Going underground

Abstract

When and why do groups participating in mass dissent choose to initiate terrorist campaigns? I argue that groups involved in civil wars and mass civil resistance might face similar organizational pressures, which encourage the initiation of terrorism due to higher tactical effectiveness. Internal organizational pressure might depend on leaders’ expectations of a decline in followers’ commitment with protracted use of mass tactics. This is likely to motivate leaders to initiate terrorist campaigns to secure organizational survival. External organizational pressures might depend on increasing dissident campaigns’ fragmentation. This intensifies competition making leaders more likely to initiate terrorism so as to establish themselves at the forefront of their movements. The findings provide empirical support consistent with my claims and indicate no significant difference between civil wars and mass civil resistance movements with regards to these effects. Contrary to the common idea that the use of conventional violence should entail a higher willingness to engage in illegal violence against non-combatants, this finding suggests that conflict dynamics affect the decision to initiate terrorism and that terrorist campaigns have a coherent strategic logic across different types of mass dissent.

The physics of dissent and the effects of movement momentum

“…Third, because civil wars are relatively rarer in our sample than low-intensity violence, we also construct a variable measuring the number of violent events in the prior week based on event type 8 from the SCAD database, which we expect to be associated with a decreased likelihood of irregular leader change3, 15,16.…”

Competition from Within: Ethnicity, Power, and Militant Group Rivalry

“…The variable captures observed competitive behavior. This offers a substantial advantage over many previous studies of militant group rivalry, which used the number of groups in a conflict or country as a proxy for inter-group rivalry or competition (Belgioioso 2018;Conrad and Greene 2015;Findley and Young 2012;Gaibulloev, Hou, and Sandler 2020). The identified behaviors are only coded as Rivalry if one or both groups explicitly directed their behavior at the policies, leaders, members and/or supporters of the other group.…”

Guest Editors’ introduction: Nonviolent resistance and its discontents

“…Existing quantitative research on nonviolent campaigns has often treated such campaigns as monolithic. There has been an increase in scholarship on violent flanks, as well as tactical diversity within largely nonviolent campaigns, with recent work showing that many actors use both violence and nonviolence (Cunningham, Dahl & Frugé, 2017; Hallward, Masullo & Mouly, 2017; Belgioioso, 2019; Breslawski, 2021; Krtsch, 2021; Gleditsch & Abbs, 2022 ). While recent scholarship has produced datasets focused more on organizations as the primary unit of analysis (Butcher et al, 2022; Pinckney, Butcher & Braithwaite, 2022), most existing quantitative scholarship treats events or campaigns as the primary units of analysis, neglecting the complexities of diversity within coalitions.…”