Nonviolent Events Research Articles

“Keep Your Heads Held High Boys!”: Examining the Relationship between the Proud Boys’ Online Discourse and Offline Activities

This study examines the relationship between online communication by the Proud Boys and their offline activities. We use a supervised machine learning model to analyze a novel dataset of Proud Boys Telegram messages, merged with US Crisis Monitor data of violent and nonviolent events in which group members participated over a 31-month period. Our analysis finds that intensifying expressions of grievances online predict participation in offline violence, whereas motivational appeals to group pride, morale, or solidarity share a reciprocal relationship with participation in offline events. This suggests a potential online messaging–offline action cycle, in which (a) nonviolent offline protests predict an increasing proportion of motivational messaging and (b) increases in the frequency and proportion of motivational appeals online, in turn, predict subsequent violent offline activities. Our findings offer useful theoretical insights for understanding the relationship between online speech and offline behavior.

Long-Term Change in Conflict Attitudes: A Dynamic Perspective

AbstractA large literature examines how citizens in violent conflicts react to the conflict's events, particularly violent escalations. Nevertheless, the temporal nature of these attitudinal changes remains under-studied. We suggest that popular reactions to greater violence are typically immediate but brief, indicating short-term emotional responses to physical threats. Over the longer term, however, public opinion is more commonly shaped by non-violent events signaling the adversary's perceived intentions, reflecting slower but deeper belief-updating processes. We support this argument using dynamic analyses of comprehensive monthly data from Israel spanning two full decades (2001–20). Rather than violence levels, we find that long-term changes in Jewish attitudes on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict follow non-violent events implying Palestinian preferences, particularly failed negotiations and out-group leadership changes. Our findings underscore the importance of public opinion's temporal dynamics and show that non-violent events, which are often overlooked in the literature, play a prominent role in shaping long-term attitudes in conflictual contexts.

PROTEST EVENT ANALYSIS MEETS AUTOCRACY: COMPARING THE COVERAGE OF CHINESE PROTESTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA, DISSIDENT WEBSITES, AND IN THE NEWS

How accurate is media-elicited protest event data from autocracies where the state censors the media? Based on a source-specific model of event selection and a multisource dataset of over 3,100 protests from three Chinese megacities, we demonstrate the substantial advantages of using social media data, capturing 115 times more protests than English-language international news, 74 times more than domestic news, and 10 times more than dissident websites. Social media are most likely to cover small and nonviolent events that other sources often ignore. Aside from antiregime protests, they are less affected by censorship than often assumed. A validity test against public holidays and daily rainfall shows that social media data outperform dissident websites and traditional news. Social media, and to a lesser extent dissident media, are promising new sources for protest event analysis in autocracies. Scholars should treat news media-based event data from heavily censoring regimes with caution.

The Impacts of Political Conflicts in Africa

The number of conflicts and deaths in Africa is rooted in the complex constructions and conjectures of Africa’s political economies, weak institutions, social identities, and cultural ecologies, as configured by specific local, national, regional, and historical experiences. Using real-time data of violent and nonviolent events in Africa, this paper analyzes the most significant indicators. The paper finds that Gross Domestic Product, corruption, state legitimacy, ethnic fractionalization, political effectiveness, and polity are significant in modeling the likelihood of political instability. The paper concludes that African countries require reconfiguration of the public and social institutions without ignoring the human factor that accelerate polarization and aggravation. Any marginalized groups should feel economically empowered and in control of their resources. The existential benefit of strong political institutions cannot be underrated as a way to ensure smooth power transition and curb of greed, which is a motivator.

Hurting without hitting: The economic cost of political tension

Political tension that causes diplomatic strain rarely escalates into direct violence or war. This paper identifies the economic effects of such non-violent political tension by examining Taiwan’s sovereignty debate. Non-violent events harming the relationship with mainland China lead to an average daily drop of 200 basis points in Taiwanese stock returns. The impact is more severe on firms openly supporting the Taiwanese pro-independence party. Through a series of tests, we show that this economic penalty is targeted at pro-independence firms that are economically exposed to mainland China via either investments or exports.

The Role of Intergroup Emotions in Political Violence

Emotions can drive intergroup behavior, including intergroup violence. We propose that anger, contempt, and disgust (ANCODI) work together in combination to motivate action, devaluation of the other group, and then elimination of their members. We tested the ANCODI hypothesis by examining speeches given by leaders of extreme political groups prior to major events or rallies that either turned violent (e.g., Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany) or did not (e.g., Gandhi’s Salt March in India). Three studies assessed these speeches in the year prior to the critical event and coded for verbal and nonverbal emotional and emotional-appraisal content in references to the nemesis group. Amounts of all three of the ANCODI emotions and their precursor appraisals, in text or video, were elevated 3 months prior to violent events, whereas only anger was elevated prior to nonviolent events. These results suggest that leaders using the ANCODI emotions can generate violence against others, and that identifying this combination prior to an event may facilitate interventions to reduce intergroup violence.

Hearing Stories That Violate Expectations Leads to Emotional Broadcasting

Emotional Broadcaster Theory (EBT) proposes that the need to disclose turns people into news broadcasters whose stories inform others of major events. The present research tested whether the discrepancy theory of emotion explains emotional broadcasting. Study 1 showed that hearers anticipated being more strongly affected by and more likely to retell unusual stories (per discrepancy theory) than stories conveyed by a distressed teller (per emotional contagion theory). Study 2 tested whether the same unusual event (violence) would be disclosed more by people for whom violence is unexpected. As predicted, people with minimal exposure to violence regarded violence as more disturbing and as more likely to be disclosed than did those with extensive exposure to violence. Study 3 replicated Study 2, and showed that violence exposure moderated anticipated emotional arousal and disclosure only for violent events but not for unusual nonviolent events. Neither violence seeking nor social desirability confounded these results.

In data we trust? A comparison of UCDP GED and ACLED conflict events datasets

In recent years, several large-scale data-collection projects have produced georeferenced, disaggregated events-level conflict data which can aid researchers in studying the microlevel dynamics of civil war. This article describes the differences between the two leading conflict events datasets, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program Georeferenced Events Dataset (UCDP GED) and the Armed Conflict Location Events Dataset (ACLED), including their relative strengths and weaknesses. The aim of the article is to provide readers with some guidelines as to when these datasets should be used and when they should be avoided; it finds that those interested in subnational analyses of conflict should be wary of ACLED’s data because of uneven quality-control issues which can result in biased findings if left unchecked by the researcher. The article concludes that those interested in non-violent events such as troop movements have only ACLED to choose from, since UCDP has not coded such data, but again warns researchers to be wary of the quality of the data. Finally, while the creation of these datasets is a positive development, some caveats are raised in relation to both datasets about the reliance on media sources.

Effects of Pre- and Post-Katrina Nonviolent and Violent Experiences on Male Veterans' Psychological Functioning

Identifying individuals at risk for mental health problems after a disaster often involves assessing potentially traumatic exposures inherent to the disaster. Survivors of disasters also may have been exposed, both before and during the event, to trauma not directly related to the disaster. A substantial literature suggests exposure to interpersonal violence may have more severe negative outcomes than exposure to non-violent events; however, it is unclear whether violent vs nonviolent exposures before and during a disaster have differential effects on postdisaster psychological functioning. We examined the associations of violent and nonviolent exposures before and during Hurricane Katrina with postdisaster psychological functioning in a sample of male military veterans. Violent and nonviolent exposures post-Hurricane Katrina as well as pre-Katrina violent exposures were significantly associated with symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder, panic, and generalized anxiety disorder more than 2 years after the storm. Moreover, veterans who reported violent exposures pre-Katrina were more than 4 times more likely to have reexperienced interpersonal violence during Katrina than those who did not report such exposures. Results suggest assessing disaster-specific experiences in addition to predisaster interpersonal violence may be important for identifying and triaging individuals at risk for postdisaster mental health problems.

Traumatic events involving friends and family members in a sample of African American early adolescents.

The current study examines violent and nonviolent traumatic events involving friends and family members as predictors of PTSD, depression, internalizing, and externalizing behaviors in a sample of 403 African American early adolescents from chronically violent environments. Although there are many studies of urban children's exposure to community violence, few address the unique contribution of events involving significant others, and almost no research addresses African American youths' exposure to traumatic events other than violence. This study found that violent and nonviolent traumatic events were pervasive in the lives of these urban youth, and that they were as likely to report loss and injury of a close other through an accident as an act of violence. There were strong gender differences in the data. Unexpectedly, injury or loss of a close friend or family member from nonviolent events, but not from violent events, predicted PTSD, internalizing, and depression for boys. The results are discussed in terms of their implications for school-based universal interventions in communities where large numbers of children live with loss and trauma.

"I didn't do nothin'": The discursive construction of school suspension

This article examines the issue of school suspension by looking at the sociocultural factors that influence a teacher's decision to remove a student from the classroom. The authors use ethnographic and discourse analytic approaches to study how disciplinary moments are constructed by teachers and students in an urban high school in the Midwest. The analysis of classroom observations, videotaped lessons, and interviews from a longitudinal study at this multiethnic high school shows that suspensions frequently occur in the absence of any physical violence or blatant verbal abuse. Rather, suspensions are often preceded by a complex series of nonviolent events when one disruptive act among many is singled out for action by the teacher. This study has implications for current debates about zero-tolerance policies that disproportionately affect students of color for their misbehavior in school. Our analysis suggests that removing a student from class is a highly contextualized decision based on subtle race and gender relations that cannot be adequately addressed in school discipline policies.

Mesure des risques de victimisation associés à la pratique clinique auprès des détenus fédéraux

This article focuses on three questions related to the risks of criminal victimization encountered by clinicians in criminology: 1) what are the general incidence, prevalence and forms of victimization in this profession? 2) Does victimization occur mostly in work settings or during any other routine activity? 3) Are these events of victimization stable across time or within the individual's career? Statistically, two main patterns emerge: violent incidents occur in works settings (mostly assaults, assaults with a weapon, illegal confinements) while non-violent events happen outside of occupational settings. In the case of our respondents, between 1976 and 1990, our results show that the risks of criminal victimization were increased by a factor of 33% merely by being clinicians in the field of criminology. Theoretical explanations are drawn from the routine activity model (Cohen and Felson, 1979) and the construction process of social problems (Spector and Kitsuse, 1977).

Drinking in violent and nonviolent events leading to arrest: Evidence from a survey of arrestees

The minimal requirements for evaluating the relative magnitude of acute and chronic effects of alcohol on violent crimes include: (a) a selection of comparable samples of violent and nonviolent events, and (b) adequate controls for the anticipated positive correlation between drinkers and drinking in feasible samples. Following these requirements, hypotheses about the impact of personal drinking patterns and drinking in events on violent crimes in a random sample of 1,147 arrestees interviewed in a California detection facility in 1989 were tested. Using multiple indicators of drinking in events, and taking into account errors of misclassification and correlations between drinkers and drinking, it was found that arrestees charged with violent crimes showed significantly higher rates of drinking in events related to arrest. On the other hand, the twelve-month drinking pattern of arrestees did not discriminate between violent and nonviolent charges in this sample, given controls for drinking in events.

Identifying and Measuring Changes in the Frequency of Event Data

Event data has emerged as a major focus of attention in both international and comparative politics. McClelland (1964, 1961) pioneered its use. The early work of Rummel (1964, 1963) on conflict within and between states led to other data collection and research (Tanter, 1966; Bwy, 1968; Wilkenfeld, 1968; Gurr, 1968). Feierabend, Feierabend, and Nesvold have collected information on violent and nonviolent events within states., Taylor and Hudson (1971) include daily event data for seventeen categories of events within states as well as international interventions. The World Event/Interaction Survey provides a rich source of information on foreign policy activities of states (McClelland and Hoggard, 1969). Azar (1970) has directed a project providing an alternative approach to international events. A number of collections reflecting more narrow geographic or substantive areas have been undertaken.