Dru Stevenson, Professor of Law

In the early 1900s, an elderly aristocratic man living in Russia was observing the rising tide of political unrest around him. He noticed that young dissidents, eager for change, were increasingly arming themselves against the government's police force. They believed that to protect themselves, and to be taken seriously, they needed weapons. But the old man saw a fatal flaw in their logic. He began writing essays arguing a completely counterintuitive point: bringing a weapon to a standoff doesn't protect you; it makes you a target. He warned that the moment a dissident picks up a gun, they validate the tyrant’s use of violence. They trade their most powerful weapon—moral asymmetry—for a game they will ultimately lose. His contemporaries thought he was hopelessly naive. But one of his essays found its way to a young, relatively unknown lawyer organizing protests in South Africa. The young lawyer read it, abandoned his initial thoughts of armed resistance, and went on to change t...