Ideas worth spreading

917,728 views | Julia Bacha • TEDSummit

How women wage conflict without violence

Are you setting out to change the world? Here's a stat you should know: nonviolent campaigns are 100 percent more likely to succeed than violent ones. So why don't more groups use nonviolence when faced with conflict? Filmmaker Julia Bacha shares stories of effective nonviolent resistance, including eye-opening research on the crucial leadership role that women play.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Are you setting out to change the world? Here's a stat you should know: nonviolent campaigns are 100 percent more likely to succeed than violent ones. So why don't more groups use nonviolence when faced with conflict? Filmmaker Julia Bacha shares stories of effective nonviolent resistance, including eye-opening research on the crucial leadership role that women play.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

About the speaker

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Julia Bacha is the creative director at Just Vision, an organization that uses film and multimedia storytelling to foster constructive conversations on some of the most divisive issues of our times.

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Political scientists Chenoweth and Stephan drill into the data, finding that nonviolent resistance campaigns "tend to succeed because nonviolent methods have a greater potential for eliciting mass participation — on average, they elicit about 11 times more participants than the average armed uprising ..."

Victor Asal, Richard Legault, Ora Szekely, Jonathan Wilkenfeld | Journal of Peace Research, 2013 | Article

Gender Ideologies and Forms of Contentious Mobilization in Middle East

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Mary Elizabeth King | Praeger, 2015 | Book

Women and Civil Rights: A Personal Reflection, excerpted from Women, War and Violence: Topography, Resistance, and Hope

Mary Elizabeth King speaks from her personal experience on the transformational role that women leaders like Septima Poinsette Clark, Ella J. Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer played in the U.S. civil rights movement.