Networks of Death and Militant Vegetarianism: The Mechanics of Communal Violence in Gujarat

This review essay examines two recently published books that explore communal violence in Gujarat: Ward Berenschot's Riot Politics: Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Indian State and Parvis Ghassem-Fachandi's Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu Nationalism and Anti-Muslim Violence in India.     

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.     

Millenarian groups and law enforcement agencies: The lessons of Waco

Why do violent movements participate in elections? To answer this question, we examine Hamas's formation of the Reform and Change Party and its iconic victory in the 2006 elections to the Palestinian Legislative Council. We argue that Hamas's formation of this party was a logical step, following nearly two decades of participation in local and municipal elections. Hamas's need to attract resources from external donors, who make funding decisions based on civilian support for the movement, best explains why Hamas decided to participate in local elections in the early 1990s, taking Hamas on a path that eventually led to its 2006 legislative victory. Hamas's foray into elections was consistent with its dual strategy of directing violence against Israel and building Palestinian support through welfare services. We demonstrate that changes in political opportunities (Fatah's decline and the increase in Hamas's popularity), institutional incentives (lax electoral laws and the holding of municipal elections), and the rise of moderate voices within Hamas explain the timing of its entry into legislative elections. Finally, we discuss Hamas's electoral victory, the need for cooperation between Fatah and Hamas, and the role played by international actors as significant factors influencing prospects for peace and democratization in the region.     

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.     

Electoral Violence in Conflict-Ridden Societies: Concepts,Causes, and Consequences

What are the causes of electoral violence? And how does electoral violence influence conflict resolution and democracy? This article argues for a conceptualization of electoral violence as a specific sub-category of political violence, determined mainly by its timing and target. The enabling conditions and triggering factors can be identified in three main areas: 1) the nature of politics in conflict societies, 2) the nature of competitive elections, and 3) the incentives created by the electoral institutions. These clusters of factors are important for understanding electoral violence both between different societies and across elections in a specific country.     

Ethnic conflict & civic life: a review essay

Academic discourse on ethnic conflict in India has, all too often, amounted to little more than platitudes, hand-wringing, and blame-casting. Far too seldom do we see an investigation of the topic that is firmly grounded in both theory and on-the-ground data collection: a soberly argued, articulately presented work examining the local circumstances that make Hindu–Muslim conflict more or less likely to flare into bloodshed. Even apart from the added timeliness produced by last year's conflagration in Gujarat, Ashutosh Varshney's new book, Ethnic Conflict & Civic Life: Hindus & Muslims in India, is a welcome contribution to a field sorely in need of such creative, clear-headed, and academically rigorous thinking. It provides the opportunity, moreover, to review the existing schools of thought attempting to explain ethnic conflict, and highlight their inadequacies as a comprehensive framework for analysis.     

Does the State Promote Communal Violence for Electoral Reasons?

It has often been alleged, most recently in the recommendations of India's National Advisory Council (NAC), that the Indian state promotes, or is complicit in, Hindu-Muslim violence for political or electoral reasons. But the evidence for the claim has historically been sketchy. In StevenWilkinson's work, Votes and Violence, the argument is that the evidence supporting state complicity is systematic.We examine this argument and find it to be fundamentally flawed.     

Interpretations of political violence in ethnically divided societies

This article challenges traditional interpretations of political violence in Northern Ireland. Based on a series of ethnographic studies undertaken in republican and loyalist communities in Belfast, Northern Ireland, I argue that it is the question of state legitimacy, not materialism, culture or religion, that is core to understanding the underpinnings and history of political violence in Northern Ireland. Research findings suggest that communal support for and tolerance of paramilitary groups and their tactics are underpinned by security‐related concerns and a crisis of legitimacy which renders the state unable to claim a monopoly on the use of force. In contradistinction to counter‐insurgency theorists, I argue that the basis for paramilitarism is not created by fear of reprisal or intimidation. Rather, intra‐communal fears of identity loss and threats (both perceived and real) from the outgroup have created a space for republicanism and loyalism in both its political and paramilitary forms.     

Power,Patterns, and Process in European Union History

Sebastian Rosato's admirably provocative Europe United retells the origins of the European Union (EU) as a realist story of the balance of power. While he deserves praise for a bold attempt to extend offensive realism into history's greatest instance of international cooperation, the book ultimately reads as a cautionary methodological tale about how not to support a realist argument. Realist theory has been influential mainly because it offers strong expectations about major patterns in the world—relatively unitary decision-making within states and specific kinds of foreign policies between them—but Rosato's evidence focuses on a thin version of process. He selectively cites leaders' statements about their policy choices across the story, providing no leverage on how these statements related to patterned interests within or across countries. Interestingly, a similar error weakens work by the most salient IR scholar writing on EU history, Andrew Moravcsik. Their shared problems hint at a pattern of IR scholars overlooking patterns in historical evidence.     

Ethnic Elites and Rituals of Provocation: Politicians,Pastors, and Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT

Prominent theories of ethnic conflict argue that instrumental ethnic elites incite violence in order to promote their own power. Yet this approach focuses primarily on political leaders and ignores other ethnic elites, meaning that we know little about how other influential actors think about provocation. In this paper, I present novel data from Northern Ireland on diverse elite attitudes toward polarising Protestant parades with a long history of sparking ethnic violence. Using original surveys of Protestant elected officials and clergy as well as interviews with ex-paramilitaries, this paper demonstrates that these elite groups have different, often competing, interests and opinions regarding contested parades: while politicians tend to support provocative parades, the others do not. By addressing elite actors that are often ignored, I present a more nuanced picture of elite-mass relations and ethnic mobilisation in conflict.     

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.     

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.     

Beyond binaries: analysing violent state actors in Critical Studies

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the importance of including the voices of violent state actors in critical research about security and terrorism. Critical Studies tend to avoid narrative research about such actors or to give them “face” and place. However, to understand violence, scholars should listen to, and explore, the narratives of those who are committing violence. The article seeks ways to produce emancipatory knowledge and to be critical without being exclusionary. It discusses the difficulties in deciding who merits the researchers’ listening and research focus, and who does not. These issues are explored and contested by presenting an analysis of women combatants’ experiences.     

Introduction: studying political violence while indicted – against objectivity and detachment

ABSTRACT

Knowledge construction should seek to embrace empiricism – the deriving of knowledge from data and experience – while not confusing this with a false notion of objectivity. As a truly objective approach is not only difficult but likely impossible to establish, it obscures the burden placed upon social scientists by sociologist C. Wright Mills who advocated for the study of society in order to change it. This action-centric, emancipatory-focused approach is a hallmark of the critical turn in the investigation of political violence. Regardless of how neutral scholars and teachers may try to appear, what does it mean when our audience – our readers, colleagues and students – glimpse behind the curtain and begin to understand knowledge producers as three-dimensional political actors with subjectivities, positionalities and passions? Upon embarking on a multi-semester research and writing process with undergraduate students, what did it mean to begin such a relationship only hours after being released from federal custody, and how did my position vis-à-vis powerful juridical discourses shape our collaborative scholarship and the process of shared knowledge construction?     

Electoral violence prevention: what works?

Elections are in theory democratic means of resolving disputes and making collective decisions, yet too often force is employed to distort the electoral process. The post-Cold War increase in the number of electoral authoritarian and hybrid states has brought this problem into relief. In recent years the prevention of electoral violence has played an increasingly large role in the democratic assistance activities undertaken by international agencies, following increased awareness within the international community of the specific security challenges that elections entail. However, there has to date been little systematic evaluation of the success of different electoral violence prevention (EVP) strategies in reforming electoral institutions so as to enable them to maintain the peace during the electoral period. This article assesses the effectiveness of two common types of international EVP activity. Using a new global dataset of EVP strategies between 2003 and 2015, this article finds evidence that capacity-building strategies reduce violence by non-state actors, whereas attitude-transforming strategies are associated with a reduction in violence by state actors and their allies. The findings are relevant both for understanding the dynamics of electoral violence, and also for policymakers and electoral assistance providers in the international community who have responsibility for the design of democratic assistance projects in states at risk of electoral violence.     

A New Typology of Electoral Violence: Insights from Indonesia

ABSTRACT

Existing literature on election violence has focused on how violence suppresses voter participation or shapes their preferences. Yet, there are other targets of election violence beyond voters who have so far received little attention: candidates and government agencies. By intimidating rival candidates into dropping out of the race, political hopefuls can literally reduce the number of competitors and increase their likelihood of winning. Likewise, aspiring candidates can target government agencies perceived to be responsible for holding elections to push for electorally beneficial decisions. In this paper, we introduce a new typology of electoral violence and utilize new data of election violence that occur around executive elections in Indonesia from 2005 through 2012. The types of violence we identified differ in these ways: a) Of all cases of electoral violence observed in this article, most incidents were targeted towards candidates and government bodies; b) candidates are generally targeted before elections, whereas voter-targeting incidents are spread out evenly before and after elections and government-targeted violence tends to occur afterwards; c) pre-election violence is concentrated in formerly separatist areas, but post-election violence is more common in districts with prior ethnocommunal violence. These distinctions stress the importance of examining when and why different strategies are adopted.     

Why do they vote out of habit? Habitual voting under diverse regimes in East Asia

While scholars have shed light on our understanding of elections in less and non-democratic countries, the incentives behind electoral participation in these countries remain unexplored. This paper sets out to investigate how regime structure is associated with voters' incentives of habitual voting. We assert that the formation of voting habits is associated with the relationships of citizens with the state and their expectations about it. Thus, habitual voting reflects voters' understandings about, perceptions of, and concerns with their political environment and system. In democracy, habituated voting behavior is strongly associated with respondents' support for the regime because their sense of civic duty encourages them to vote. In authoritarian regimes, knowing that their ballots are the adornments of the authoritarian government, habitual voting simply reveals citizens' short-term support for the government or their concerns with the vertical accountability of the government. We further test the hypotheses against Asian Barometer Survey data and the analysis evidences our assumptions.     

Gender Equality and State Aggression: The Impact of Domestic Gender Equality on State First Use of Force

I examine the role of domestic gender equality in predicting whether or not a state is more aggressive in international disputes. This research adds to a growing body of feminist research in international relations, which demonstrates that states with higher levels of gender equality exhibit lower levels of violence during international disputes and during international crises. Many scholars have argued that a domestic environment of inequality and violence results in a greater likelihood of state use of violence internationally. This argument is most fully developed within feminist literature; however, research in the field of ethno-nationalism has also highlighted the negative impact of domestic discrimination and violence on state behavior at the international level. Using the MID data set and new data on first use of force, I test, using logistic regression, whether states with higher levels of gender equality are less likely to be aggressive when involved in international disputes, controlling for other possible causes of state use of force. Beyond this project's contribution to the conflict literature, this research expands feminist theory by further incorporating it into traditional international relations theory to deepen our understanding of the impact of domestic gender equality on state behavior internationally.