How the “Internal Brakes” on Violent Escalation Work and Fail: Toward a Conceptual Framework for Understanding Intra-Group Processes of Restraint in Militant Groups

Joel Busher,Donald Holbrook,Graham Macklin

doi:10.1080/1057610x.2021.1872156

Joel Busher, Donald Holbrook + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610x.2021.1872156

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Abstract

This article advances the emergent literature on restraint within militant groups in three ways. First, it offers a framework for situating the “internal brakes on violent escalation”—understood as the practices through which group members shape the outer limits of their action repertoires—in relation to the interplay between conflict dynamics, intra-group processes and individual-level decision making. Second, it develops a basic analytical strategy for examining how such brakes operate at different levels of proximity to potential or actual instances of escalation. Third, it sets out four types of mechanisms through which internal brakes appear to generate or enable restraint.

Highlights

Few if any militant groups carry out as much violence as they are ostensibly capable of
Our intention in that project was to develop a descriptive typology of the practices through which members of militant groups themselves contribute to establish and maintain the parameters on their own violence, either in the form of resisting or preempting escalation or by exploring less violent alternatives—thereby inhibiting, albeit sometimes only marginally, the type of escalation processes often described within the terrorism literature.[11]
In the project report and the first article,[20] we argued that it was possible to develop a typology of the “internal brakes” on violent escalation, and that the typology that we developed enabled us to describe the braking practices observed across the three main case studies and across other cases described in the academic literature