence (Sage, 2013). Chenoweth has also published their work in International Security, The Journal of Politics, American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Peace Research, The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Mobilization: An International Quarterly, and Political Research Quarterly, among others.
In 2014, they received the Karl Deutsch Award, which the International Studies Association gives annually to the scholar under the age of 40 who has made the greatest impact on the field of international politics or peace research. And together with Maria J. Stephan, they won the 2013 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, which is presented annually in recognition of outstanding proposals for creating a more just and peaceful world order. Their book, Why Civil Resistance Works, also won the 2012 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, given annually by the American Political Science Association in recognition of the best book on government, politics, or international affairs published in the U.S. in the previous calendar year.
Along with Jeremy Pressman of the University of Connecticut, Chenoweth is founding co-director of the Crowd Counting Consortium, a collaborative public interest project that collects data on the size of political crowds protesting within the United States since the first Women’s March of 2017.
Before coming to Harvard, Chenoweth taught at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at DU, as well as at Wesleyan University, where they received the 2010 Carol A. Baker Memorial Prize for excellence in junior faculty research and teaching. They have also held prior visiting appointments at Harvard, Stanford University, UC-Berkeley, and the University of Maryland. They have also held research associations or fellowships at the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO), the Academic Council at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, the One Earth Future Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. At Harvard, they are a Faculty Affiliate of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy and a Faculty Associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Chenoweth has presented their research all over the world at various academic conferences, government workshops, and international governmental organizations including at the 2013 World Summit of Nobel Peace Prize Laureates held in Warsaw. Their research and commentary has been featured in They New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Economist, The Boston Globe, The Christian Science Monitor, TEDxBoulder, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.
Along with Barbara F. Walter of UCSD and Joseph K. Young of American University, Chenoweth hosts the award-winning blog Political Violence @ a Glance. In addition, Chenoweth hosts a blog called Rational Insurgent and has been an occasional blogger at The Monkey Cage and Duck of Minerva.
Chenoweth received an M.A. and a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Colorado and a B.A. in political science and German from the University of Dayton. They reside in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
