Political Violence in Context

Time, Space and Milieu

Lorenzo Bosi, Niall Ó Dochartaigh, Daniela Pisoiu

• Publisher: ECPR Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785521713
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Terrorismo

Context is crucial to understanding the causes of political violence and the form it takes. This book examines how time, space and supportive milieux decisively shape the pattern and pace of such violence. While much of the work in this field focuses on individual psychology or radical ideology, Bosi, Ó Dochartaigh, Pisoiu and others take a fresh, innovative look at the importance of context in generating mobilisation and shaping patterns of violence. The cases dealt with range widely across space and time, from Asia, Africa and Europe to the Americas, and from the Irish rebellion of 1916 through the Marxist insurgency of Sendero Luminoso to the 'Invisible Commando' of Côte d'Ivoire. They encompass a wide range of types of violence, from separatist guerrillas through Marxist insurgents and Islamist militants to nationalist insurrectionists and the distinctive forms of urban violence that have emerged at the boundary between crime and politics. Chapters offer new theoretical perspectives on the decisive importance of the spatial and temporal contexts, and supportive milieux, in which parties to conflict are embedded, and from which they draw strength. 'Time, space and milieux have for too long been silences in the research on social movements. This most welcome collection helps fill the gap through theoretical reflections and empirical evidence, and it contextualizes political violence, recognising the importance of contingency and agency within a relational approach.'Donatella della Porta, European University Institute 'This is an excellent volume which shows why, when and how social contexts shape the dynamics of violence. Combining theoretical insights with meticulous and wide ranging empirical studies from all over the world, this book makes a powerful case for the centrality of relational analysis in the study of violent conflicts.'Siniša Maleševi?, University College Dublin

Chapter One

Contextualising Political Violence

Lorenzo Bosi, Niall Ó Dochartaigh and Daniela Pisoiu

Political violence involves a heterogeneous repertoire of actions aimed at inflicting physical, psychological and symbolic damage on individuals and/or property with the intention of influencing various audiences in order to effect or resist political, social, and/or cultural change. This edited volume aligns itself with the recent shift in political science towards contextualisation of political phenomena (Goodin and Tilly 2006; Lawson 2008), with particular consideration of some of the concerns raised by critical terrorism studies (Jackson et al. 2011) and social movement scholars (Bosi and Malthaner forthcoming), and focusing on the crucial importance of the contexts within which political violence by non-state actors occurs. Despite recent developments, as pressures for decontextualised explanations persist both from the broader society and from within academia itself, this is not necessarily a straightforward task. Furthermore, efforts to conceptualise and empirically analyse the various facets and dimensions of context are still in an initial phase of development.

Political science approaches that are directed towards identifying law-like regularities in political conduct are ill-equipped to explain periods of protracted transformation associated with the emergence of political violence, and the dynamics that political violence sets in motion across time and space. Political violence is particularly resistant to this type of explanation not just because of the exceptional importance of contingency – imagine how different current global patterns of political violence would be if the 9/11 attacks had been disrupted at the planning stage – but also because many of the most important features of violent political conflicts are endogenous to those conflicts. Moreover, the political structures that social scientists often treat as though they were stable frameworks for interaction and decision making – institutions, boundaries, power configurations, and the rules of the game – are frequently the targets that armed actors seek to eliminate or, at least, change. Much of the literature on political violence still focuses on explanatory approaches that resort to macro-level examination of initial conditions or root causes. Frequently, explanations are discussed in terms of the international system, material deprivation and economic grievances, processes of modernisation – or interruptions thereof – and political culture, such as the cultural acceptance of violence (for an overview see Franks 2006). With the exception of emergent psychological and social movement research on individual pathways emphasising ‘soft’ rationality and the intentionality of involvement (Horgan 2005; Wiktorowicz 2005; Pisoiu 2011; Bosi and della Porta 2012), a similar focus on root causes is also evident in work conducted at the micro level, on dependency, circular reactions, and identity-seeking personalities (Victoroff 2005 provides a review). However, these supposed root causes seem to provide neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for explaining the phenomenon of political violence. Political violence has occurred in wealthy and poor regions alike, in modern industrialised countries as well as in less developed ones. Furthermore, as Tore Bjørgo’s points out, a ‘limitation of the “root cause” approach is that it may give the impression that insurgents or terrorists are merely passive objects of social, economic and psychological forces: puppets obeying what these causes compel them to do’ (2005: 3), thus depriving armed activist behaviour of meaning, agency and legitimacy. Because root causes imply general and prior causal factors, these are ill-suited to explain nuances and variations in the processes by which political violence emerges, persists, and declines. One of the responses to these elements of contingency and endogeneity has been to treat individual conflicts and pathways as unique. However, to analyse individuals, groups or conflicts as though they were sui generis limits our capacity to understand political violence as a phenomenon and it carries the danger of impoverishing our analysis and understanding, leading to what Rose and Mackenzie have called a ‘false particularisation’ (1991: 450). Furthermore, a fixation on case idiosyncrasies, while certainly allowing for richness of detail, can hinder the development of theory, which is an important aim of social science research.

Goodin and Tilly’s Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis (2006) articulates the paradigmatic gist of positivist and empiricist approaches:

Some observers speak of choices between positivism and constructivism, between covering laws and hermeneutics, between general and local knowledge, or between reductionism and holism. Regardless of the terminology, at one end of the range we find claims for universal principles that cut across particular social contexts, at the other claims that attempt to describe and explain political phenomena that have no means of escaping particular social contexts. (Tilly and Goodin 2006: 9)

In the specific area that is political violence, and in contrast to the dominant paradigm of identifying law-like relationships between political violence and various macro and meso-level variables, Martha Crenshaw’s seminal edited volume Terrorism in Context (1995) emphasised already twenty years ago how vital context is to understanding and explaining political violence. Also central to her approach is the relationship between structure and agency, in that

[b]oth the phenomenon of terrorism and our conceptions of it depend on historical context – political, social and economic – and on how the groups and individuals who participate in or respond to the actions we call terrorism relate to the world in which they act. (Crenshaw 1995: 3)

More recently, Bosi, Demetriou and Malthaner (2014) have taken a closer look at the immediate context of political violence, inscribing it in the broader context of political contention. Here the emphasis on the contextualisation of political violence allows us to avoid the deterministic, essentialist, and reifying readings that characterise much of the literature. It helps us to understand this phenomenon, instead, ‘as one of several forms of confrontation within a wider repertoire of actions and strategies’; to appreciate ‘that militant groups are embedded within the broader field of actors involved in the conflict’; and to ‘recognize that violent interactions are embedded in the wider processes of political contention’ (Bosi, Demetriou and Malthaner 2014: 2). Analysing political violence in context allows us to examine questions about how and when, rather than why, a group or an individual would engage in violence, persist in using this repertoire of action, and eventually disengage from it. It locates the choice for that particular tactic in the context of its strategic aims and other tactical choices.

Context has, in much of the work on political violence, been understood to refer to the specificities of particular historical, political, social and economic situations. Going beyond this empirical level of analysis, this volume aims to lay the foundations for uncovering new territory in the effort to contextualise political violence. In doing so it introduces and elaborates on specific dimensions of context that shape political violence and that – although taken into consideration – has been neither fully conceptualised nor theorised in the literature. Accordingly, it relocates political violence within the contexts of time, space, and milieu. This is not done with an aim – as Koopmans puts it – to treat the latter ‘as dimensions on which to sample “cases”, but as variables that are an intrinsic and central part of the analysis of contention’ (2004: 32). This volume is divided into three thematic sections addressing these contexts, and each section is preceded by a brief introduction. In the remainder of this introduction we illustrate the value of focusing on these three contextual dimensions by looking at four crucial themes in the analysis of political violence. In each case we outline the importance of our three contextual dimensions for understanding these key themes.

Political violence and contentious politics

The distinctively unpredictable, endogenous and intense features of political violence have been cited in recent scholarship in support of the argument that it is necessary to study violence as a distinctive phenomenon in its own right, separately from the broader category of conflict or contentious politics (Brubaker and Laitin 1998: 427; Kalyvas 2006). Scholars particularly emphasise the sharp changes in patterns of individual decision making that occur upon the introduction of the prospect of terminal violence. While we accept that, for individuals, violence creates a very different kind of context for decision making, focusing on the broader political context of the outbreak and the persistence of violence is vital to understanding the processes through which violence escalates, and through which it eventually ends (della Porta 2013; Alimi et al. 2015). The issues around which a conflict begins may be altered in the course of that conflict, but they nonetheless often remain a vital source of motivation, as well as a key point of orientation for attempts to end the conflict (O’Connor and Oikonomakis, forthcoming). For example, during the Italian 1968–9 period, the early emergence of armed left-wing groups was related to right-wing violence and indiscriminate police repression of the mass upsurge of students and workers. As soon as this broader cycle of contention moved towards a conclusion – partly as a result of the violent actions of armed left-wing groups – the violent conflict began to progressively decline (Alimi et al. 2015).

Social movement scholars, in locating political violence in a continuum of contentious politics, have never argued that violent and non-violent repertoires are equivalent. Rather than developing a separate perspective particular to violence, the aim has been to provide an integrated perspective capable of contextualising violence within broader processes of contention of which it forms a part (Bosi and Malthaner 2015). This process of contention provides much of the explanation for the emergence of violence, while the temporal, spatial, and milieu contexts of the broader mobilisation that precedes violence are essential to understanding the pattern that violence subsequently follows. Beissinger (2002), for example, shows how nationalist violence in the former Soviet Union was strongly correlated with levels of popular mobilisation at the earlier stages of the cycle of contention. Violence was intensely clustered in time and played essentially the same role in several distinct cycles of – largely peaceful – nationalist contention throughout the Soviet Union. He shows how violence intensified at a crucial moment of decision concerning state boundaries. In this example, a historically specific struggle over territorial boundaries in a time of transition was central to an episode of contention in which political violence was integrated with other forms of contention. In most cases, the violence abated as the issues at the centre of contention were settled. Its spatial contours, and its timing, progress, and termination were all shaped by the temporal, spatial and milieu contexts of the broader mobilisation of which it formed a part. The temporal context of a long phase of contention; the spatial context of clusters of local mobilisation, and a struggle oriented around boundaries, and the context of nationalist milieus are all essential to understanding how this violence emerged from a broader episode of contention, and how its termination was directly connected to issues central to the broader episode of contention.

The work on political violence also emphasises that certain individuals become specialists in violence, and that this is a very distinctive kind of expertise, of quite a different order than the kind of expertise involved in non-violent contention (Collins 2009). Specialists in violence are, in certain ways, fundamentally different kinds of actors from those involved in non-violent contention. But as Collins and other scholars of the micro-sociology of violence have shown, individuals become specialists in violence in specific temporal and spatial contexts and in specific milieus. For many, this path to specialisation begins during early episodes of non-violent contention and street protests that are deeply embedded in specific social contexts and shaped by relational dynamics. The contention on the streets of Kiev in 2014 – characterised by interrelated incidences of street protest, rioting, and gun battles – provides a powerful recent example of the direct relationship between non-violent contention and the emergence of specialists in the use of violence on the political scene. Similar stories can be traced with micro-mobilisation paths in the Provisional IRA (Bosi 2012); in ETA (Reinares 2001); in left-wing clandestine groups in Western countries (della Porta 1992, 1995; Zwerman, Steinhoff and della Porta 2000); or in the FMLN (Viterna 2013). Furthermore, only a small minority of armed activists are involved in violent activities throughout all of their lives. Most of these people disengage at some stage during the cycle of violence or when an armed group calls for an end to violence (Bjørgo and Horgan 2009). As with social movement activists, individuals involved in political violence experience post-activism consequences, often keeping them socially and politically active throughout their lives (Viterna 2013; Bosi 2014).

The way in which violence is deployed changes over time, in the targets that are chosen, the repertoire deployed, and in the intensity of the violence. Sometimes actors shift back and forth between violent and non-violent forms of action and in many cases violence does not mark a new and separate phase of contention but proceeds in parallel with non-violent mobilisation, with street protests, marches, boycotts, and strikes. And violence is deployed in territorially and spatially distinctive ways that are related to the broader contention of which it forms a part. In many cases certain forms of violence are seen as appropriate and legitimate only at certain times (Rucht 2003), in certain kinds of spaces (Ron 2003), and within specific milieus (Malthaner and Waldmann 2014). This contextual shaping of patterns of violence is connected to the broader episodes of contention from which the violence emerges. Patterns of violence are shaped by the wider political culture of these movements, a political culture that is formed through the experience of peaceful mobilisation as well as through violence. Tilly (2006) points out that the repertoires of contention deployed – including forms of violence – ‘draw heavily on historically accumulated and shared understandings with regard to meanings, claims, legitimate claimants, and proper objects of claims’ (426). That is, violence is shaped by meanings and understand...