PSC 211 Chapter 5 Political Violence

What Is Political Violence?

• Political violence is violence outside of state control that is politically motivated.

• Some political scientists see political violence as part of "contentious politics" or collective political struggle, which includes such things as revolutions, civil war, riots and strikes, but also more peaceful protest movements.

• Crime and warfare share some attributes with political violence, but political scientists do not define them as political violence.

Why Political Violence?

• Scholars who seek to explain political violence use three categories of factors: institutional, ideational, and individual.

  • Institutional explanations for political violence focus on how state, economic, or social systems contribute to political violence.

  • Ideational explanations focus on the effect of political, religious ideas in causing political violence.

  • Individual explanations focus on what motivates individual people to engage in political violence—because of either rational or psychological factors.

Comparing Explanations of Political Violence

• The three approaches to explaining political violence—institutional, ideational, and individual—may be compared on their view of free will versus determinism and on universal versus particularistic approaches.

• Institutional explanations are more deterministic, while individual explanations tend to afford more free will. Ideational explanations lie somewhere in between.

• Institutional explanations are more particularistic, while individual explanations tend to be more universal; again, ideational approaches lie somewhere in the middle.

• These three types of explanations are frequently put in competition with one another, but they actually work best in conjunction.

Forms of Political Violence

• Revolution is a public seizure of the state in order to overturn the existing government and regime.

  • Unlike a coup d'état, in which elites overthrow the government, the public plays a key role in a revolution.

  • Revolutions often, but not always, involve violence.

• Scholars group studies of revolution into three phases:

  • Earlier scholars focused primarily on describing revolutions. Their explanations were often unsystematic, laying blame on bad governments or leaders.

  • The second phase of scholarship took a more psychological approach, such as the relative deprivation model, which argued that revolution occurred when there was a gap between public expectations and actual conditions in a country.

  • Later work focused on institutional explanations, including how competition for power in the international system can lead weaker states to institute reforms that may breed discontent and thus incite revolution.

  • Today, scholars try to reintegrate individual and ideational arguments with these institutional explanations for revolution.

• If we study the consequences of revolutions, we find that revolutionary leaders seldom achieve what they set out to do. States that experience revolutions tend to become less democratic and more violent. Some research suggests that revolutionary states may be more likely to engage in interstate war, directing the internal violence outward.

• Terrorism is the use of violence by nonstate actors against civilians in order to achieve a political goal. State-sponsored terrorism occurs when a state directly supports terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy.

• In contrast to terrorism, guerrilla war involves violence by nonstate actors targeting the state. While the line between the two can be blurry, combatants in guerrilla war generally accept the traditional rules of war, including limits on targets.

• Drawing from institutional explanations, some scholars point to weak economies and low levels of education as explanations for terrorism; however, many terrorist leaders and followers come from economically advantaged backgrounds. Economic factors may be compounded by political institutions, as states with weak state capacity, autonomy, and public participation may provide incentives and opportunities for violence.

• Ideational explanations (blaming a particular ideology or religion) are common but do not sufficiently explain cause and effect. Individual explanations focus on the feeling of injustice or humiliation that, some feel, comes at the hands of oppressors. Some scholars point to nihilism and apocalyptic viewpoints—beliefs that all values and institutions are meaningless and that violence can destroy a corrupt world and usher in a new order—as causes of terrorist violence.

• Though most scholars argue that terrorism has not been successful at achieving its long-term goals, it does have a significant political impact.

  • Terrorism has been successful at disrupting economies and destabilizing politics in some countries and can be a tool to provoke international conflict.

  • Fighting terrorism may lead to a weakening of democratic institutions and civil rights, which may result in less trust in government and less public control over it.

  • At an extreme, the instability created by terrorism can bring down a regime.

Terrorism and Revolution: Means and Ends

• Terrorism and revolution often share similar motivations—often the transformation or destruction of existing institutions. It is perhaps unsurprising that terrorism can trace its modern origins to the French Revolution.

• The often-revolutionary nature of terrorist groups may help explain why their tactics and targets may differ from guerilla groups. Guerillas typically accept their opponents as legitimate actors, making them more open to negotiation or compromise. Terrorist groups reject opposing forces, leading their violence to be more indiscriminate and widespread.

Political Violence and Religion

• As ideology has waned, religious fundamentalism has reemerged in the public realm.

• There are three main factors that connect religious fundamentalism to political violence:

  • A hostility to modernity, as fundamentalists often argue that the institutions of the modern state have stripped the world of greater meaning and caused people to suffer.

  • A “cosmic war,” as fundamentalists may believe that modern states actively seek to exterminate and denigrate believers.

  • Messianic, apocalyptic, and utopian beliefs may lead fundamentalists to engage in greater violence, as they believe that while modernity currently has the upper hand, the righteous believers will triumph in the end.

• We have seen fundamentalists engaging in terrorism in a number of countries and across a variety of religions.

Countering Political Violence

• Democracies may be better positioned to address problems of political violence. Some argue that democratic regimes allow enough political participation to diffuse the possibility of political violence by providing more options for political opposition.

• Even democracies may struggle when faced with violence from domestic or international actors. Democracies that are victims of political violence may curtail certain freedoms in order to increase security, creating what some have called a "surveillance state." In their search for security, democratic states may actually erode democracy and contribute to greater political violence by acting in a way that may be interpreted as the state conspiring to destroy its opponents.