Competing for Change: Regime Transition, Intrastate Competition, and Violence

Abstract

When collective violence breaks out during periods of regime change, the root cause of that violence is ordinarily assumed to be a failure of state and/or governmental organizations, alongside transition. However, there are limits to the applicability of this understanding, since violence sometimes erupts during regime change, even when state and executive organs remain intact. This paper addresses those puzzling cases, by arguing that transitional violence can be a by-product of competition between, or within, a state's security services—for power and resources in an emerging regime. Competition develops where there is intense uncertainty about the form that the new regime might take and associated uncertainty about the distribution of power and state funds among state security services within that regime. The dynamics of transitional violence through intrastate competition are illustrated in the paper through treatment of two “most different” cases: Indonesia (1998) and Romania (1990).