Political Violence and Legitimation: The Episode of Colonial Cyprus

Abstract

Guerrilla warfare often becomes popular despite the fact that many aspects of it are morally objectionable. Guerrilla groups too, instead of being considered terrorists, often become legitimate political actors. How does this happen? How does the process of legitimation of political violence work? I argue that this process is social and cognitive at the same time, and that a framework for its explanation must be able to account for this dualism. I build such an analytical framework on McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly's approach to social movement studies and on the general sociology of Pierre Boudieu. I use it to analyze the legitimation process of the guerilla anti-colonial campaign in Cyprus. In the legitimation process of Cyprus, two social mechanisms proposed by McAdam et al. played a critical role at an early stage-the mechanisms of certification and of boundary-drawing. Later, a social mechanism that I term "valorization" was central as well. To appreciate the effectiveness of these mechanisms, however, I argue that the dispositional facet of the legitimation process must be accounted for as well. I do this through field analysis, focusing in particular on positions of social and symbolic power. The analysis of the legitimation process in Cyprus offers lessons for the study of other similar processes. By showing how the three mechanisms worked effectively, and also showing the limits of their effectiveness, this analysis offers readily comparable causal analogies

Formations and Formalisms: Charles Tilly and the Paradox of the Actor

“…Although incomplete, Tilly's work bequeaths a powerful set of tools to social scientists who are concerned with explaining social processes through sustained research and not through speculation. 4 A very incomplete accounting of the ongoing conversations among Tilly's former students and colleagues would include efforts to build more explicit foundations for mechanismbased explanations (Demetriou 2009(Demetriou , 2012; extend Tilly's later work back into his early interest in urbanization (e.g., Hanagan & Tilly 2011); join Tilly's network-sensitive later work with more closely ethnographic studies of protest (e.g., Auyero & Moran 2007, Wood 2012; deepen the cultural aspects of Tilly's analysis of mechanisms and repertoires (Demetriou 2007, Fukase-Indergaard & Indergaard 2008; expand on the links between contention and states, regimes, and repertoires (e.g., Tarrow 2012); develop new measures of repertoires and their diffusion (e.g., Wada 2012); apply Tilly's Durable Inequality to comparative immigration (Poros 2011); explore the link between narrative and boundaries (Smith 2004); and, as here, link Tilly's developing theories of social action to his broader analysis of political contention (Goldstone 2010). 5 For a detailed discussion of Tilly's legacy, see the special issue of the American Sociologist coedited by Koller & Nichols (2010).…”

Historical legacies and political agency: hate speech in contemporary Cyprus

“…Nationalism brought about a strong sense of the ‘other’. As a result, by the 1950s, certain groups were created that engaged in hostile rhetoric against the other community, while particularly during the EOKA (National Organisation of Cypriot Fighters) armed struggle for enosis , organised incidents of intercommunal violence and murders made their appearance (Kızılyurek ; Demetriou ).…”

Genocide as Contentious Politics

“…31), and edited volumes such as Bosi et al (2014) "Dynamics of Politics Violence" likewise emphasize connections between contention and violence. Similarly, scholars in the United States and elsewhere increasingly devote their attention to the study of far-right and left-wing extremist activism (Dobratz and Waldner 2012;Klandermans and Mayer 2006;McVeigh 2009), militant nationalism (Demetriou 2007;Maney 2007), terrorism (Beck 2008;della Porta 2008;Goodwin 2006;Oberschall 2004), guerrilla warfare (Viterna 2006(Viterna , 2013, counter-insurgency (Blocq 2013), armed activism (Bosi 2012;Bosi and della Porta 2012), violence as an escalation of action repertoires in response to state repression (della Porta 1995; Koopmans 2005), collective killings (Su 2011), 6 and political violence against civilians (Maney et al 2012). This is a significant amount of research, indeed.…”