Collective Political Violence

An Introduction to the Theories and Cases of Violent Conflicts

Earl Conteh-Morgan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000704693
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

First published in 2004. Collective Political Violence is a concise, but thorough, interdisciplinary analysis of the many competing concepts, theories, and explanations of political conflict, including revolutions, civil wars, genocide, and terrorism. To further his examination of each type of conflict, Earl Conteh-Morgan presents case studies, from the Rwandan genocide to the civil rights movement in the United States. Along the way, he illuminates new debates concerning terrorism, peacekeeping, and environmental security.

Written in a knowledgeable, yet accessible, manner, Collective Political Violence treats the issue of political violence with on impressively wide geographic range, and successfully straddles the ideological divide.

CHAPTER 1

Collective Political Violence

Scope, Assumptions, and Approaches

The focus of this book is to identify the underlying causes of violent conflicts that range from mass protests, riots, civil wars, genocide, interstate wars, to revolutions. Why do we emphasize explanations of these phenomena in this book? The most general and obvious reason is that violent conflict is endemic to nation-states and is becoming inevitable in many societies, particularly with the end of the Cold War. Class cleavages or problems of inequality continue to polarize segments of populations, and the negative effects of abject poverty, economic deprivation, unemployment, or ethnic discrimination continue to widen in scope and deepen in intensity. This results in violent eruptions either between incumbent regimes and specific groups, or between ethnocommunal groups. The scope of this book is therefore quite broad because explanations of the causes of these varied forms of violence are many and different. While the various forms of conflict are significantly different, their causes are also analytically distinct.

With the end of the Cold War, the world is experiencing an increase in intrastate bloodletting that has horrified many observers of world politics. The possibility that zones of conflict will continue to widen and threaten peaceful ones make it increasingly essential that we understand the underlying causes of violent conflicts as a first step toward dealing with them more effectively. In other words, amplification and greater understanding of the sources of societal conflicts is a first and necessary step toward conflict resolution or peacemaking. Over many years, conflict within and among nations has baffled philosophers, scholars, and practitioners alike. Their consequences—death, maimings, institutionalized fear and hatred, population displacement, and destruction of property—mean that they should be avoided at all costs. Although violent conflicts are an integral part of the march of human history, the dramatic changes within nations and in the international system (for example, the divergence among nations along religio-political value systems and socioeconomic distance) seem to be increasing the scope (extent), intensity (gravity), and duration of violent conflicts in the world. The principal imperative of any government is therefore to avoid violent conflicts within and outside its borders. All other goals cannot be meaningfully and effectively pursued where violent conflict abounds. If education, tourism, trade and finance, and other pursuits among human beings are to flourish, and elevate standards of living, then we must understand the causes of violent conflict; and thereby hope that we would be better able to prevent their eruption, and even identify their necessary ingredients before they occur.

On what assumptions is this book based? Seven central assumptions guide our analysis of violent conflicts within and among states. First, the control and distribution of resources underlie group structure and social arrangements within nation-states, and it is these social structural arrangements that constitute the foundation and outcome of power and inequality. Second, because of the realities of power and inequality, competition for and conflict over the control of resources become perennial issues reflected in all relationships and dynamics of social change among groups within the nation state. Resource control shapes behavior and social processes for all actors within the state ranging from the individual to specific groups often manifested in cleavages such as race, gender, class, or religion. Third, while capitalism has become the undisputed economic system in the world following the end of the Cold War, at the same time it produces gross inequalities and social problems such as ethnic discrimination, inflation, or environmental degradation that in turn aggravate tensions among groups in society. Fourth, the primordial sentiments of presumed common ancestry, racial characteristics, or a common ethnolinguistic background, among others, often intensify and prolong the rivalry among groups thereby further aggravating levels of discrimination and raising the stakes in conflict situations. Fifth, this book is also guided by the assumption that there is an inherent duality in the international system: fragmentation/disintegration and integration/stabilizing forces.¹ International society is characterized by conflict within and among nations. Subgroups, the state, and other actors are basically in continuous competition and conflict, as well as in cooperation with each other. Accordingly, a sixth assumption of this book is to emphasize both conflict and cooperation. While conflict is endemic to society and even inevitable to others because of their social structure and group composition, at the same time, the presence of regional organizations like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), powerful states like the United States, and the United Nations (UN) encourage groups to resolve and manage their conflicts. Thus peacekeeping operations have increased significantly with the end of the Cold War. However, although peacekeeping perspectives are incorporated in the analysis, the emphasis is on explanations of collective violence. Finally, on a similar level of analysis, this book is based on the assumption that change and continuity, or stability and change are properties of all nation-states, including the international system. They also impact most groups within nation states thereby producing violent conflicts in some. Efforts at ensuring peace and stability have increasingly become the responsibility of the great powers and the UN because meaningful interactions, transactions, production processes, and distribution require an environment free of conflict and disorder. But because the very process of societal organization generates dissatisfaction, violent conflict becomes inevitable in some societies.

There is no single text that has attempted to fully synthesize most of the varied theories of violent conflicts. This book is therefore an attempt at a concise analysis of the individual, group, societal, state, and international sources of collective political violence.

Explaining Collective Political Violence

The meaning of explanation and cause as they are used in this book require some elaboration because the overall thrust of this conflict analysis project is to present contending explanations of varied aspects of violent conflict.

Many types of explanation are employed in the social sciences, along with many competing notions of what it means “to explain” phenomena, events, or a class of events. The nomological mode of explanation will serve our purposes. Nomological (nomos is Greek for “law”) explanations are generalized statements to explain a particular event or class of events like riots, civil wars, or even revolutions. Such generalizations or covering laws explain events by linking cause to effect. “Severe economic deprivation leads to internal rebellion” is an example of a generalized, lawlike statement connecting cause to effect. Internal rebellion is, no doubt, the effect, and severe economic deprivation is the cause, because our nomological statement implies that severe economic deprivation is an antecedent of internal rebellion. Stated differently, cause implies a sequence in time between event X and event Y. Thus severe economic deprivation occurs prior to internal rebellion.

Most hypotheses in the social sciences are expressed as lawlike statements connecting independent variables (causes) to dependent variables (effects) in terms of a tendency or probability.² It is then the task of the researcher to confirm the expectation implied in the hypothesis through substantiating data or empirical testing.

In the analysis of violent conflict, social scientists generally employ either normative theory or empirical theory. Normative theory focuses on prescriptive concerns (ought, must, should). The emphasis is on how things should or oughtto be. Examples include ethical questions of what is right or wrong in the conduct of war, or what activities and behaviors are morally acceptable or unacceptable. What should be the conditions for a just war? What practices or techniques are considered unethical or immoral in war? Such normative concerns are not the major focus of this book, although they will be discussed when and where relevant.

Based on our discussion above of explanation and nomological cause and effect, our primary focus will be on the second kind of theory: empirical or causal theories. Their emphasis is not on how things ought to be but why are they the way they are. The objective of empirical theory is the explanation of behaviors—in this case, violent conflict behaviors such as riots, civil wars, genocides, or revolutions.

Theories

Theories in the social sciences are essentially explanations concerning the causes of human behavior. Theories of collective political violence, for example, consist of explanations about what causes phenomena such as rebellions, civil wars, violent demonstrations, and so on, and what determines this cause and effect relationship. In conflict analysis many theories or explanations are put forward by scholars from different disciplines about why collective violence occurs. Theories of conflict consist of explanations about what causes the various types of collective violence that plague the world. Generally, theories are constructed through reasoning: that is the use of premises (one or more statements) of an argument to infer another statement called the “conclusion.” This means that theories are developed in three different ways: through induction, deduction, or a combination of the two. In inductive reasoning the analyst conducts reasoning from the particular (observation of the facts or data) to the general (conclusions). In other words, it is a bottom-up approach in which the premises provide evidence only for the conclusion. As a researcher learns more about, for example, specific revolutions, and as hypotheses are tested, theories are constructed and reformulated. In deduction the top-down approach is used to reason from the general to the particular, and the premises lead necessarily to the conclusion. An example would be deducing the theory of revolution from a more comprehensive, general theory about societies.

In the social sciences, most explanations fall under the inductive method of analysis rather than the deductive method. Similarly, in the natural sciences many explanations are also inductive. Inductive explanations have an explanandum and an explanans.³ The explanandum is the problem, phenomenon, thing, or event to be explained and it is the conclusion of an inductive argument. The explanandum may be an individual event or phenomenon such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, or a more general class of events, such as interethnic conflicts in developing countries. The explanans explains the explanandum. The explanandum is deduced from the explanans. In other words, the explanans are the premises, and the explanandum is the conclusion of an inductive argument. The explanans comprises two types of statements: (1) a set of universal (lawlike) generalizations (the covering laws), and (2) a set of initial statements or conditions (the particular facts of the problem, event, or situation).

However, in inductive explanations, the generalizations are statistical rather than universal in the explanans. This means that the explanandum cannot be deduced from the explanans with certainty. The explanans imply probability in relation to the explanandum. It provides support or evidence for the explanandum but does not guarantee certainty for the explanandum. In other words, in inductive argument, the explanans could be true and the explanandum could still be false. An inductive argument takes the following form:

Problem or event:	Why do people in Los Angeles riot?
Explanans:	If people are economically deprived there is 80 percent probability they will engage in riots.
	The people of Los Angeles are economically deprived.
Explanandum:	The people of Los Angeles engage in riots.

In this example, the generalization is statistical or based on probability. The probability here is 80 percent that the people of Los Angeles will riot.

Deductive explanations contain the most powerful type of arguments because they explain individual as well as general events, and their conclusions must be true if their premises are true. Similar to inductive explanations, they consist of the explanandum and the explanans. The deductive argument follows this form.

Problem or event:	Why did the Rwandan genocide occur?
Explanans:	If a totalitarian regime faces bitter opposition from a minority group, it will resort to genocide to silence that opposition.
	The Hutu regime of Rwanda was a totalitarian regime.
	The Hutu regime of Rwanda faced serious opposition from the Tutsi minority.
Explanandum:	The Rwandan Hutu regime resorted to genocide against the Tutsi minority.

In this example, the event (genocide against the Tutsi minority) is explained by deducing it from a universal generalization or covering law, as well as a se...