Democracy's Effect on Terrorist Organizations: Regime Type and Armed Group Behavior in Chile

How does democracy influence terrorism? The regime-responsive school argues that lack of representation in autocracies motivates violence; the regime-permissive school posits that individual liberty in democracies allows it. The schools thus disagree about the democratic feature to which violence responds—representation or individual liberty. These arguments are problematic in two ways. First, neither accounts for the potentially competing effects of different democratic features. Second, treating terrorism as a set response to operating context ignores the operational processes behind violence, described in organizational theories of terrorism. This article develops a bridge between the regime-responsive and regime-permissive schools by applying organizational theories of terrorism to their key arguments. I argue that representation and individual liberty have independent, and sometimes competing, effects on armed groups' missions, hierarchies, and membership—collectively organizational capacity, the ability to survive and influence the environment. This explains the mixed effects of democracy on terrorism: both high-functioning democracy and repressive autocracy weaken organizational capacity, but decreased representation in a democracy or higher individual liberty in an autocracy removes organizational stresses. New research on Chile between 1965 and 1995—representing five government periods, with four armed groups operating—acts as an initial test of these relationships.     

Thinking about terrorism and just war

Since 2001 a new urge to moralize the use of violence as an instrument of state policy has appeared in liberal democracies. The American idea of a War against Terror, and the European notion of confronting a global terrorist threat, have together merged with a discourse on humanitarian military action: the political/moral ‘responsibility to protect’ is no longer to be confined to one's own citizens. Renewed interest among academics in ‘just war’ theory, the tradition that seeks to humanize war through law, reflects this development. This article questions the assumption that there is an essential difference between war (civilized violence) and terrorism (barbaric violence). It argues that their similarity appears more clearly if we set intentions aside—such as the deliberate or accidental killing of ‘innocents’—and focus instead on three main facts: (a) modern war strategies and technologies are uniquely destructive, (b) armed hostilities increasingly occupy a single space of violence in which war and peace are not clearly demarcated, and (c) the law of war does not provide a set of ‘civilizing’ rules but a language for legal/moral argument in which the use of punitive violence is itself a central semantic element.     

United Nations Peacekeeping Decisions: Three Hierarchies,Upward Mobility and Institutionalised Inequality among Member States

ABSTRACT

This article explores the multiple and evolving hierarchies shaping UN decisions on peacekeeping operations. Three hierarchies—based on Security Council membership, financial assessments, and troop contributions—currently distribute influence over these decisions among UN member states. These hierarchies differ in their relationship to global stratification patterns, and in the states they empower. Their gradual “layering” has thus expanded the potential for upward mobility within the UN: states unable to increase their influence in one hierarchy can seek empowerment in another. Yet the UN peacekeeping case also highlights the limitations of hierarchy layering as an equalising mechanism in international organisations. New hierarchies supplement rather than replace older ones, and the degree to which they challenge existing rankings varies. Moreover, each new hierarchy inherently highlights, and creates institutional consequences for, a particular type of inequality among states. Consequently, hierarchy layering is best understood as recalibrating rather than eliminating institutionalised inequality in international organisations.     

Who Can Keep the Peace? Insurgent Organizational Control of Collective Violence

Every armed organization seeks the ability to turn violence on and off by getting fighters to fight when ordered and to stop fighting when similarly ordered. This ability is a defining feature of what makes organized violence, in fact, organized. While state militaries develop clear hierarchies and disciplinary procedures to accomplish this goal, the complexity of civil war makes the task more difficult for insurgent groups. I argue that the leaders of insurgent organizations are able to turn violence on and off when they have deliberately established resource control through the direct, and exclusive, distribution of resources to their followers and those followers are socially embedded, meaning that members are united by strong horizontal ties and group norms. In contrast to existing approaches, I argue that material and social endowments do not predetermine whether leaders can establish resource control or embeddedness. Further, laying out the precise organizational mechanisms that determine when organizations can turn violence on and off challenges the utility of conceptions such as “fragmentation” or “cohesion” for explaining insurgent behavior and conflict outcomes. I test the theory by examining variation in behavior over time in two organizations facing different structural contexts—Jaysh al-Mahdi in Iraq and the Viet Minh in Vietnam—and find strong support for my argument while casting doubt on existing explanations.     

Military Structure,Civil Disobedience,and Military Violence

In this article, I argue that factors inherent to the structure of a military organization and their relationship with the political leadership play a role in the organization's tendency to perpetrate violence against civilians during civil disobedience campaigns. To examine this hypothesis, I conducted a three-phased statistical analysis on a database containing 97 campaigns that took place between 1972 and 2012. In the first phase, I examined the relationship between military centric factors and violent crackdowns. In the second phase, I examined the relationship between military centric factors and mass killing. In the third stage, I examined the relationship between two specific types of discrimination in the military and mass killing. I found strong evidence supporting the hypothesis mentioned above. High-risk militaries that served a militarized regime, contained loosely regulated or indoctrinated paramilitaries, and discriminated against the protesting group, were much more likely to perpetrate violence against civilians during civil disobedience campaigns than low-risk militaries. The conclusions of this study suggest that further examination of the military's role in perpetrating violence against civilians during protests and conflict may provide some novel findings.     

Colombian peace communities: the role of NGOs in supporting resistance to violence and oppression

Colombia's chronic war is one of the world's worst humanitarian crises. Amid armed actors, pervasive violence, and increasing militarisation, many citizens experience hostility from all sides. This violence continues the historical marginalisation of Afro-descendant, indigenous, and campesino communities and is intensified by the ‘global war on terror’. Some ‘peace communities’ are rejecting violence and seeking ways to survive within war—becoming protagonists in their own protection. This is risky: it draws accusations, threats, and attacks by all armed actors, including the state. Over time, the lack of sustainable livelihoods, weak internal cohesion, and antagonistic external dynamics test the determination of such communities. This article examines four peace communities and explores factors that generate and sustain grassroots protagonism. It ends by suggesting ways in which development organisations can enhance community-level protection and reinforce local peace processes, in order to contribute to broader peace building.     

The Institutionalization of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI)

A number of observers have expressed serious concerns that Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI), as it expands in the Sahel, may become strong enough to be a threat to Europe and carry on the global mission of Al-Qaeda as conceived by bin Laden. This fear seems unwarranted. Using institutional analysis to study the AQMI behavioral fluctuations over the last decade, this article argues that AQMI's need to find a compromise between external and internal legitimacy has constrained its behavior. The affiliation of the Algerian terrorists with Al-Qaeda was in many ways a marriage of convenience that created a number of internal contradictions. At the cognitive level, implicit Algerian nationalism to rid the country of its corrupt regime remains at odds with pan-Islamic views shared by Al-Qaeda's leadership. At the normative level, indiscriminate suicide bombing supported by Al-Qaeda is abhorrent to many Algerian terrorists, who construe their mandate in the spirit of the Algerian war of independence where it is their duty to protect civilians. These and other contradictions prevent AQMI from developing a coherent political agenda and thus it is less likely to engage in a long-term conflict against European societies.     

Representative Democracy and Fighting Domestic Terrorism

Does more representative government improve states' ability to fight domestic terrorism? In prior work, democracies are seen as more susceptible to terrorism because their respect for human rights prevents them from fully eliminating terrorist groups. However, such extrajudicial aggression could also alienate large portions of the population and create the ideal conditions for an insurgency. I argue that since terrorism is the lowest-capacity form of political violence, it is natural that states that do best at deterring political violence experience the most terrorism. While representative democracies should see terrorist groups initiate spells of attacks at a greater frequency, full political representation should also galvanize major political actors to unite and eliminate terrorist threats. I test this assertion through statistical models that treat the process of terrorist group initiation and its duration and intensity separately. Results not only show that less consolidated democracies and autocracies experience longer and more intense terrorist campaigns, but that, in support of the theory's mechanisms, groups are more likely to shift to terrorism from insurgency when their political base gains more political representation. The results call the division among research programs of various political violence types into question.     

Willingness and Opportunity: A Study of Domestic Terrorism in Post-Cold War South Asia

Domestic terrorism, as a form of intrastate violence, has varied widely in South Asia along with the post-Cold War period of global economic integration and political openness. How are these two phenomena—economic integration and emergence of democracies—related to domestic terrorism in South Asia? I argue that resorting to terrorism is a rational choice when individuals'/groups' cost of heterogeneity—deprivation from public goods due to geographical and ideological distance—increases; opportunity is provided by democratization and integration into the global economy. The testable hypotheses derived from the theory are empirically tested on a dataset of five South Asian countries for the time period between 1990 and 2007. The results show that both minority discrimination and presence of unconsolidated democratic institutions increase terrorism in the highly heterogeneous South Asian countries. International trade in the presence of minority discrimination increases homegrown terrorism, but foreign direct investment neither increases nor decreases such incidents.     

Veil and four walls: a state of terror in Pakistan 1

The understanding of terrorism should be expanded to encompass the types of violence most often experienced by women, such as rape. Pakistani men, soldiers and civilians have used rape as a strategy of terrorism against Pakistan's women, particularly those who dare to transgress existing social hierarchies or who belong to stigmatized social groups. Moreover, the complex and sometimes contradictory set of criminal, Islamic, and tribal laws on rape and ‘honour killings’ give women little recourse against gender violence and even permit their re-victimization.     

Violence in Lenin's thought and practice: The spark and the conflagration

Drawing on Lenin's writings, the commentary of Soviet specialists, and the work of those who focus on the special character of violence, this article discusses Lenin's views on violence over his lifetime, his distinction among different types of violence, his policies and their results, and finally the doubts about his practices that he ultimately expressed near the end of his life. Beginning in the tsarist era with Lenin's campaign among his fellow revolutionaries to reject individual terror in favor of mass violence, it follows him into power as he put his tenets into practice and finally into his introspective retirement. It discusses how, oblivious to developing danger he unleashed mass violence and prodded it to action in the service of the revolutionary state; why he refused to incorporate safeguards against runaway violence; and how, as its deleterious effects became manifest, he continued to employ violence as both instrument of choice and substitute for legitimate authority. It shows that Lenin evinced an addiction to violence that caused him to overlook or foreclose other, less radical, political methods for accomplishing his goals. We see that Lenin's evident belief in the efficacy and controllability of violence blinded him to its potentially counterproductive and even disastrous effects. The state that resulted from Lenin's policies was not what he had envisaged, and not the result of a preconceived plan. But equally it did not emerge as the simple product of ineluctable circumstances defeating a hapless Lenin. Lenin made a series of policy choices ‐ none foreordained by circumstance ‐ which yielded an authoritarian state grounded in violence. These choices were explicitly contested by prominent contemporaries within and outside of the Bolshevik government, who correctly and vocally predicted the results which were becoming clearly visible during Lenin's tenure. Lenin chose to ignore the results, reject the alternatives and silence the critics, decisions he himself came to regret.     

Examining Deterrence and Backlash Effects in Counter-Terrorism: The Case of ETA

Scholars are increasingly drawing on models and theories from the field of Criminology to offer new insights on terrorist violence. A particularly useful framework by LaFree, Dugan, and Korte works from the assumption that illegal behaviour can be affected by the threat and/or imposition of punishment. It sees the results of the government's intervention in terms of deterrence (state's repressive action leads to a reduction in terrorism violence), and backlash (state's repressive action leads to defiance and retaliation, and to an upsurge of terrorism violence). This article applies this model to a case study of the government's responses to Euzkadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA). It uses a variation of survival analysis technique—Series Hazard—to assess the impact of six major initiatives on the risk of new ETA attacks in the period from 1977 to 2010. Mostly, the results provide support for both backlash interpretations, although important questions regarding interpretation are raised.     

Wrestling with Another Human Being: The Merits of a Messy,Power-Laden Pacifism

ABSTRACT

As one of many scholars who have situated their research in terms of nonviolence (a mode of action) rather than pacifism (a philosophical position), I ask, what do we gain instead by adopting an explicitly pacifist stance, especially as a response to forms of violent extremism? First, I respond to three common dismissals of pacifism, interrogating the misguided assumptions about violence/nonviolence upon which they depend. Second, exploring recent violent encounters between white nationalist and antifa activists in the US, as well as insights from Ruddick’s “maternal thinking,” I argue that taking a principled stance against collective violence (1) has practical utility, including a protective effect, (2) forces us to wrestle with the humanity of our adversaries and our inability to ever fully control them, and (3) enables radical inclusion by requiring sustained attention to difference but also resistance to the forms of injustice and oppression this “difference” might entail. The pacifism that emerges here is messy and power laden, demanding that we continually wrestle not only with one another but with the tensions inherent in human interaction, difference, and conflict.     

Strategist or Pragmatist: A Challenging Look at Ocalan's Retrospective Classification and Definition of PKK's Strategic Periods Between 1973 and 2012

The PKK, a violent group seeking secession in southeastern Turkey through the use of terror and guerilla methods, has evolved through different strategic and pragmatic phases in pursuing its goal. Ocalan, the incarcerated leader, classified the PKK's objectives into four deliberate strategic periods and commenced the final period of Strategic Lunge in March 2010 (for establishing de-facto autonomy). To compare these periods to PKK's real evolution, this article reviewed the entire process of the PKK (1973–2012) through analysis of resolutions from PKK congresses/conferences and the characteristics of PKK violence (e.g., target status, incident type/location, form, and purpose). This study argues that as opposed to Ocalan's assessment, PKK moves—particularly after 1994—are based on emergent (ex-post) pragmatic shifts rather than predetermined (ex-ante) strategic plans, as verified by analysis of the nature/form of PKK violence. It also argues that the PKK's pragmatic moves permeated even into its ideology and declared goal. Contrary to Ocalan's four-stage strategic periods, the PKK's initial manifesto indicates a three-stage Maoist strategy for reaching its goal. However, the PKK's military attempt to reach the third stage in 1991 failed due to conditions that were not sufficient for realization of the third stage of Maoist strategy. As a result, the PKK quit pursuing military victory after acknowledging its defeat in 1994; instead, since it still possessed the ability to initiate violence, it strategically employed (and ceased) violence to supplement its campaign of political compromise and negotiation.     

The Truths/Fictions/Traumas of Marikana: Exploring Violence and Trauma in Three Films,The Marikana Massacre: Through The Lens (2013), Miners Shot Down (2014), and Night is Coming: A Threnody for the Victims of Marikana (2014)

ABSTRACT

By exploring three films that centre on the Marikana strikes and killings of 2012, I seek to examine both the representations of violence as trauma, and the trauma of representing violence, within the context of visual, cinematic texts. I position Marikana, and the trauma of Marikana, as both a highly significant moment, and also as representative of deeper social and political traumas and injustices. I ask whether and how these films create a narrative context for this pivotal moment in South African history. I also question the effects of cinematic style and genre in the depictions of trauma and violence. The institutional context in which each film originated and developed is important, and I argue that the audience's expectations of the genre of documentary film also play a significant role in the way in which the films process trauma. I situate my paper in conversation with previous articles by Lucy Graham and Helene Strauss among others, that deal with cinematic portrayals of Marikana. By examining the selected films alongside each other, and through the lens of Decolonial Trauma Studies, I hope to elucidate the ways in which these South African films deal with and work through trauma.     

Illiberal democracy and violent conflict in contemporary Indonesia

When Indonesia's President Suharto was forced to resign in 1998, the accompanying uncertainty triggered serious communal violence in five regions. As the nation's politics and economy stabilized from 2002, so did those provinces. Identity-based conflict is now the rare exception rather than the rule in democratic Indonesia. Yet puzzlingly, despite the consolidation of democracy, ethnic clashes and mob violence against religious minorities continue to occur. While such events are now far smaller than those in the first years of democratization and occur only occasionally, their persistence requires analysis given the potential for escalation and what it tells us about Indonesia's reform process. In this article I compare recent incidents with that of the initial post-authoritarian era, and find that identity-based collective violence persists because many important causes of conflict have not been removed by democratic consolidation. As found by numerous scholars, many illiberal characteristics of the authoritarian state have segued neatly into democratic Indonesia. I assert that this has left several main causes of group violence firmly in place. I further contend that the failure to remove these phenomena partly has its origins in the order of democratic reforms chosen in the years after Suharto's resignation.     

Terror mandated by god

Religion's renewed political presence on a global scale is often accompanied by violence ‐ in part because of the nature of religion and its claims for power over life in death; in part due to the nature of secular politics, which places its own legitimacy on the currency of weapons and can only be challenged successfully on a military level; and in part due to the nature of political violence. The symbolic power of violence can be a valuable commodity for religious as well as for political forces. Through violence, the proponents of a religious ideology like Aum Shinrikyo remind the populace of the godly power that makes their ideology potent, and at times religious activists create man‐made incidents of terror on God's behalf.     

Organizing for Resistance: How Group Structure Impacts the Character of Violence

How does the way in which a group organizes change the lethality of the group's attacks? In this article, we argue that groups organized vertically as hierarchies are likely to conduct more lethal attacks. We build our argument around three advantages inherent to centralized structures: functional differentiation, clear command and control structures, and accountability. We argue that each of these characteristics positively impacts an organization's ability to deliver an effective lethal blow. To test our argument, we use a mixed method approach, drawing on empirical evidence and support from a time-series case study. Our large-N analysis examines the trends in more than 19,000 attacks. In this test we develop a novel proxy measure for hierarchy based on a group's bases of operation and non-violent activities. To complement the empirical work, we examine the history of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA), the Basque separatist group. Over several decades of violent operations, this group's structure has changed dramatically. We analyze how these shifts impacted ETA's ability to maximize the effectiveness and damage of their attacks. In both the case study and large-N analysis, the more hierarchically organized the group, the more easily the group can orchestrate lethal attacks.     

Expert intervention: knowledge,violence and identity during the Algerian crisis, 1997–1998

Civil wars and humanitarian intervention became two of the most dominant security concerns of the 1990s and Algeria was one of the many sites where these discourses were played out, especially during the wave of massacres that claimed the lives of hundreds (if not thousands) of Algerian civilians between mid-1997 and early 1998. The internationalization of the Algerian Civil War was driven as much by the horrific violence as by a lack of certainty as to the identity of those perpetrating the massacres. The indeterminacy of violence in Algeria provided the warrant for experts to fill the void. Yet interpretations of the violence in Algeria, coupled with the generic logics of intra-national armed conflicts and the use of international coercive force for the protection of human rights, produced divergent problematizations of the crisis. This paper thus examines the ways in which Algeria was, and often was not, produced as a civil war and a humanitarian crisis by expert and scholarly knowledge and practice. Through an analysis of the exclusionary effects of the dominant understandings of political violence in Algeria, we are able to understand the conceptual impasse that faced international action against the massacres.     

RAHOWA! A History of the World Church of the Creator

This article surveys the history of the World Church of the Creator, a small and obscure organization, which has nevertheless had a significant influence on the international far right. The Creativity movement has had an impact on the far right in several ways, including spearheading an anti-Christian orientation among its younger activists, introducing vitriolic rhetoric that has contributed to violence and radicalism, fostering the development of a larger racial, as opposed to a national, identity in the global “white power” movement, and paradoxically, advocating the adoption of an organizing model which would explicitly seek to emulate certain characteristics of Judaism.