Isaac Newton is perhaps not the first person you think of when it comes to describing the path ideas take before they drive widespread change, but that’s precisely what new research from Harvard University suggests. The researchers argue that the P=MV formula at the heart of Principia can just as well predict the success of non-violent political movements as it can describe an object’s momentum.
“As we’ve seen recently in Sudan and Algeria, you only need to mobilise a small number of people to effect sweeping political change,” the researchers explain. “In both those instances, about one million people—only about 2.5% of the population—were mobilised for non-violent protests, and yet both were effective in driving leadership change. When you start looking into how these movements succeeded, you see that the important thing wasn’t just how many people were mobilised, but how often. They may have been small in number, but they gathered often—they generated momentum.”
The researchers examined the Social Conflict in Africa Database to identify examples of riots, strikes, protests and other forms of unrest across Africa between 1990 and 2014 to try and determine any consistent underlying factors.
The importance of momentum
The analysis found that while obviously having a large number of people on your side is kinda helpful, what really makes movements go places is the momentum they have.
“Newton’s theory of momentum serves as a really useful metaphor—if we consider the number of people mobilised as the ‘mass’, and the frequency at which they gather as the ‘velocity’, we can start to quantify how much ‘momentum’ a given movement has,” the authors explain. “By doing this, we’ve demonstrated a clear positive correlation between a movement’s momentum and its probability of successfully overthrowing a country’s leadership.”
The researchers suggest that if any movement can attract around 20% of the population to 60 events over the course of a week, then that movement is almost guaranteed to succeed. By contrast, if you can only mobilize 10% of the population, you’ll need 81 distinct events to achieve the same outcome, or 121 events if just 5% of the population are involved.
“We’ve demonstrated with this paper that what is usually required to succeed is getting people mobilised, and getting them mobilised often. The more often you can get people mobilised, the fewer people you require to build momentum. That’s why a well organised, enthusiastic movement like the one were recently witnessed in Sudan can succeed, despite only a small number of people taking part,” the authors conclude.
