POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Political Violence



Political Violence

Introduction

Political violence is today virtually ubiquitous. It occurs in so many circumstances, takes so many different forms, and results in such a variety of consequences that in spite of the many efforts to comprehend it in its entirety, most commentary does not get much further than the obvious—a tipping point where justice leaves off and abuse becomes intolerable. This establishes the quality of the claim and, after an assessment of the adequacy or inadequacy of government responses, the legitimacy of the objectives. So considered, a field of action can be established for examining political violence, and by evaluating different cases, judgments made about the validity of the claims, although these last may remain very much in the eye of the beholder. In short, discussions of political violence are about unrequited inequities real or fancied on the basis of which one can reconcile validity claims with the strategies people use to realize them (Walzer, 1983; Yack, 1986). Although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with such approaches, a too simple reckoning of causes leads to descriptions, in varying detail, of the powerless chasing power. Yet surely with so much political violence all around us, one wants to know more about what determines whether people will take matters into their own hands and the methods they choose when doing so, with more attention paid in this paper to why it is that some movements succeed rather than a focus on why others fail.

Despite presumed common denominators, actual episodes of violence are embodied in so many guises that it is possible to use those very differences to generate new kinds of theory—theories that go from the particular to the general and back again with the result an enlarged understanding of what remains such a frightening (and growing rather than dissipating) phenomenon.

To examine such matters, this paper will frame the discussion in five parts: a glance at some of the ways analysts have studied social movements; a structural argument of global capitalism in terms of how it generates propensities to violence; an exploration of risk, agency, and leadership; and a typology of violence prone movement whose systemic qualities affect the kind of political violence likely to be deployed.

Some Relevant Analytical Approaches to the Study of Social Protest

It should be clear that this discussion does not imply some kind of political reflex that establishes a one-on-one correspondence between degrees of injustice or human suffering and the outbreak of political violence. It does imply that among the several major factors that lead to violence, such as authoritarian or arbitrary rule, there is something more sweeping. The problem is a function of global capitalism or rather the propensities to violence it generates. Of course making research on such matters all the more difficult are such parochial concerns as the safety of the observer. Most people involved in such movements do not regard those who stick their noses into their affairs congenially. Hence, most of the studies of political violence are forced to use descriptive ...