This article argues that revolutionary leaders are more willing to commit mass killing than nonrevolutionary leaders. Revolutionary leaders are more ideologically committed to transforming society, more risk tolerant, and more likely to view the use of violence as appropriate and effective. Furthermore, such leaders tend to command highly disciplined and loyal organizations, built in the course of revolutionary struggles, that can perpetrate mass killing. This study uses time series cross-sectional data from 1955 to 2004 to demonstrate that revolutionary leaders are more likely to initiate genocide or politicide than nonrevolutionary leaders. The violent behaviors of revolutionary leaders are not limited to the immediate postrevolutionary years but also occur later in their tenure. This demonstrates that the association of revolutionary leaders and mass killing is not simply indicative of postrevolutionary instability. This article also provides evidence for the importance of exclusionary ideologies in motivating revolutionary leaders to inflict massive violence. Keywords: human rights, domestic politics, political leadership, political survivalThis article examines the relationship between revolutionary leaders and mass killing. Previous studies have focused how the aftermath of domestic revolutions opens up opportunities for new elites to seize control of the state (e.g., Fein 1993; Krain 1997;Melson 1992). Mass violence is considered to be a product of digitalcommons.unl.edu 2 Nam Kyu Kim in Journal of Conflict Resolution (2016) the political upheaval that occurs during and shortly after a revolution. However, revolution not only produces the collapse of a state's political authority and heightened political instability but also elevates a type of leaders qualitatively different from the type that comes into power through other means. The questions of how different revolutionary leaders are from others and whether revolutionary leaders are more prone to employ mass violence than their nonrevolutionary counterparts have not received much systematic investigation in the political violence literature. This article attempts to determine whether revolutionary leaders have an impact on the likelihood of mass killing onsets distinct from revolutions as one-off events.I argue that not only are leaders emerging from domestic revolutionary struggles apt to possess an enhanced willingness to engage in large-scale violence, but they are also likely to command highly disciplined and loyal organizations for doing so. Revolutionary leaders are, on average, more ideologically committed to a radical transformation of the existing social and political orders, more risk tolerant, and less violence averse than their nonrevolutionary counterparts. These personal attributes lower their perceived moral, political, and economic costs of inflicting large-scale violence on civilians and raise their perceived benefits of mass murders. Revolutionary leaders, thus, are more likely to have the ''destroy them to save us '' ment...

Recent research finds an association between nonviolent protests and democratic transitions. However, existing scholarship either does not specify the pathways through which nonviolent protests bring about democratization or conduct systematic empirical analyses demonstrating that the specified pathways are operative. This article proposes four pathways through which nonviolent anti-regime protests encourage democratic transitions, emphasizing their ability to directly conquer or indirectly coerce such transitions. Most simply, they can conquer democratic reforms by directly overthrowing authoritarian regimes and installing democracies. They can also coerce democratic reforms through three additional pathways. Nonviolent anti-regime protests can coerce incumbent elites into democratic reforms by threatening the survival of authoritarian regimes. They also increase the likelihood of elite splits, which promote negotiated democratic reforms. Finally, they encourage leadership change within the existing authoritarian regime. Following leadership change, nonviolent movements remain mobilized and are able to coerce democratic concessions from the regime’s new leaders. Our within-regime analyses provide robust empirical support for each pathway. We show that nonviolent anti-regime protests conquer democratic reforms by ousting autocratic regimes and replacing them with democracies. Nonviolent anti-regime protests also coerce elites into democratic reforms by threatening regime and leader survival. These findings highlight the importance of protest goals and tactics and also that nonviolent anti-regime protests have both direct and indirect effects on democratization.

Why do some states pursue transitional justice (TJ) in the immediate aftermath of armed conflict while others do not? What drives a state to select a particular type of justice mechanism over another? Building on the political explanations of TJ, we argue that postconflict justice (PCJ) decisions are driven by the interests and power of political elites shaped by recently ended conflicts. Our empirical analysis shows that conflict outcomes and their subsequent impact on the balance of power between the government and rebel groups are the most important determinants of PCJ decisions. Domestic trials are most likely to emerge out of a decisive, one-sided victory while truth commissions and reparations are most likely to occur after a negotiated settlement. We also find that conflict severity interacts with conflict outcomes to affect PCJ decisions.

No abstract

The finding that military regimes are more fragile than other authoritarian regimes represents one of the few stylized facts in comparative politics. However, the existing literature contains substantial differences in the theoretical explanations for military regime instability and operationalizations of military rule. To assess competing explanations, we examine regime and leader instability after distinguishing between collegial and personalist military rule. We show that regime and leader insecurity characterize only collegial military regimes. Particularly, the fragility of collegial military regimes comes from a heightened likelihood of democratization, not more frequent transitions to alternative autocratic regimes. In addition, leaders of collegial military regimes face higher risks of both regular and irregular turnovers than other autocrats. Also, irregular exits of collegial military leaders tend to occur through reshuffling, rather than regime-changing, coups. The results strongly support theories focusing on military officers’ preference for unity over other explanations.