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.     

Transnationalizing democracy promotion: The role of Western political foundations and think‐tanks

Promoting democracy has developed into a common activity performed by a variety of actors in the post‐cold war world. While it is states and international institutions that receive most of the attention devoted to this increasingly important issue‐area, other non‐state actors also engage in democracy promotion. This article examines the activities of two such actors: political foundations ‐ quasi‐governmental organizations established in a number of advanced states ‐ and think‐tanks ‐ private institutions traditionally engaged in research and policy advocacy. It argues that the role and impact of these actors deepen the transnationalization of democracy promotion, which has important consequences for the international politics of democratization and international relations more generally.     

Terrorist Assassination and Institutional Change in Repressive Regimes

ABSTRACT

Missing from the political violence literature is an in-depth and systematic examination of the effects of terrorist assassination on state political institutions in repressive regimes. By broadening the scope and depth of empirical research into terrorist assassinations, the potential exists to enhance our understanding of the outcomes of assassination by terrorist actors as well as our overall understanding of political violence in repressive regimes. Utilizing survival analysis and data from the Global Terrorism Database, the Polity IV Project, and the Political Terror Scale, this project focuses on the post-terrorist assassination institutional outcomes in repressive regimes. While the effects are long-term, the most repressive regimes are the most likely to experience political institutional shifts in the wake of terrorist assassinations. The direction of the institutional shifts is mixed, but results indicate that the level of state repression in existence prior to a terrorist assassination matters to post-terrorist assassination outcomes.     

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.     

The Dynamics of Mass Killings: Testing Time-Series Models of One-Sided Violence in the Bosnian Civil War

Many observers contend that wartime civilian victimization is an instrument of political leaders to achieve a particular goal. This article examines whether retaliation for similar acts by the other side, the developments on the battlefield, or the behavior of international actors accounts for the ups and downs of this so-called one-sided violence. Using information from the Konstanz One-Sided Violence Event Dataset and other sources, we evaluate the empirical relevance of these complementary models statistically. Time series analyses of the weekly number of killed and harmed Muslims (Bosniacs) and Serbs during the Bosnian civil war support the military and the massacre logic. We show that the Serbian side decreased one-sided violence following a territorial conquest, but that its one-sided violence was not a reciprocal response to the Bosniac targeting of civilians. Conversely, the Bosniac side resorted to violence during times of increasing Serbian atrocities and when the fighting was particularly intense. The analysis reveals that most international interventions did not reduce the carnage, but that the Serbs responded to Russian moves.     

Rebellion without a shot—peaceful conflict management in Ecuador

Most conflict studies focus on the causes of war and violence. In contrast, this article on Ecuador explores the causes of peace in a country with strong conflict fault lines, a political army and several deep political crises during the last two decades. The article suggests that focusing on domestic capabilities for peaceful conflict management provides a new entry point to explaining why peace is sustained. An important aspect lies in the role of the armed forces and of civil society. Theories on civil-military relations provide an understanding of why armed forces intervene. However, there is less analysis of factors that influence political armies' behaviour in terms of the use or non-use of violence. This is the focus of this article. Furthermore, the article asks why actors in civil society opt for non-violent strategies. In summary, the article analyses the capabilities for peaceful conflict management of national actors—particularly of the armed forces and of civil society—through a focus on their behaviour in three recent political crises, and by tracking the influence of historical experiences, cultural context and the structural and institutional framework on their behaviour.     

The Homegrown Threat: State Strength,Grievance, and Domestic Terrorism

Scholars maintain that, similar to insurgency, terrorist violence is precipitated by both relative deprivation and state weakness. Yet aggrieved minority groups within a country should turn to terrorism when they are weak relative to the state rather than strong. Empirical evidence shows minority group discrimination and fragile political institutions to independently increase domestic terror attacks. But it remains unclear whether grievances drive domestic terrorism in both strong and weak states. Using data from 172 countries between 1998 and 2007, we find that for strong states the presence of minority discrimination leads to increased domestic terrorism, while for weak states the presence of minority discrimination actually leads to less domestic terrorism. Consequently, increasing state capacity may not be a panacea for antistate violence, as nonstate actors may simply change their strategy from insurgency or guerrilla warfare to terrorism. Efforts to reduce terrorist violence must focus on reducing grievance by eliminating discriminatory policies at the same time that measures to improve state capacity are enacted.     

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?     

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.     

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.     

Public Support for Political Violence and Paramilitarism in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland

Most of the research on paramilitary activity in Northern Ireland has concentrated on either the historical origins of paramilitary organizations or the background characteristics of individuals who engage in this activity. Less attention has been given to analyzing public attitudes in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland toward the use of paramilitary violence as a political tool within this society. In this paper we argue that one of the reasons for the intractability of the conflict and the current impasse over the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons is the widespread latent support for paramilitary activity among the civilian population in both these societies. Overall, the results suggest that only a lengthy period without political violence in Northern Ireland will undermine support for paramilitarism and result in the decommissioning of weapons.     

Hobsbawm in Trinidad: understanding contemporary modalities of urban violence

Eric Hobsbawm’s milestone work Bandits is attentive to the rural poor and situates social banditry within the world of peasant resistance, but his concepts are surprisingly adaptable to contemporary urban settings. Drawing on Hobsbawm’s conceptualisation of social banditry and avengers, this article examines the perspective of gangs who perceive themselves as victims of inequality, poverty and capitalism; who serve as social actors and security providers for their communities; and who at the same time engage in cruelty and high levels of violence and terror. This qualitative study is based on fieldwork undertaken in Trinidad and Tobago. Findings show that Hobsbawm’s figure of the avenger contributes to a better understanding of the contemporary modalities of urban violence and helps unpacking and characterise the ambiguity of the relationship between gangs and local communities.     

A social theory of war: Clausewitz and war reconsidered

This article presents a new theory of war that is grounded in the insights of Clausewitz on the social nature of conflict. Clausewitz had argued that war is a political process; he therefore distinguished between ‘war’—understood in political terms—and warfare—understood as fighting. He then created a typology covering a spectrum of war ranging from total to limited, the political stakes of a conflict determining where it would fall on the spectrum. I develop and modify this basic framework by arguing that the social organization of the actors has a determining role in predicting the stakes of war. I then show how this framework helps us understand some key problems in the political science literature on war and conflict. I attempt to show two main things: (1) that there are different types of wars (and that these differences are not necessarily related to the standing of the actors, i.e. the presence or absence of sovereignty); and (2) that how war and warfare are related is more complicated than previously understood and that this has implications for the political science literature on order, conflict and violence.     

Contemporary radical right‐wing violence in Canada: A quantitative analysis

Despite the presence of radical right‐wing movements, groups, and individuals in Canada, a paucity of academic research on this topic exists. Concurrently, the majority of material on this particular area has employed either journalistic or ethnographic methodologies. What remains is several thesi and dissertations and a couple of excellent case studies describing not only membership, but also the most salient activities of radical right‐wing groups and parties. These studies, however, have been short on examining these actors’ proclivity to engage in violence. In contrast, this article, uses an events data methodology to show the dynamics of radical right‐wing violence in Canada over the last three decades. The author then maps out the attributes of this particular type of violence and where possible specifies its correlates. This work is a part of a larger project on violence in Canada.     

The Michigan militia: Political engagement or political alienation?

The split within the Michigan Militia leadership highlights a disagreement between competing factions about the role militia groups should play in the political system. Norm Olson, the deposed commander of the group, rejects political participation entirely and focuses on the militia's paramilitary role. The leadership that replaced him under Lynn VanHuizen and Tom Wayne actively engages the political system, using tactics resembling those of modern interest groups. Despite continued challenges to VanHuizen and Wayne's leadership, the Michigan Militia has maintained this focus. Ada Finifter's classic conception of the multiple dimensions of political alienation is utilized as a framework from which to understand these different views of political participation. Strategies that restrict or stigmatize traditional forms of political participation by militia groups may, in certain cases, increase the likelihood of violence and should be carefully considered in light of this risk.     

The Political Effectiveness of Non-State Violence: A Two-Level Framework to Transform a Deceptive Debate

The most striking aspect of the current scholarly debate over the political effectiveness of non-state violence is that, upon careful examination, there is not much of a debate to be found. Despite seemingly irreconcilable positions claiming that terrorism and insurgency “work” or “do not work,” varying case selection and thresholds for success lie at the root of these debates, not disagreements over the empirical record. Although this previously unrecognized empirical consensus helps to resolve existing disputes, it relies on single-level strategic frameworks that fail to capture the effectiveness of violence from the perspective of those who employ it. This article presents an alternative concept of political effectiveness based on a two-level framework that accounts for the fact that insurgencies are not unitary actors, but are instead marked by armed groups that pursue strategic objectives that benefit their larger social movements (such as the overthrow of a regime or the withdrawal of enemy troops), while they simultaneously pursue organizational objectives that benefit the groups themselves (such as increasing membership or funding). Empirical analysis of eight paradigmatic campaigns common to studies of insurgency and terrorism across time and space reveals that the two-level framework better captures the political effectiveness of non-state violence than existing single-level models and primes the subfield for powerful new theories that explain greater variation in the use and effectiveness of non-state violence.     

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.     

Microlevel Dynamics of Violence: Explaining Variation in Violence among Rural Districts during Northern Ireland's Troubles

Violence varies in intensity across intrastate political conflicts. This study suggests that interactions between local state agents and nonstate radicals affect the intensity of violence. When contention develops in a community and nonstate actors radicalize, whether or not some local state agents deviate from their institutional role as providers of law and order to support radicals is a crucial feature that explains how some communities experience more violence than others. This argument explains the different trajectories of violence in two neighboring rural districts during the 1971–76 period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The major implication of the study is that these interactions affect not only the intensity of violence in particular communities but also the breadth, length, and end of violence in the overall intrastate 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.     

Analysing Terrorism and Counter-terrorism: A Communication Model

This article analyses terrorism and counter-terrorism within a framework of communication. This analytic framework views violence as a form of communication that interacts with other forms of social and political communication, whether by non-state actors or state actors. By looking at how terrorism and counter-terrorism fit into the wider context of social and political life, both at the national and the international level, the analyst can better understand how terrorism emerges from other social or political activity, how it can evolve into legal or nonviolent action, and how it can be but one tool in a political or social struggle that includes both violent and nonviolent tactics. By including counter-terrorism and the array of control institutions used to battle terrorism and related phenomena, the model forces a degree of self-reflectivity and self-awareness upon the analyst, who must examine societal, state and international institutions and forms of social control alongside strategies and tactics of protest and political agitation. In a post-11 September world, this analytic task is all the more challenging.