🇬🇧 The Power of the Few
🇬🇧 How a small minority can change the world
Speaker: Erica Chenoweth | Academic Dean for Faculty Development at Harvard Kennedy School
Date: 17.09.2026
Time: 16:00 – 17:00
Language: English 🇬🇧
Place: online
Target Group: Executives, HR managers and anyone interested in the 3.5% method.
Level: Intermediate (for individuals with prior knowledge of anti-discrimination, e.g. from one of our events, but without systematic knowledge of the topic) & Advanced (for individuals who have already engaged with the basic concepts and terminology of anti-discrimination)
Content
In this Impact Session, Erica Chenoweth – Academic Dean for Faculty Development at Harvard Kennedy School and one of the world’s leading scholars on civil resistance and political change – shares what their groundbreaking research reveals about how small, committed groups can shift entire systems.
Chenoweth’s work, including the influential 3.5% finding, shows that large-scale transformation often begins with a minority willing to act with discipline, courage, and strategic clarity. Their award-winning books and global datasets (NAVCO, WiRe, Crowd Counting Consortium) have changed how governments, organizations, and movements understand power.
In this session, they will explore:
- Why nonviolent movements succeed more often than violent ones,
- What patterns distinguish impactful collective action and
- What leaders can learn from social movements about navigating resistance and driving change.
This event is hosted in Co-Partnership with PANDA | The Women Leadership Network: Leadership means designing systems – not just managing your own career. This session explores how we can create collective impact, how evidence-based strategies advance equality, and how we can move closer to our 50:50 leadership mission. This session is more than inspiration – it is a call to collective action.
About the Format:
In our Insights sessions, participants receive a well-founded overview of the topic and are sensitized to the challenges through practical examples. All of our Insights are interactive — small exercises or a brief exchange with other participants are frequently part of the format. In a Q&A session, the content presented is reflected upon and questions are answered.
About Erica Chenoweth:
Erica Chenoweth is the Frank Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard Kennedy School and director of the Nonviolent Action Lab at Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy. They are one of the world’s foremost scholars of civil resistance and nonviolent social movements. Chenoweth is best known as the creator of the „3.5% rule,“ an empirical finding showing that no government has withstood a sustained challenge once 3.5% of its population actively mobilized against it. Together with Maria J. Stephan, they co-authored the seminal book „Why Civil Resistance Works,“ for which they received the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award and the Grawemeyer Award. Chenoweth’s research continues to shape how governments, organizations, and civil society understand the power of nonviolent resistance.
You may register via the Link below.