Dynamics of Political Violence

A Process-Oriented Perspective on Radicalization and the Escalation of Political Conflict

Chares Demetriou, Lorenzo Bosi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409443513
• eBook ISBN: 9781317147367
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Advocacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Dynamics of Political Violence examines how violence emerges and develops from episodes of contentious politics. By considering a wide range of empirical cases, such as anarchist movements, ethno-nationalist and left-wing militancy in Europe, contemporary Islamist violence, and insurgencies in South Africa and Latin America, this pathbreaking volume of research identifies the forces that shape radicalization and violent escalation. It also contributes to the process-and-mechanism-based models of contentious politics that have been developing over the past decade in both sociology and political science. Chapters of original research emphasize how the processes of radicalization and violence are open-ended, interactive, and context dependent. They offer detailed empirical accounts as well as comprehensive and systematic analyses of the dynamics leading to violent episodes. Specifically, the chapters converge around four dynamic processes that are shown to be especially germane to radicalization and violence: dynamics of movement-state interaction; dynamics of intra-movement competition; dynamics of meaning formation and transformation; and dynamics of diffusion.

PART I Dynamics of Interaction between Oppositional Movements/Groups and the State

DOI: 10.4324/9781315578323-2

Chapter 2 The Mechanisms of Emotion in Violent Protest

Hank Johnston

DOI: 10.4324/9781315578323-3

The study of collective violence is a research focus that brings together in common task two major disciplines in the social sciences—sociology and political science. It has important implications for understanding democratic participation and transitions to democracy, and, as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, has practical political importance in two different parts of the world characterized by distinct political regimes. In Western Europe, protests against austerity measures to reduce government debt have erupted into violence—in Greece, Spain, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and the UK. In the Middle East, the different trajectories of Arab Spring protests brought the violence of the state security apparatus to the forefront of understanding the transitions there. Developments in these two parts of the world direct our attention to recent theoretical trends in the field of social movements, which promise to deepen our understanding of how protests turn violent.

In this chapter, I will focus specifically on two distinct currents of research:

1. The renewed interest in emotional aspects of collective action which has threaded through the field for the past decade; and
2. Theoretical interest in the dynamics of collective action, specifically the quest to identify general mechanisms and processes. This too is a perspective that has coursed through the field of protest studies for the past decade.

Neither, however, would be characterized as paradigmatic, although, as I will suggest, they are both central to understanding protest violence. Drawing on a broad spectrum of empirical examples both from current events and from my own field research, I will bring them together to suggest preliminary models for two fundamental emotional management mechanisms in collective violence: fear abatement and anger spirals. If successful, these mechanisms will be sufficiently robust to explain how collective violence unfolds in settings as diverse as Middle Eastern authoritarian states, European liberal democracies, and state regimes that lie in between.

For example, in 2010 and 2011 protesters poured into the streets in Athens, Greece, to protest austerity measures proposed in response to the country’s debt crisis. May 1 is a traditional day of mobilization for labor, but in 2010 a broad-based protest of about 17,000 marched in Athens’s streets against the government. Newspaper headlines captured protesters’ sentiments about proposed cuts in pensions, social security, and wages: “Fear, Rage, Hope” (Bilefsky 2010). Protests were mostly peaceful, yet the in front of the Parliament building hundreds of black-clad anarchists attacked police and threw gasoline bombs. The police responded by firing tear gas into the crowd. Four days later a general strike to protest government corruption and austerity took place throughout Greece. Again, protests were mostly peaceful. Most commerce and transportation came to a standstill. Yet, anarchist groups again escalated the confrontation, breaking away from the main protest of 100,000 they threw gasoline bombs into the Marfin Egnatia Bank in Athens, trapping many workers who had to be rescued by fire brigades. Tragically three bank employees died of smoke inhalation (Kakissis 2010).

Greece is an important case because it is a state where the prevailing strategy toward protests parallels that of other Western democracies, namely the negotiated management of protest events to permit public expression of claims and grievances. Also, there are strong parallels with antiausterity protests in Spain, Portugal, and Ireland, all democratic countries where elections are fair and open by most standards, and citizen protections guaranteed by articles in their constitutions. Still, there reigns in Greece—and in several other European countries—broad popular discontent over hardships from austerity measures aimed at reducing national debt, and anger toward the politicians who passed those measures despite popular resistance. Perceptions of political unresponsiveness are aggravated by the common view that—at the minimum—the political class pursues its self-interest at public expense, or—at the maximum—are corrupt and incorrigible bandits. In the spring and summer of 2011, protests in Greece escalated during parliamentary deliberations about cuts in social services, public salaries, and pensions, and the privatization of national industries. Attacks on riot police by masked protesters, tear gas clouds, Molotov cocktails being thrown, windows broken, and businesses set ablaze in the downtown shopping district of Athens were standard fare in nightly news. Despite the outrage evident on the part of the protesters, and in spite of numerous arrests and injuries during police-protester confrontations, only three deaths were reported. How this might have been accomplished despite aggressive and confrontational tactics by some protesters suggests an overarching normative understanding of proportionality by all social actors.

In stark contrast, and as part of the diffusion of prodemocracy movements throughout the Middle East in 2011, a deadly wave of protest and repression commenced in Syria in March of that year. The Syrian state’s prevailing strategy toward protests, unlike Greece, was highly repressive. The al-Assad regime had a history of brutal repression of Sunni Islamist movements, most notably in the city of Hama where an estimated 10,000–25,000 protesters were killed by the Syrian military in 1982. As of this writing, Syrian protests have spiraled out of control into a protracted civil war that has claimed a huge toll in lives lost, and caused over 2.5 million Syrians to flee their homes.

The Syrian conflict began as a wave of protests centered in the southern city of Dara’a. Protests erupted when the police detained and tortured several youths who were accused of spraying antigovernment graffiti. Tolerating no replication of Egypt and Tunisia’s regime-toppling protests, police fired on protesters, but as news of government repression spread the effect was to animate the opposition rather than to quell it. The al-Assad regime reacted with a combination of concession and repression. On the one hand, President Bahsar al-Assad reshuffled the cabinet, appointed a new prime minister, ended the emergency law that been in effect for decades, issued calls for dialogue, and even permitted opposition activists to meet in a Damascus hotel (Shadid 2011a). On the other, the regime sent security forces and the military, especially the 4th Armored Division, led by Bashar Assad’s brother Maher, to cities where the opposition was strongest, with the goal of crushing the rebellion before it grew further.

As protests spread around Syria, activists estimated that about 10,000 people were arrested and about 2000 killed in March and April 2011, suggesting a systematic policy of the regime to induce fear. The regime instituted widespread arrests, military incursions, checkpoints, and occupations in the most restive cities such as Homs, Baniyas, Dara’a, Deir al-Zour, the outskirts of Damascus, and northern towns in the Idlib region near the Turkish border. The regime also made concessions, granted freedoms to the Kurdish minority, and increased salaries of government workers, but protests continued to grow. In early July, 2011, activists reported that more than 200,000 protesters amassed in both Hama and Homs—the largest protests to date—after Friday prayers, defiantly calling the actions, the “Friday of Departure” (of the al-Assad regime). Continuing the regime’s strategy of fomenting fear, it was also reported that police killed 24 protesters that day (Sandals 2011).

These examples reflect vastly different modalities of repressive response—organized state violence and civil war in Syria with over 100,000 deaths (as of this writing), and only three deaths in Greece. They suggest several themes that I will be developing in the course of this chapter:

1. To begin, the Syrian case amply demonstrates the fundamental axiom of the repression-mobilization nexus, namely, that state is the main source of violence, often as a matter of policy at the national level. The worst violence during the period of initial protests was perpetrated by the military and/or police as a result to elite-level decisions. Koopmans and Kriesi (1998) have termed the general orientation of these decisions as the state’s “prevailing strategy” toward social protest. Part of this may mean that state or state factions may provoke violence for their own advantages, using the military (Tilly 1995) or rogue police and vigilante groups (White and White 1995) to repress opposition and/or gain advantage over rivals. In 2010, army and police units in Kyrgyzstan initiated violence in which perhaps 2000 ethnic Uzbeks died and 400,000 fled the country. Similar patterns were seen in the Rwandan genocide, and in Bosnia and Kosovo. Ethnic cleansing is often the result of elite-initiated decisions. When violence is overlaid upon ethnic divisions, it can become an especially hot button for emotional reactions.
2. Social movements and protest campaigns are complex phenomena, which have diverse participants and groups, some of which may be more prone to violence than others—radical Islamists in Syria and anarchist groups in Greece, for example. In general, most protest participants would like to avoid the high costs of violence, but militant minorities that are included under the broad movement umbrella are often willing to incur these costs and may spark violence within larger campaigns
3. Violent tactics get the attention of state elites. Reflecting Tilly’s WUNC conditions (worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment) for successful movement displays (Tilly and Wood 2009), property destruction and violence affirms the seriousness of protesters’ claims and their dedication. Such tactics are also magnets for media attention. The strategic use of violence, then, is not without its benefits for a protest campaign.
4. Of the elements in the total repertoire of protest tactics, violent confrontation and property damage run the greatest risk of engaging emotional behaviors that impede cool and considered decision making. They hold the potential of rapidly escalating beyond strategic intent.
5. They similarly risk emotional responses on the part of the police and security forces (as opposed to considered, strategic reactions characteristic of negotiated management policing—see Soule and Davenport 2009; Earl and Soule 2006). In complex gatherings and regardless of protester militancy, the actions of the police and/or military often escalate confrontations and precipitate violent reactions by protesters if front-line policemen perceive threats or loss of control. Different policing strategies can either avoid violence or cause it.
6. Putting these last two observations together, there is a dynamic relationship between strategic planning by both protesters and police and how action actually unfolds in the streets. This makes violent and/or destructive actions, and their intensity, highly contingent on the situation, and especially how they are affected by the emotionality of protesters. One must only recall the anger that fueled youthful protests in Greece at the killing of a 15-year-old student in December 2008 to recognize the mobilizing force of emotions. Moreover, emotions are not the sole province of protesters—I have in mind police brutality and overreaction, sometimes guided by fight-or-flight responses—that can turn otherwise peaceful protests toward violent trajectories.

Taken together, these points lay out the conceptual map of my analysis. To begin, for protesters there are two choices. They may rationally plan and strategically employ either peaceful tactics or violence as a means to gain attention and publicly assert commitment. Complicating this statement, it is not uncommon that demonstrations or protest campaigns can involve different groups that have different tactical orientations on the violence-nonviolence continuum. And then, despite the best-laid plans, confrontation can occur as anger and frustration drive protesters’ behaviors in the streets, taking the careful and strategically planned protest campaigns into uncharted combinations of emotional spirals.

Then, given this complexity on the protesters’ side, the same array of variations hold for security forces as well. The regime may, as a matter of policy, order crushing repression or managed restraint. Also, as with protesters, in the heat of the moment, emotional responses may shape police behaviors. Commonly, there is a loss of restraint in the face of protester provocation, which can be quite threatening at times, but also there may be the opposite effect of softening the repression and even identification with protestors, as for example when conscript troops refuse to fire on protesters, which occurred in Yemini demonstrations in April 2011, or, reportedly, in early Syrian protests when troops in the Jisr al-Shoughour region refused to fire on peaceful demonstrators.

Most empirical occurrences of collective violence are a complex mix of these strategic choices, situational outcomes, multiplied by a factor based on the complexity of actors both on the movement side and on the side of security forces (local police, secret police, riot squads, military conscripts, and elite troops). In al-Assad’s Syria prior to the civil war, there were no...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• A Contentious Politics Approach to the Explanation of Radicalization
• Part I Dynamics of Interaction Between Oppositional Movements/Groups and The State
• Part II Competition and Conflict: Dynamics of Intra-Movement Interaction
• Part III Dynamics of Meaning Formation: Frames and Beyond
• Part IV Dynamics of (Transnational) Diffusion
• Index