Nonviolence does not promise instant release. It offers something far more dangerous to those in power: endurance.

Solidarity held for nearly a decade under arrests and propaganda. Chile’s opposition spent years training, organizing, and defending the vote before the 1988 plebiscite cracked Pinochet’s rule. In the United States, civil rights protests reshaped elections by forcing the public to watch peaceful demonstrators meet violence, a dynamic political scientists continue to track in modern protest research.

Power often pretends nothing changed until it quietly adjusts course.

When someone shrugs and says marching does nothing, they confuse visibility with effectiveness. Nonviolent resistance works like water on stone. Slow. Relentless. Devastating.