Great share.
This article gives me a lot of food for thought, since my own instinct (which is hardly infallible), is that peaceful protests occur largely at the sufferance of the regime. The article offers some counter-examples (Suharto, Milosevic, Pinochet, all of whom lost power due to peaceful resistance), but they are in my view not determinative, since a sufficiently determined force has also proven to be able to suppress even widespread non-violent resistance (Tianamen Square and the Prague Spring come to mind).
There is also a question of survivor's bias with non-violent revolutions. It makes sense that more non-violent revolutions than violent wwould succeed, because vulnerability to non-violent revolution is a sign of regime weakness, either in the form of a lack of popular support, or a lack of will. Any regime willing to escalate to blood in the streets is unlikely to capitulate to any level of non-violent resistance, and most regimes will ratchet up the violence level in the face of non-violent resistance if they feel their survival is at stake. Once it gets to that point, since a regime almost always has a superior capacity for violence, absent exterior support for rebels, the regime will tend to win.
The article has aged very badly in some of it's points, since it points to the success of the Arab Spring and Syria as emblematic of the benefits of non-violent resistance. This actually points out one the most interesting dangers of non-violent protest, which is originally non-violent movements being co-opted by their most violent constituent members as the conflict intensifies, as happened in Iran in '79, and Syria more recently.
One interesting thing that the article also doesn't really get into is the role that foreign, and especially American, intervention plays in a lot of the successful non-violent revolutions (and violent). Most of the colour revolutions, as far as I know, had significant American support.
Anyway, I'm not totally persuaded by the thesis that non-violent resistance is always more successful than armed resistance; like most things, it's probably a matter of context which one will prove more successful. Certainly useful to think about the contexts where non-violent action has proven most successful, since they offer the most food for thought in America these days.
Side note, when thinking about this article I read a bit about the Coal Wars in Appalachia in the 1910s and 1920s. Holy shit, speaking of violent resistance, was that some crazy stuff.
@Trotsky, I think I've heard you talk about them before. Know any good resources on the Coal Wars?
