The politics of preventing violent extremism: the case of Uganda*

Multilateral development actors have recently embraced the ‘PVE’ (preventing violent extremism) agenda. This includes consideration of PVE measures in countries like Uganda, where interpretations of non-state violence are contested and where the government has a history of strategic rent-seeking behaviour regarding counter-terrorism assistance. This article assesses the threat of terrorism and violent extremism in Uganda. We argue against a strategic reorientation towards PVE among development actors. Current and emerging threats do not justify a departure from existing development priorities. Importantly, consideration of the political context pertaining to PVE in Uganda commends a cautious approach.     

Toward Conflict or Compromise? How Violent Metaphors Polarize Partisan Issue Attitudes

We know much about how opinion leaders drive mass partisan polarization with position-taking cues but little on how different message types polarize citizens, and who responds most to those messages attributes. This article contributes new insights by investigating how exposure to common violent metaphors interacts with audience personality traits to polarize partisans on issues. Building from research on conflict orientations, we theorize that aggressive rhetoric primes aggression in aggressive partisans, motivating greater intransigence on party positions. As a consequence, aggressive partisans are pulled further apart on issues, thereby reducing prospects for compromise. We find support for our predictions in two large nationally diverse survey experiments conducted in very different political contexts. Our results demonstrate the subtle power of aggression in public opinion and highlight the important moderating role of individual differences in the communication of partisan conflict.     

Violence Against Civilians: A Disaggregated Analysis

Disaggregated approaches to conflict research have led to new insights into the patterns and processes of political violence in developing countries. This article uses the most comprehensive subnational political violence data (ACLED) to observe where and when violence against civilians occurs within civil wars. Several new conclusions are evident from an event-based analysis of civilian violence: retribution or collateral damage are poor explanations for attacks on the unarmed. Instead, civilians are targeted because they are accessible; rebel groups kill more civilians, often in an attempt to create new frontlines for conflict. However, governments are also responsible for high rates of civilian death, yet they often “contract” this violence out to militias. This analysis confirms that there are multiple violent groups within civil war spaces, and small opposition groups commit higher levels of violence against civilians in local spaces. The strength of a violent group compared to its competition shapes how much civilian violence it commits. The results suggest that theories that emphasize civilian support and retribution as a basis for violence against civilians have overlooked the importance of how multiple violent opposition groups compete within civil wars, and how civilians suffer as a result.     

When do people pay attention? Violence and non-violence in political movements and the differential media attention provided

Media can dictate what people see, but an individual’s choice in media consumption can also determine what stories the media report. This paper demonstrates that people show a greater interest in large-scale protests when the use of violence is employed, though this trend does not strongly hold in every case. Google search Trend data are analysed across five recent political movements to determine at which points in a movement media attention peaks. The data are compared to the timelines of these protests with a specific emphasis on when major violent events occurred. The level of violence that occurs in a movement is potentially correlated with how many times the region experiencing the movement is searched. Some movements however do a good job at generating attention without violence, and violence does not guarantee a large audience. The Google Trend data provide valuable information about what causes people to pay attention to world events and can be used to analyse political movements and potentially make predictions about violent and non-violent conflict.     

Does civil war breed authoritarian values? An empirical study of Bosnia-Herzegovina,Kosovo and Croatia

This article analyses how armed conflict affects individual support for liberal values. It is commonly assumed that the consolidation of democracy depends on individual values such as tolerance as well as aspirations of civil and political liberty. For post-conflict societies, consolidating democracy is also a means of reducing the risk of recurring violent conflict. However, democracy has proven to be especially hard to achieve and consolidate in ethnically divided societies. While previous research has centred mainly on institutions and political elites, I expand the focus to also include ordinary citizens. Using survey data from post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Croatia, I examine the effect of exposure to violence on a scale of authoritarian values. While the effects are small, the results show that war-related violence in some cases leads people to embrace authoritarian values.     

Being resilient to radicalisation in PVE policy: a critical examination

ABSTRACT

The problematic nature of certain policies and approaches to preventing and countering violent extremism has been robustly demonstrated; it is clear that rethinking the prevention of violent extremism requires concerted attention. One response to critiques of security-driven approaches has been the adoption of the language of resilience building. However, the turn to resilience has not been matched by a fundamental rethinking of approach, and may often mask troubling approaches in the language of objectivity and positivity. In rethinking the question of prevention, examining the concept of resilience is important not only to address a current trend in policy discourse, but also to benefit from the rich literature on resilience from which valuable lessons may be drawn. A critically informed concept of resilience has the potential to provide a framework of response that recognises individuals and communities as political actors who, rather than being shielded from ideologies, require the resources and channels to challenge violence, discrimination, and injustice, be it state or non-state driven. This article, through examining the current use of “resilience” in PVE policies, makes a modest attempt to draw on lessons from applying resilience in other contexts to articulate possible features of a critically informed approach to preventing violent extremism.     

Women defining terrorism: ethnonationalist,state, and machista terrorism

This article explores definitions of terrorism according to various women in the Basque regions of Spain and France. We ask how women in social movements and government institutions define terrorism, how terrorism influences them, and whether they are viewed as victims of violence and/or as political agents who challenge terrorism. We discuss three definitions of terrorism: ethnonationalist terrorism of ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), state terrorism against ETA operatives and supporters, and terrorismo machista (or intimate terrorism seen as gender violence). The article uncovers multiple women’s lived experiences related to terrorism, and by problematising agency and definitions of terrorism, it challenges the binary in international relations of women as either victims or violent perpetrators of terrorism and it establishes terrorismo machista as political violence closely related to other forms of political violence. We conclude that women are important political agents regarding multiple types of terrorism.     

Conflict Dynamics and Feedback: Explaining Change in Violence against Civilians within Conflicts

Conflicts are complex, dynamic processes wherein the frequency and intensity of violence changes throughout the contest. In this article, we explore the temporal dynamics of two long-term civil wars—DR-Congo and Sudan—to identify systematic and random conditions that lead to changes in civilian targeting. Violence committed by rival political actors, territorial exchange, and the number and addition of violent agents strongly shape the likelihood that civilian targeting events and casualties increase or decrease over time. General and country differences emerge from vector autoregression analysis to suggest that (1) three types of violent agents—rebels, militias, and the government—are locked in spirals of violence where violence against civilians by one actor leads to subsequent violence by another actor; (2) rebels and government forces respond to the other side’s acquisition of contested territory by increasing counterattacks on civilians, specifically in DR-Congo; and (3) increasing numbers of active nonstate agents lead to higher violence rates in the following months. Among these, civilian targeting by rival actors triggers the most follow-on violent events against civilians.     

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.     

Safe Territories and Violent Political Organizations

This article assesses how the concept of safe territory can expand our understanding of the persistence of, and eventual disengagement from, violence by violent political organizations. The explanatory utility of this concept is demonstrated through an analysis of the cycles of political violence perpetrated by the Red Brigades in Italy and the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. This work offers two main illustrative hypotheses. First, the opportunities provided by safe territories are not necessarily conducive to the continuation of political violence, although they facilitate its persistence over a long period of time. Second, the presence of safe territories, regardless of the ideology of the violent political organization, tends to enforce disengagement from political violence at the group, rather than the individual, level. Finally, the analytical intent in introducing the concept of safe territory is to contribute to spatial understandings of political violence.     

Purpose and behaviour: The Cuban missile conflict revisited

Fairly strong theoretical arguments posit that the use of force to achieve foreign policy objectives and the milita’ rization of society are part of a self‐amplifying feedback process. In spite of the rather coherent reasoning linking these two factors, little empirical work has attempted to demonstrate the strength of this postulated relationship. This analysis uses a system of equations to model this hypothesized feedback in the US and British societies during the 20th century. The findings presented below lend tentative support for the hypothesized feedback, though suggests that further verification might be facilitated through refinements in the operational indicators of violent foreign policy. Furthermore, the analysis demonstrates that systemic level variables contribute significantly to the propensity of the US and Great Britain to employ violence as a tool of foreign policy.     

Political Violence: Switzerland,A Special Case?

When we speak of political violence during the second half of the twentieth century in Western Europe, we tend to think of events that took place in Germany, involving the Red Army Faction, and in Italy, with the Red Brigades. Such political violence does not apply in the case of Switzerland, which is perceived as a haven of peace, security, democracy, and economic affluence. However, cursory analysis of the contemporary press undermines this stereotypical vision: indeed, between 1968 and 1995 there were a number of violent acts of protest. Switzerland may not have experienced the phenomenon of organized armed struggle in the same way as Germany and Italy—in fact, the intensity of the violence was far from being the same—but political acts against the government did occur, acts involving either damage to property or, more rarely, injury to people. A rough typology identifies three different political tendencies: separatists and anti-separatists pertaining to Canton Jura, the far-Left, and the far-Right. The aim of this article is to pinpoint and analyze the different features of the violent repertoire that unfolded in Switzerland between 1968 and 1995.     

Explaining violence after recent elections in Ethiopia and Kenya

A comparison of recent contested elections in Kenya and Ethiopia points to divergences in the forms of political violence. While both countries saw the use of excessive force by members of the security services, Kenya experienced more widespread and deadly inter-ethnic violence than Ethiopia. This article considers these two countries in light of competing explanations for inter-ethnic violence, and concludes that variation in the extent of constitutional reforms is critical in influencing citizens’ responses to close electoral contests. In Kenya, there has been a lack of meaningful constitutional and institutional reform since the introduction of multiparty politics in the early 1990s. By contrast, Ethiopia has seen extensive and substantive constitutional reform in a similar period, but without a negotiated pact among political elites. In both cases, electoral procedures have heightened the stakes of politics and therefore led to significant and escalating political violence, but in unforeseen ways. The important electoral issue of regionalism or devolution in both countries is also briefly considered here. The violence surrounding the elections raises concerns about how to sustain citizen engagement with elections and other democratization activities when these fail to meet voter expectations over several electoral cycles.     

Rebel Behavior in the Context of Interstate Competition: Exploring Day-to-Day Patterns of Political Violence in Africa

This study develops a day-to-day theory of political violence that predicts that rebels respond strategically to the onset of interstate conflict that is directly related to a civil war. Government-initiated interstate conflict is theorized to incentivize rebels to signal their resolve, willingness to bear costs, and vulnerability of government forces. In addition, this form of interstate conflict is predicted to decrease violence against civilian populations, as it makes it more likely that rebels will need to rely on civilians for resources in the future. This is contrary to interstate conflict initiated by an external state, as this signal of third-party support makes civilian support more dispensable from the perspective of a rebel movement. Using a country-day data set constructed from event data, evidence is presented that is consistent with this theoretical logic. Interstate conflict, therefore, is shown to play a significant role in explaining the variation of violent events that occur on a day-to-day basis during a civil conflict.     

Political settlements as a violent process: deconstructing the relationship between political settlements and intrinsic,instrumental and resultant forms of violence

Abstract

This article explores the opportunities and conundrums of understanding violence at critical junctures following ruptures in political orders through the prism of political settlements. While there is an emerging body of scholarship on political settlements, we specifically examine its relationship to violence, which we argue has been under-theorised. Through comparative country case studies (Bangladesh, Egypt, Kenya, Sierra Leone), we examine in a historicised manner how these types of settlements interact with various forms of violence at various scales. The article reconceptualises political settlements in relation to three forms of violence, intrinsic, instrumental and resultant, and shows how multi-scale dynamics and formal/informal interactions shape the violent nature of political settlements in different contexts.     

Revenge and reprisal violence in Kosovo

One of the most often reported but under-studied phenomenon in post-conflict states is that of revenge violence. While such violence is widely acknowledged to occur after wars, it is often dismissed as epiphenomenal to the central problem of restoring order and good governance in the state. This paper seeks to refocus attention on this phenomenon and challenge the way that it is normally portrayed as a normal, almost incidental consequence of armed conflict. It develops an ideal-type distinction between revenge violence and its strategic mirror, reprisal violence. While revenge violence is premised on a judgement of individual responsibility for a prior act of harm, reprisal violence is driven by an assumption of collective guilt. This paper argues that these two types of violent activity—one expressive and the other strategic—are often intermixed in post-conflict states. Moreover, the interplay between them provides political cover for those who would employ violence to achieve strategic or political goals, while lowering the risks involved when doing so by attributing it to revenge for wartime atrocities. In effect, the fact that revenge and reprisal violence are mirror images of one another can serve to explain and subtly justify the use of organised violence against disadvantaged groups in post-conflict states. This paper examines the validity of this heuristic distinction through a within-case analysis of violence in Kosovo from 1999 to 2001 and identifies the policy consequences of this distinction.     

Violence,politics and the state in Bangladesh

The politics and ideology of South Asia has been characterised by violence for a considerable time. Bangladesh is no exception, where violence is both widespread and multifaceted. It arises for political, economic, and socio-cultural reasons and is evidenced not only in the incidence of violence but also in the availability of small arms, in the evident political ties with violent organisations and criminal activities, in the prevalence of corruption and the effect which all this has on the forces of law and order. This poses enormous challenges for the state which urgently needs to introduce measures of reform in the judicial and police administration system. De-linking politics from the activities of criminals and terrorists is an important first step toward this goal.     

Neville Bolt. The Violent Image: Insurgent Propaganda and the New Revolutionaries.

This article examines key setting events and personal factors that are associated with support for either non-violent activism or violent activism among Somali refugee young adults in the United States. Specifically, this article examines the associations of trauma, stress, symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), posttraumatic growth (PTG), strength of social bonds, and attitudes towards legal and non-violent vs. illegal and violent activism. Structured interviews were conducted with a sample of Somali refugee males ages 18–25 living in the northeastern United States (N = 79). Data were analyzed using multiple linear regressions and path analysis. Greater exposure to personal trauma was associated with greater openness to illegal and violent activism. PTSD symptoms mediated this association. Strong social bonds to both community and society moderated this association, with trauma being more strongly associated with openness to illegal and violent activism among those who reported weaker social bonds. Greater exposure to trauma, PTG, and stronger social bonds were all associated with greater openness to legal non-violent activism.     

Making sense of terrorism: a narrative approach to the study of violent events

ABSTRACT

How does violence become understood as terrorism? In this article, we show how a narrative approach to the study of violent events offers a conceptually productive way to understand the process of “seeing” an event as a terrorist act, one that explicitly integrates the phenomenology of violence. While the collective practice of defining terrorism in academia and the policy arena has struggled to produce a universal definition, we identify a set of “common sense” characteristics. We argue that if the framing of violent events prominently features these characteristics as discursive anchors, this primes processes of sensemaking toward interpreting violence as terrorism. While terrorism markers are often articulated as being pragmatic and apolitical indicators of terrorist acts, we show that they are indeed at the core of political contests over historical and physical facts about violent events. The narrative approach we develop in this article underscores that intuitive leanings toward interpreting violence as terrorism are a sign of political agency precisely because they are produced through the stories political agents tell.     

Too many enemies: Mobilization,marginalization, and political violence

Over the past decades, a pattern has emerged across the Islamic world of secular actors struggling to build sustainable social movements while Islamists show a higher success rate in doing so—a dynamic often accompanied by high levels of violence and little space for dialogue between actors from across the political spectrum. In this article, we illustrate the utility of social movement theory (SMT) in explaining the ability of some movements to mobilize en masse, while others become marginalized. Furthermore, we suggest that SMT is useful in understanding the processes that produce socio-political dynamics conducive to violent rather than non-violent tactics. Through a case study of Bangladesh, where in 2013 the secular Shahbag mobilization was derailed by a massive Islamist counter-mobilization, this article shows how movements not only capitalize on, but actually contribute to, shifts in cultural discourse through political maneuvering and long-term socialization. By anchoring their ideology in pre-existing religio-cultural imagery, Islamists have been successful in casting themselves as “authentic” defenders of Islam and their secular opponents as “atheists.” In such a socio-political context, the space for dialogue among the various political actors is severely limited and the impetus to employ violent tactics strong.