Campaign Of Violence Research Articles

Stabilizing or Challenging Patriarchy? Sketches of Selected “New” Political Masculinities

Although it has come under multiple attacks and pressures over the past decades, patriarchy has proven itself to be highly resilient and adaptive. However, new ways of “being men” have started to emerge over the past years that at least seemingly question dominant masculinities. I examine here four “new” forms of political masculinities: violently fratriarchal masculinities, “softer” militarized masculinities of peacekeepers, the less violent masculinities promoted by global antidomestic violence campaigns, and lastly what I term the “He4She” masculinities of international political actors. These four manifestations of political masculinities underscore on the transitional and temporal nature of gender roles and identities. All have arisen out of political and social transitions in which previously dominant notions of masculinity have been challenged. These changes, however, do not necessarily mean an end to patriarchy. Indeed, the new somewhat more egalitarian masculinities may serve to shore up and stabilize patriarchy.

Rohingya Refugee Crisis and Forest Cover Change in Teknaf, Bangladesh

Following a targeted campaign of violence by Myanmar military, police, and local militias, more than half a million Rohingya refugees have fled to neighboring Bangladesh since August 2017, joining thousands of others living in overcrowded settlement camps in Teknaf. To accommodate this mass influx of refugees, forestland is razed to build spontaneous settlements, resulting in an enormous threat to wildlife habitats, biodiversity, and entire ecosystems in the region. Although reports indicate that this rapid and vast expansion of refugee camps in Teknaf is causing large scale environmental destruction and degradation of forestlands, no study to date has quantified the camp expansion extent or forest cover loss. Using remotely sensed Sentinel-2A and -2B imagery and a random forest (RF) machine learning algorithm with ground observation data, we quantified the territorial expansion of refugee settlements and resulting degradation of the ecological resources surrounding the three largest concentrations of refugee camps—Kutupalong–Balukhali, Nayapara–Leda and Unchiprang—that developed between pre- and post-August of 2017. Employing RF as an image classification approach for this study with a cross-validation technique, we obtained a high overall classification accuracy of 94.53% and 95.14% for 2016 and 2017 land cover maps, respectively, with overall Kappa statistics of 0.93 and 0.94. The producer and user accuracy for forest cover ranged between 92.98–98.21% and 96.49–92.98%, respectively. Results derived from the thematic maps indicate a substantial expansion of refugee settlements in the three refugee camp study sites, with an increase of 175 to 1530 hectares between 2016 and 2017, and a net growth rate of 774%. The greatest camp expansion is observed in the Kutupalong–Balukhali site, growing from 146 ha to 1365 ha with a net increase of 1219 ha (total growth rate of 835%) in the same time period. While the refugee camps’ occupancy expanded at a rapid rate, this gain mostly occurred by replacing the forested land, degrading the forest cover surrounding the three camps by 2283 ha. Such rapid degradation of forested land has already triggered ecological problems and disturbed wildlife habitats in the area since many of these makeshift resettlement camps were set up in or near corridors for wild elephants, causing the death of several Rohingyas by elephant trampling. Hence, the findings of this study may motivate the Bangladesh government and international humanitarian organizations to develop better plans to protect the ecologically sensitive forested land and wildlife habitats surrounding the refugee camps, enable more informed management of the settlements, and assist in more sustainable resource mobilization for the Rohingya refugees.

Days of rage

Although the empirical study of strategic nonviolent action has expanded in recent years, no current dataset provides detailed accounts of the day-to-day methods and tactics used by various nonviolent and violent actors seeking political change. We introduce the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) version 3.0 dataset, which assembles over 100,000 hand-coded observations of nonviolent and violent methods in 21 countries around the world between 1991 and 2012. Researchers can use these data and their associated coding framework to (1) replicate or challenge existing findings about nonviolent and violent action; (2) test or uncover novel insights about the dynamics of violent and nonviolent action; and (3) recode existing protest events databases to capture specific variations in risk and disruption across event types. In particular, scholars can use these data to better understand which types of lower-level interactions between dissidents and regimes lead to large-scale mobilization; which sequences of nonviolent methods are most effective; and which types of spatial and participation diffusion yield the highest likelihood of success.

Telling the Story of the National Socialist Underground (NSU): A Narrative Media Analysis

ABSTRACTThe German media have played a much more important role in the context of the National Socialist Underground (NSU) than has been acknowledged. Drawing on criminological approaches to media images of crime and narrative hermeneutics, this article is based on an analysis of more than 1,000 print news articles published on the NSU crimes before and after the discovery of the perpetrators in November 2011. It argues that the story of the NSU as a right-wing terrorist group whose violent campaign was not recognized for more than a decade cannot be conceived of without the news media's narrative work across the period 2000–2012.

Students in the Streets: Education and Nonviolent Protest

This study investigates whether protest movements consisting of students and educated protesters are more likely to (a) use nonviolent rather than violent resistance and (b) successfully reach their goals. Extant literature suggests that education is negatively linked to violent conflict, and the commonly assumed mechanism is that educated groups are less likely to resort to violence. Moreover, many argue that education is a force for regime change and democratization, by inducing successful protest movements. This article is the first to systematically test implications of these mechanisms at the protest level. The empirical analysis builds on original data on the educational background of participants in all protest campaigns aiming for regime change from 1900 to 2006 identified in the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes Dataset 1.0. I find robust evidence that protest movements with a high degree of involvement by students and graduates are more likely to turn nonviolent. Moreover, there is some (although weaker) evidence that these movements are more likely to achieve their goals, but only due to their nonviolent dispositions. This adds to the literature explaining why some movements resort to nonviolence (and succeed), by establishing that the identity and socioeconomic background of protesters matter.

Parlez-vous français? Language and agricultural aid allocation strategies in northern Mali

In January 2012, insurgent groups in northern Mali began a violent campaign against the central government. By March 2012, then-President Amadou Toumani Touré (ATT) was ousted in a successful coup. The ongoing unrest has drastically shifted the strategies foreign donors are using to allocate aid, particularly to northern Mali. While bilateral donors have drastically scaled back all programmatic aid, NGOs including Oxfam International and the Red Cross have stepped in to provide humanitarian aid. This shift from programmatic to humanitarian aid has left the agricultural sector particularly vulnerable. Since most of the food grown in Mali is grown in the northern region, such a drastic decrease in agricultural aid will have catastrophic effects in terms of projected food shortages. Furthermore, using evidence from new World Bank survey data gathered in northern Mali in 2015, we find that the agricultural aid being distributed by NGOs is not targeting those most in need. We find that French-speaking villages are more likely to be targeted for aid compared to non-French-speaking villages. We argue that in northern Mali, under the current sociopolitical conditions, speaking French makes these villages more attractive to aid organizations, regardless of their actual need for assistance. This appropriation principle means that aid is not going to the most vulnerable, but to the most politically or socially connected. We also find proof of a second layer of aid misappropriation. While Sonrai and Tamasheq-speaking villages receive less agricultural aid than French-speaking villages, the aid they do receive goes to those households most vulnerable to exogenous shocks. However, in French-speaking villages, the most vulnerable households are not guaranteed to receive agricultural aid. If desperately needed agricultural aid continues to be misappropriated, it could lead countries like Mali to become even more unstable.

Game Changers: Detecting Shifts in Overdispersed Count Data

In this paper, I introduce a Bayesian model for detecting changepoints in a time series of overdispersed counts, such as contributions to candidates over the course of a campaign or counts of terrorist violence. To avoid having to specify the number of changepoint ex ante, this model incorporates a hierarchical Dirichlet process prior to estimate the number of changepoints as well as their location. This allows researchers to discover salient structural breaks and perform inference on the number of such breaks in a given time series. I demonstrate the usefulness of the model with applications to campaign contributions in the 2012 U.S. Republican presidential primary and incidences of global terrorism from 1970 to 2015.

Drugs, Violence and Trauma in the Colombian Context: A Health Care Point of View of a Human Rights Challenge.

The impact of violence due to illicit drugs markets varies tremendously in magnitude and characteristics depending on several factors. In Colombia, drugs and trauma are related in multiple ways. From interpersonal violence at the street level to the criminal actions of various armed groups whose violent campaigns are financed through the vast profits associated with the illicit drug market. The objective of this review is to analyze the association of the illicit drugs trade and its impact on violence in Colombia from the viewpoint of healthcare providers who care for trauma patients. Injuries related to drug traffic violence are high in Colombia, and only a small reduction was obtained after severe crime enforcement policies. The societal cost of the war on drugs policy is high on trauma deaths and related disabilities according to several reports from non-government agencies and the Colombian National Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences. A health care initiative in order to understand the drug phenomena as a health care problem shifting the actual criminal-justice based on the approach can minimize the human rights crisis that is evolving being faced every day at health care facilities in Colombia. This new approach in the actual post-conflict environment deserves to be analyzed.

Erdogan's Future: The Failed Coup, The Kurds & The Gulenists

Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 41, No. 2, Winter 2018 Erdogan’s Future: The Failed Coup, The Kurds & The Gulenists Michael M. Gunter* Introduction On April 16, 2017, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s long campaign to convert Turkey into a presidential system that would grant him significant new powers prevailed when a controversial referendum was narrowly approved.1 Indeed, Erdogan already had become Turkey’s first popularly elected president in August 2014, forced his previous ally and former president Abdullah Gul out of politics, and hand-picked his new Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu whom he then fired in May 2016 to appoint the even more compliant Binali Yildirim. In recent years, Erdogan has also jailed many perceived political opponents such as journalists, academics, military leaders, and Kurdish leaders, among others. For example, media freedom in Turkey, as ranked by Freedom House,2 1 *Michael M. Gunter is Professor of Political Science, college of Arts and Sciences, at Tennessee Technical University. Dr. Gunter is an authority on Kurds in Turkey and Iraq and has written seven books on the Kurdish struggle. He is a board member of the Center for Eurasian Studies. 1 Patrick Kingsley, “Erdogan Claims Vast Powers in Turkey after Narrow Victory in Referendum,” The New York Times, April 16, 2017, Https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/16/ world/europe/turkey-rerendum-polls-erdogan.html, accessed July 2, 2017. For background, see Soner Cagaptay, “Erdogan’s Nationalist Path to a Full Presidential System,” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, May 24, 2016, http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis /view/erdogans-nationalist-path-to-a-full-presidential-system, accessed August 23, 2016; P. Scharfe, “Erdogan’s Presidential Dreams, Turkey’s Constitutional Politics,” Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective, 8 (February 5, 2015), http://origins.osu.edu/article/erdo-s-presidential -dreams-turkey-s-constitutuional-politics, accessed August 23, 2016; and Semih Idiz, “Erdogan Aims to Create Stronger Presidential System,” Al-Monitor, February 3, 2015, http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2015/02/turkey-erdogan-presidential-system-campaign .html, accessed August 23, 2016. 2 Freedom House, “Turkey 2015 Press Freedom Report”, https://freedom/house.org/ report/freedom-press/2015/turkey, accessed August 23, 2016, which ranked Turkey as being “Not Free.” 2 Reporters Without Borders,3 and Bianet4 among others, has deteriorated at an alarming rate in recent years as Erdogan aggressively used the penal code, criminal defamation legislation, and the country’s antiterrorism law to punish critical reporting. Journalists faced growing violence, harassment, and intimidation. Can Dundar and Erdem Gul, editor-in-chief and Ankara bureau chief respectively of the leading opposition newspaper Cumhuriyet, are two egregious examples of this situation.5 Erdogan personally filed a criminal complaint against them for leaking state secrets, and both were sentenced to five-year prison terms in May 2016 for reporting on how Erdogan’s government had tried to ship arms to jihadists in Syria. Zaman, a well-respected (but Gulenist–run) newspaper and Turkey’s largest, was placed under state control and represented another appalling case, among many others, of how Erdogan has sought to reduce members of the press critical of his actions. The Ergenekon trials of supposed ultranationalists and retired military officers charged with planning violent campaigns to destabilize Erdogan’s long-ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and seize power began on July 28, 2008 and continued until February 2011.6 The original massive indictment consisting of 2,455 pages described an incredible plot ultimately connecting 531 military, mafia, ultranationalists, lawyers, and academic figures supposedly attempting to weaken the country’s administration and justify an illegal intervention against the Erdogan government and eventually reached more than 8,000 pages of indictments. Critics, however, accused Erdogan—in league with his then Gulenist allies who had infiltrated the police and judiciary—of simply trying to take revenge on their military and Kemalist opponents and promote their own interests with all these conspiracy theories and sham charges. 3 Reporters Without Borders Turkey, https://index.rsf.org/#!/index-details/TUR, accessed August 23, 2016, where Turkey is ranked in 149th place out of over 180 states. 4 Bianet, “Increasing Pressure on Press: Democracy in Question,” Media Monitoring...

Deciphering IS’s Narrative and Activities in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

ABSTRACTThe self-proclaimed Islamic State (IS) has never ceased targeting, verbally and physically, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. While it might be easy to know why, it is harder, but more important, to understand how. Since Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the establishment of a wilaya (province) in the land of the two Holy Mosques in November 2014, thirty-two IS-linked terrorist operations took place in Saudi Arabia. Based on primary source materials produced by IS, and an examination of its footprint in Saudi Arabia, this article explains the calculus behind IS’s strategy and objectives in Saudi, shows the main themes of its narrative and how it tailors its strategic communications campaign to the specific historical and social context of the country, and illustrates how it tries to exploit and claim the Saudi religious heritage. The article also examines to what extent IS’s activities and operations reflect its rhetoric and purported strategy, describes the structure it adopts inside the Kingdom, and demonstrates why the momentum of its violent campaign has faltered in recent months.

It takes a village to raise a militia: local politics, the Nuer White Army, and South Sudan's civil wars

AbstractWhy does South Sudan continue to experience endemic, low intensity conflicts punctuated by catastrophic civil wars? Reporters and analysts often mischaracterise conflicts in the young country of South Sudan as products of divisive ‘tribal’ or ‘ethnic’ rivalries and political competition over oil wealth. More nuanced analyses by regional experts have focused almost exclusively on infighting among elite politicians and military officers based in Juba and other major cities who use patronage networks to ethnicise conflicts. This paper argues instead that civilian militias known as the Nuer White Army have consistently rebelled against elites who they blame for mounting inequalities between urban areas and the rural communities regardless of their ethnicity. While unable to stop governments and NGOs from funnelling almost all their resources to the cities, these militias have consistently mobilised local resources for violent campaigns that redistribute wealth by pillaging urban areas.

Choose Your Weapon: The Impact of Strategic Considerations and Resource Constraints on Terrorist Group Weapon Selection

ABSTRACTHistorians of terrorism note that modern terrorists rely almost exclusively on two weapon types: the gun and the bomb. However, the comparative use of these weapons differs from one terrorist group to the next. We exploit this variation to examine how the tactical decisions of terrorists respond to both strategic aspirations and resource constraints. We argue that a group’s goals (a strategic consideration) and size (a resource constraint) provide a parsimonious explanation for weapon selection. Because firearms inherently expose the shooter to higher risk, are more precise, and must be used if a group aspires to maintain social order, they are unlikely to be used by groups with limited recruits in a campaign of violence. We test this theory using data on over 350 terrorist organizations. Our analysis shows that strategic considerations and resource constraints both impact tactical choices, although groups with the most expansive goals, those which transcend national borders, as well as militias, are two interesting exceptions to our theory. Our research has implications for the use of disaggregated tactical data and in furthering our understanding of the rationality of terrorism.

The Political Economy of the Provos: Inside the Finances of the Provisional IRA—A Revision

ABSTRACTFew academically rigorous accounts exist of the financial activities that sustained the rise of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) during the Northern Ireland Troubles. Through a sustained methodology this study seeks to challenge some popular preconceptions and address omissions in the limited historical record. The article explores the organization's evolving financial sophistication by analyzing PIRA's acquisition of capital rather than its arms dealings. Using a new quantitative evaluation, this investigation confronts the prevailing understanding that Irish-American funds were of unrivaled significance to PIRA. It points to an array of domestic fund-raisers that collectively provided the overwhelming bulk of revenue. The study reveals also how PIRA developed an extensive reliance on criminal gangs for its expertise in illegal fund-raising, suggesting that moneymaking schemes were perceived as a necessary but unpopular by-product of the greater political objective. Finally, this article briefly explores how the British authorities sought to interdict PIRA's funding. While the general perception is that little was done to counteract PIRA's financing initiatives in the early phases of its violent campaign, this study, nevertheless, reveals that a subtle counterfinance initiative did take place in Belfast across the 1970s. Overall, the analysis enables a more rounded comprehension of the group's financial resilience.

‘They know not what they do’? Bolshevik understandings of the agency of perpetrators, 1918-30

This article examines how the Bolshevik party and state officials in early Soviet Russia understood the agency of their enemies, an important consideration which illuminates the particular dynamics and complexities of state violence in the Soviet context. It focusses on criminal justice, and on the relationship between the state and peasantry. The evolution of Bolshevik thought on these issues is traced from the revolution to the onset of Stalinism, providing intellectual context for the violent campaigns of the nineteen‐thirties. The article exposes the theoretical ambiguities, ironies and inconsistencies that characterize the intellectual history of the Soviet state's violent and punitive practices.

Transnational Feminist Movement and the Representation of Survivors of Violence against Women in the Third World: a Case Study of Anti-acid Violence Campaign in Bangladesh

Transnational Feminist Movement and the Representation of Survivors of Violence against Women in the Third World: a Case Study of Anti-acid Violence Campaign in Bangladesh

Gays, Cross-Dressers, and Emos

Gays, Cross-Dressers, and Emos

RESURGENCE OF MILITANCY IN OGONILAND: SOCIO-ECONOMIC PERSPECTIVE

Militant activities, which are mostly localized in Ogoniland, Nigeria, have remained a threat to the security of the country since the death of Ken Saro-Wiwa and nine Ogoni members when they were hanged during military rule. As a way of drawing attention to itself, the militant Ogoni group initiated violence campaigns which resulted in the massive killing of many multinational oil workers and security forces. To understand how militancy came to be such a Gordian knot in Nigeria’s contemporary security situation, one should have an understanding of Ogoniland’s reality as well as the social and economic history.

Ethnic Exclusion and Civil Resistance Campaigns: Opting for Nonviolent or Violent Tactics?

ABSTRACTPrevious research has argued that political inequality between ethnic groups increases the likelihood of both nonviolent and violent protest. In this study, I focus on civil resistance campaigns and argue that the probability that these large-scale, organized movements will take violent over nonviolent forms increases with the share of a country’s population that is excluded from political power on the basis of ethnic affiliation. I expect this to be so because ethnically exclusive regimes are more likely to counter political demands with violent repression, which increases the cost and decreases the anticipated success of nonviolent relative to violent resistance. I test this proposition in a global sample of countries for the period 1950–2006 and find, first, that high levels of ethnic exclusion make civil resistance campaigns more likely to occur violently than nonviolently. Next, to assess the mechanism at play, I conduct a mediation analysis and show that almost half of the effect of ethnic exclusion on violent campaign onset is mediated by the latent level of violent repression in a country. This result suggests that political authorities’ repressive strategies are key to explaining why regime opponents do not always opt for nonviolent forms of civil resistance.

Irish Republican Terrorism: Learning from and Teaching Other Countries

ABSTRACTViolent nationalism in Northern Ireland has drawn inspiration from a tradition of physical-force republicanism that dates back centuries. The consequence has been a strong tendency for Irish republicans to draw on that history as a source of ideas for their conduct of campaigns of violence. However, during Northern Ireland's most recent Troubles from the late 1960s to the 1990s, external influence on the republican movement was evident in some of the tactics adopted and, even more strongly, in the turn toward negotiations. At the same time, Irish republicans have directly assisted other groups from Spain to South Africa in the employment of particular means such as the culvert bomb. But it is more striking that republicans have tended to eschew some of the means that have been widely associated with terrorism elsewhere since the 1960s such as the hijacking of aircraft for the taking of hostages. Transnational influences on Irish nationalists have been greater at the level of political ideas and as a source of legitimization than as a model for their own campaigns.

Mass protests and the resource curse: The politics of demobilization in rentier autocracies

Why are some dictators more successful at demobilizing protest movements than others? Repression sometimes stamps out protest movements (Bahrain in 2011) but can also cause a backlash (Egypt and Tunisia in 2011), leading to regime change. This article argues that the effectiveness of repression in quelling protests varies depending upon the income sources of authoritarian regimes. Oil-rich autocracies are well equipped to contend with domestic and international criticism, and this gives them a greater capacity to quell protests through force. Because oil-poor dictators lack such ability to deal with criticism, repression is more likely to trigger a backlash of increased protests. The argument is supported by analysis of newly available data on mass protests from the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO 2.0) dataset, which covers all countries (1945–2006). This article implies that publics respond strategically to repression, and tend to demobilize when the government is capable of continually employing repression with impunity.