High Levels Of Political Violence Research Articles

Arming Upstanding Citizens: Dynamics of Civilian Disarmament and Rearmament in Restoration Spain

This article examines the state's actions to arm and disarm the civilian population in Spain during the convulsive final years of the Bourbon Restoration period (1917–23). While this topic has received little attention in the abundant literature on the crisis of the liberal regime in Spain, it is crucial to fully understanding the inherent causes and nature of the high levels of political violence which characterised this period. By analysing the ‘selective rearmament’ of part of the population by both legal and illegal means, this article considers the relationship between dynamics of civilian disarmament and rearmament and the evolution of the alleged state monopoly on violence in Spain.

Fear of Electoral Violence and its Impact on Political Knowledge in Sub-Saharan Africa

The literature on electoral violence has focused on its causes as well as its scope, ignoring the implications for citizens trying to practice their political citizenship. Informed citizens are a central part of a functioning democracy. The emotive response to violence may play an important role here. This article contributes to a deeper understanding of how the voter responds to violence. Recent work on the role of emotions in politics has demonstrated its positive role for cognition, as fear can increase the individual’s propensity to amass information and reevaluate attitudes and behavior. This is tested in a hitherto unexamined context, namely, Sub-Saharan Africa, using the Afrobarometer survey (20 different countries). In general, political fear is a significant predictor of political knowledge, but in the opposite direction compared to the hypothesis. The affective intelligence hypothesis only receives partial support using this data, namely, in countries with high levels of political violence.

Party System Decline in Colombia: A Subnational Examination of Presidential and Senate Elections from 1994 to 2006

While many Latin American party systems are experiencing new levels of volatility, the Colombian case allows us to examine the effects of performance factors such as violence and unemployment, while controlling for the consequences of structural change. What best explains changes in the Colombian party system? In the 1980s and 1990s, national level institutional changes created a uniform shock to the party system. Meanwhile, the country faced crucial problems of political violence and economic crisis. Have these challenges undermined the stability of the party system? We test two hypotheses. First, high levels of political violence will increase support for nontraditional parties. Second, economic crisis will increase support for nontraditional parties.

Religious and Ethnonational Identification and Political Violence

Religious and national identification are often elided when describing the Troubles in Northern Ireland: Catholicism with Irishness and Protestantism with Britishness. However, these categories do not coincide completely, and a third national identity label ‘Northern Irish’ has recently been seen to emerge, with some respondents from both major religious groupings claiming this identity. A survey study of residents in Northern Ireland (n = 359) examined religious and national identification using a scale of collective self-esteem. This measure could be described as evaluating the relative strength or thickness of the identities across the various expected (British Protestant; Catholic Irish), unexpected (Protestant Irish; Catholic British) and emerging (Protestant and Catholic Northern Irish) national and religious combinations. Alongside these measures, respondents were sampled in wards that had historically high levels of political violence and in wards matched for socio-economic status and urbanization but with historically low levels of violence. The findings suggest that the relationship between national and religious identification in Northern Ireland is influenced by the sampling based on geographical experience of violence and that unexpected identity combinations and weaker patterns of identification are evident among participants in those areas with the least experience of violence.

Opportunity, Democracy, and the Exchange of Political Violence

With more than 12,000 deaths in nine years, a homegrown Maoist insurgency, reinforced by ethnic and socioeconomic cleavages, has resulted in high levels of political violence and human rights violations in Nepal. With fresh district-level data and drawing on theoretical insights from both the conflict and human rights literatures, research that has relied primarily on cross-national comparisons, the authors develop and test hypotheses using a subnational research design. They find an exchange of violence between government and opposition forces that depends on the political and geographical opportunities for violence. Their findings contribute new evidence for the importance of geography but also suggest that democracy and social capital influence the selection of violence by both government and opposition.

Persistent Collective Violence and Early Warning Systems: The Case of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa

One of the little known specifics of the democratic transition in South Africa during 1990-1994 is its system of early warning about political violence. The strong role that grassroots organizations played in monitoring affected communities and suspected perpetrators set it apart from systems that are driven primarily by academics, although academics were important for the analysis of the violence reports collected by the popular movement and for formulating warnings on trends and hot zones that the transitional government as well as the media actively demanded. This article describes the mechanisms of early warning and analyzes data from the province of KwaZulu-Natal, where high levels of political violence continued for much longer than in the rest of the country. Using regression techniques, we show that the violent behavior of the main political antagonists changed significantly after the April 1994 national elections. Also, the violence followed different causative patterns in the various subregions. Profiles derived in 1994 and 1995 informed the government's decision to postpone regional elections in KwaZulu-Natal three times before they could be held in June 1996 in a climate of relative tranquillity.