Revolutionary Leaders and Mass Killing

Abstract

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...

Revolutionary Homophobia: Explaining State Repression against Sexual Minorities

“…Several additional tests are conducted to ensure the robustness of these results. First, an alternative argument is that revolutions select for particularly violent leaders who are more likely to engage in various forms of political violence (Colgan 2013; Kim 2018). We therefore decompose revolutionary governments into two types – personalist and non-personalist – using pre-existing data on regime type (Geddes, Wright and Frantz 2004).…”

“…Secondly, the topic of revolutionary violence has been frequently explored (see Goldstone 2000). It is also a vibrant area of research that continues to provide insight into interstate conflict (Colgan 2013; Colgan and Weeks 2015), mass killing (Kim 2018) and genocide (Harff 2003; Melson 1992). While homophobic violence may appear to be a minor addition to this repertoire, it sheds light on important dynamics of revolutionary violence.…”

“…These include strict variants of Marxist-Leninism, Islamic states governed by sharia, rigid anticommunist doctrines, ethnonationalism and strict secular nationalism. Regimes adhering to these ideologies are coded 1 on the Exclusionary Ideology variable, combining previous efforts at coding exclusionary ideologies and original research on state ideologies (Harff 2003; Kim 2018).…”

“…Revolutions are in part distinguished from other irregular transitions – including coups, assassinations and revolts – by ideological ambitions to completely transform social and political life (Goldstone 2000, 170; Huntington 1968; Levitsky and Way 2013; Skocpol 1979). Revolutionary belief systems such as communism, fascism and Islamism are sometimes called exclusionary ideologies, 10 since social and political transformation provides an overriding justification for the exclusion and oppression of social groups that can motivate genocide against ‘real or perceived enemies of the new order’ (Harff 2003, 57; Kim 2018; Melson 1992, 32). We theorize that exclusionary ideological systems lead to homophobic repression for similar reasons.…”

Strategic gerontocracy: why nondemocratic systems produce older leaders

“…With regard to dictatorships, Baturo (2016) finds that autocrats are more likely to have military backgrounds than democrats, have shorter political careers prior to assuming office, are less likely to stem from middle-class families and have, on average, lower levels of educational attainment. Research also finds that leaders who came to power in the aftermath of a coup, a civil war or a revolution are more likely to display high tolerance for risk and a certain proclivity for violence, which in turns impact their propensity to use force against opponents or other states (Colgan 2013;Horowitz and Stam 2014;Kim 2017).…”