Vigilante justice and informal policing in post-Euromaidan Ukraine

During and after the Euromaidan, the Ukrainian society experienced an emergence of non-state groups that combined elements of civic activism and paramilitarism. They operated independently from the state and often used extra-legal violence to restore law and order, deliver justice, and protect Ukraine from external and internal threats. Their conduct closely resembles vigilantism. This article draws on the body of criminological and sociological research on vigilantism in order to understand the diverse landscape of vigilante groups in post-Euromaidan Ukraine. It explores the complex relationship between the most representative vigilante groups, the Ukrainian government, and the political and business elites; analyzes the legal boundaries of vigilantism in Ukraine; and discusses the outcomes of vigilante justice for democratic consolidation, rule of law, and human rights. This article offers a new paradigm for theorizing popular mobilization in Ukraine and sheds light on important dimensions of the formation of an informal system of policing and justice.     

Beyond regional radars: Security from below and the rule of law in the Sahel

ABSTRACT

Political crises, terrorism, porous international boundaries, coups d’état, and socio-political upheavals all underline the need to rethink what security means in the Sahel region. While international and regional approaches to security still take predominantly military and macro-political perspectives, there is a need to ethnographically describe and analyse security from below. To this end, citizens’ own initiatives should be central to contemporary analyses of African peacemaking interventions. This article takes the growing and diverse movements of self-defence groups in Burkina Faso and Mali as a starting point for analysing how security can be ‘seen from below’, often in interaction with and sometimes even in outright contradiction with the rule of law. While local self-defence groups constitute a challenge to the rule of law, ethnographic fieldwork in Mali and Burkina Faso reveals a high degree of adaptability and flexibility of these movements. This article furthermore discusses methodological challenges when doing ethnographic research in dangerous terrains, drawing on fieldwork in the Sahel, and considers implications of the study of ‘security from below’ for the wider study of international affairs.     

A Vigilante Model of Justice: Revenge,Reconciliation, Forgiveness,and Avoidance

Once a working relationship is damaged through an act of injustice, how do the victim and offender repair their relationship? What causes the victim to let go of the anger and resentment and then reconcile with the offender? We propose a theory that the likelihood of forgiveness and reconciliation is greatly enhanced, and revenge and avoidance greatly decreased, if justice is first served. That is, forgiveness follows justice; without justice, forgiveness is much less likely. Justice may be served one of three ways: (1) by the victim evening the score; (2) by the organization punishing the offender; or (3) by the offender repenting. We recommend that managers establish a procedurally just climate so that victims of offense seek distributive justice through formal channels rather than seeking it themselves through revenge.     

Police legitimacy and support for vigilante violence in Pakistan

Bottoms and Tankebe recently analysed the multidimensional nature of police legitimacy and made an argument for its relevance to social order. Using survey data from three communities of varying socioeconomic conditions in Pakistan, this paper examines the links between the multiple dimensions of the Bottoms-Tankebe model of police legitimacy and support for vigilante violence. The findings show overall high levels of support for vigilantism. Regression analysis shows that experiences of police illegality consistently predict support for vigilantism across the three communities. Perceived quality of police decision-making predicts support for vigilantism in some conditions but not others. Contrary to expectations, quality of interpersonal treatment by police and police effectiveness do not explain support for vigilantism. We also found no evidence to show that feelings of obligation to obey the police mediate the influence of police legitimacy on vigilante support. The implications of these findings are discussed in this paper.     

Scambaiting on the Spectrum of Digilantism

Digilantism is punishment through online exposure of supposed wrongdoing. Paedophile hunting is one example, and the practice is open to many of the classical objections to vigilantism. But it lies on a spectrum that contains many other kinds of digilantism. Scambaiting is among the other kinds. It consists of attracting online approaches from perpetrators of different kinds of online advance-fee fraud. Characteristically, it takes the form of protracted email exchanges between scammers and scambaiters. These exchanges are mainly down-to-earth and occasionally testy conversations about the details of fictitious money transfers or involved explanations of delays in payment. They succeed in their purpose if they waste a lot of their targets’ time, but they can also be pursued as a sort of comic art form. Scambaiting exchanges seem often, but not always, to be relatively harmless. They therefore help to make intelligible a region of morally permissible digilantism on the spectrum of digilantism. Not that scambaiters never go too far, but their typical weapons inflict and risk inflicting far less harm than those of other digilantes, and there are actual scambaiting norms that have been chosen because of their relative harmlessness.     

Urban Irregular Warfare and Violence Against Civilians: Evidence From a Colombian City

Defining terrorism and explaining how it occurs remains a contentious issue. This article attempts to generate new understandings on these topics by applying the work of Ehud Sprinzak's delegitimatization model to the Sea Shepherds. Evidence presented in the article suggests that the Sea Shepherd's present level of political violence passed through gradual phases. In this respect, it is possible to suggest that Sprinzak's model has applicability for maritime organizations, as well as terrestrial based groups. However, we also note that on the one hand, it may be possible to argue that in some respects the Sea Shepherds may constitute either a “blind spot” in the literature on terrorism and political violence, because its actions could in some circumstances be considered activism, militant direct action, piracy, vigilantism, terrorism, or eco-defense, which makes it very difficult to classify. On the other hand, that both the Sea Shepherds and the whalers may both engage in illegal activities, but are not prosecuted, may indicate that states and the international community may have neither the will nor the means to enforce laws against them. Therefore, they may be turning a blind eye to their actions. Throughout the article we maintain that the Sea Shepherds constitute an example of a gray area phenomenon. Despite the ambiguity surrounding their legal status and academic interpretations of their actions, the results of nearly three decades of the organization's activities, including its 2007 campaign to disrupt Japanese Antarctic Whaling, suggest that the Sea Shepherds may be best categorized as a vigilante group, because they claim they are seeking to enforce a legal status quo because of states' and the international community's inabilities or unwillingness to do so.     

Youth,parental absenteeism and political bases in Mazowe district

The study sought to establish the effects of parents and guardians' absenteeism from homes on the dependents especially the youth in the rural villages of Chiweshe in Mazowe district committing time to political bases' activities. Data for the exploratory study was collected from narratives gathered from interviews and observations that were held with 40 youth purposefully sampled from the participants based on age and exposure to circumstances of living with parents/guardians who often manned political bases. The findings did to some extent confirm that elders' absenteeism from the children has various negative effects on the children. However, there were also isolated positives that were recorded.     

National heroes or coming anarchy? Vigilant youth and the “war on terror” in Nigeria

In this article, I explore analytically how local youth vigilante groups in terror-stricken northeastern Nigeria – locally known as the Civilian Joint Task Force or yan gora (“youth with sticks”) – are responding to threats to their communities posed by the terrorism of Boko Haram and the human rights abuses of the Nigerian security forces. The article argues that vigilantism has been a way for victimised local youth to reclaim a sense of control and agency in a context of risk, radical uncertainty, powerlessness and heightened fear. While one group of victimised and angry youth (Boko Haram) in northeastern Nigeria are violently resisting the state, another group of victimised and angry youth (yan gora) from the same region are joining forces with the state to protect members of their local communities and to restore peace to their troubled region. However, growing concerns that the yan gora are a “coming anarchy” have compelled state-endorsed youth empowerment schemes geared at integrating the militia into Nigerian security service, while regulating their actions and instilling patriotism and discipline in its members. Yet, such hybrid security arrangements may end up reproducing the very insecurity they were meant to forestall.     

Excessive Use of Deadly Force by Police in the Philippines Before Duterte

ABSTRACT

Under President Duterte the Philippine National Police have killed several thousand suspects in so-called legitimate encounters. While this has engendered much media attention and scientific research, earlier police violence is still a black-box in many respects. This article provides at least a partial filling of this void. It establishes several indicators for measuring lethal police violence. Moreover, it presents a detailed mapping of regional and sub-regional patterns of armed police encounters for the decade from 2006 to 2015. The spatial and temporal comparisons show that even though actual levels of deadly police violence have been quite low in several Philippine provinces and cities, the Philippine National Police almost always shot to kill suspects and not to incapacitate them. While there was significant variation over time and between sub-national units, neither the magnitude nor the levels of lethality of the violence are related to the threat levels to which the police officers were exposed.     

INSTITUTIONAL INEFFECTIVENESS,ILLEGITIMACY, AND PUBLIC SUPPORT FOR VIGILANTISM IN LATIN AMERICA

Why do individuals or groups support vigilantism as a means of conflict resolution? Most researchers tend to agree that support for and participation in vigilantism occurs in “stateless locations,” that is, when formal justice institutions are weak or absent. Despite this general consensus, quantitative evidence of this relationship is limited to a handful of country‐specific studies that used only subjective survey‐based measures of institutional weakness. This study seeks to extend research on vigilantism by assessing the relationship between subjective and objective conditions of formal justice institutions and public support for vigilantism across 323 provinces in 18 Latin American countries by using the 2012 AmericasBarometer Survey. Specifically, this study uses multilevel logistic regression techniques to examine the variability of public support for lethal vigilantism within and across Latin American countries. When controlling for a wide range of potential confounds, the results show that the most robust predictors of support for violent vigilantism are subjective indicators of institutional illegitimacy, personal victimization, and punitive attitudes. Evidence also exists that objective insecurity, as measured by province‐level homicide rates, fosters public support for violent vigilantism in certain situations.