Pamela E. Oliver
Professor of Sociology

Violence and Nonviolence

(An unsorted collection of possible sources. Need to include Chenoweth and critics.)

  1. Kurt Schock and Chares Demetriou, 2019, “Nonviolent and Violent Trajectories in Social Movements” Chapter 19 of Snow et al Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (available online through UW) Radicalization processes, demilitarization processes, interactions of violent and nonviolent contention.
  2. Colin Beck and Eric Schoon. “Terrorism and Social Movements” Chapter 40 of Snow et al Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (available online through UW) 2019. Definitions, radicalization, intensity and targets of violence, organizational expansion and diversification, interactional dynamics.
  3. Robert Futrell, Pete Simi, and Anna Tan. “Political Extremism and Social Movements.” Chapter 35 of Snow et al Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (available online through UW) 2019. Conceptualizing extremism; organization and networks, context and strategy.
  4. Case, B. S. (2021). “CONTENTIOUS EFFERVESCENCE: THE SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE OF RIOTING*.” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 26(2): 179-196. How do violent protests affect social movement participants? Riots are common in civilian movements, but the effects of protester violence remain under-researched, in part due to an association of civilian protest with nonviolent methods and an association of violent protest with irrational chaos. Specifically, few studies have examined the experiences of rioters themselves. I use theoretical analysis and qualitative in-depth interviews with activists from the United States and South Africa to explore the subjective impact that moments of violent protest have on participants. Activist accounts indicate that many experience what I call “contentious effervescence,” a heightened state and sense of political empowerment amidst low-level violent actions, with long-term effects that raise consciousness and deepen and sustain activists’ resolve. I argue that examining the experiential and emotional effects of riots enhances our ability to understand contentious politics from below. NOTE: Case is doing other papers on importance of civil resistance.
  5. Case, B. S. (2018). “Riots as Civil Resistance: Rethinking the Dynamics of ‘Nonviolent’Struggle.” Journal of Resistance Studies 4(1): 9-44. ow do we understand violent actions in social movements? Civil resistance research has made strides in demonstrating the comparative efficacy of ‘nonviolent’ campaigns, and has become a major force in shaping social movement strategy today, calling for nonviolent discipline. But dominant arguments narrowly interpret the data and uphold a violence/nonviolence dichotomy that does not reflect the tactical repertoires of social movements on the ground. This paper argues that unarmed collective violence is common in civilian-based social movements and can be analyzed in the same terms that civil resistance scholars use to analyze nonviolent actions. The paper makes use of prominent datasets on contentious political actions and on nonviolent struggle to demonstrate the common occurrence of riots alongside nonviolent civil resistance campaigns, and advances a theoretical argument using the example of the anti-Mubarak Egyptian Revolution of 2011. Ultimately, this paper argues that civil resistance studies must move beyond the violence/nonviolence paradigm so that standard analyses of unarmed movements include a broader range of collective actions that more accurately reflect existing movement repertoires.
  6. Case, B. (2021). “Molotov Cocktails to Mass Marches: Strategic Nonviolence, Symbolic Violence, and the Mobilizing Effect of Riots.” Theory in Action 14(1): 18-38. What effects do violent protests have on social movement mobilizations? In recent decades, the field of nonviolence studies has popularized a strategic nonviolence framework to understand activist tactics. This framework is problematic in two ways. First, dominant theories argue that violent protest actions demobilize nonviolent protest. However, there is less empirical support for this claim than often assumed. Current quantitative findings on the demobilizing effects of violent protest rely on a false dichotomy between violence and nonviolence that obscures the effects of low-level violent actions. Through statistical analysis of protest trends in the US over 72 years, I show that riots have an overall mobilizing impact on nonviolent protests. Second, the strategic nonviolence framing encourages an instrumental view of tactics that is prone to miss the symbolic and emotional aspects of different types of actions. Through qualitative interviews with participants in the black bloc tactic, I explore the experiential effects of the riot, and find that rioting can have deeply empowering emotional impacts on participants, with lasting effects that sustain activists’ political engagement. In combination, these results demonstrate that low-level violent actions interact with movements in more dynamic ways than dominant theories have understood. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2021 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]
  7. Case, B. S. (2018). “Riots as Civil Resistance: Rethinking the Dynamics of ‘Nonviolent’Struggle.” Journal of Resistance Studies 4(1): 9-44. How do we understand violent actions in social movements? Civil resistance research has made strides in demonstrating the comparative efficacy of ‘nonviolent’ campaigns, and has become a major force in shaping social movement strategy today, calling for nonviolent discipline. But dominant arguments narrowly interpret the data and uphold a violence/nonviolence dichotomy that does not reflect the tactical repertoires of social movements on the ground. This paper argues that unarmed collective violence is common in civilian-based social movements and can be analyzed in the same terms that civil resistance scholars use to analyze nonviolent actions. The paper makes use of prominent datasets on contentious political actions and on nonviolent struggle to demonstrate the common occurrence of riots alongside nonviolent civil resistance campaigns, and advances a theoretical argument using the example of the anti-Mubarak Egyptian Revolution of 2011. Ultimately, this paper argues that civil resistance studies must move beyond the violence/nonviolence paradigm so that standard analyses of unarmed movements include a broader range of collective actions that more accurately reflect existing movement repertoires.
  8. (Bosi and Giugni 2012; Bosi and Ó Dochartaigh 2018)Links to an external site.Bosi & Giuni Despite the development of the political violence and terrorism literature, which has moved strongly forward in the past decade, scientific works on the consequences of armed groups are still rare. This article encourages cross-fertilization between the sparse studies of the consequences of political violence and the growing body of research on how social movements matter. First, we show the variety of potential outcomes of armed groups’ violent repertoires. We then review works on the consequences of social movements and highlight lessons for the study of armed groups. Specifically, we urge scholars to look for the interplay of internal and external factors in studying the impact of armed groups. We call for a comparative focus that dwells less on conditions and more on the processes and mechanisms affecting the impact of political violence. At the same time, we acknowledge that the literature on political violence and terrorism can inform social movement scholarship. In particular, students of social movements should pay more attention to the potential economic consequences of protest activities, the international factors constraining their impact, and the life-course patterns of movements’ targets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]  Also Bosi & O’Dochartaigh in SMS about identity and violence
  9. Peay, P. C. and T. Camarillo (2021). “No Justice! Black Protests? No Peace: The Racial Nature of Threat Evaluations of Nonviolent #BlackLivesMatter Protests.” Social Science Quarterly 102(1): 198-208. Abstract Objective: Nonviolent protests have been at the center of minority interest advocacy for nearly a century, as marginalized communities air their grievances in search for substantive policy change. While groups organize and demonstrate in a peaceful manner, there is no guarantee that onlookers will perceive them as such. We find it necessary to explore what factors shape perceptions of social movement protests and how the racial composition of a demonstration can elicit dramatically different responses from onlookers. Methods: To examine the impact of racial identity on protest evaluations, we conduct a survey experiment on a total of 921 respondents. We simulate a media report concerning a Black Lives Matter protest to determine how subtle changes in the racial composition of the demonstration elicit varying perceptions of a potential for violence. Results: We find that protests that comprise all-Black participants are perceived to have a higher probability to end in violence than more diverse demonstrations. These findings come despite an assurance that the protest in question was peaceful. Consistent with minority threat theory, these perceptions are largely driven by the sentiments of white respondents. Conclusion: We argue that ill-conceived threat perceptions, rooted in the racial composition of Black Lives Matter protests, complicate the mission of those charged with making visible the plight of Black Americans. Even when Black protesters adhere to the “rules” of non-violent protest, there is no guarantee that the biases of onlookers will not drown out their efforts. These findings have wide reaching implications on the exercise of First Amendment right to protest, the role of the media in reporting on protests, and the expectations of government interactions with protesters.
  10. Donker, Teije H. 2019. “Between Rebellion and Uprising Intersecting Networks and Discursive Strategies in Rebel Controlled Syria.” Social Movement Studies 18(1):17–35. In the article I explore how, at the individual level, participation in multiple networks opens up questions regarding the classification of social activism. The central contention is that as mobilization networks increasingly intersect, explicit discursive designations of activism (being ‘political’ or ‘nonpolitical, social’) by individual activists becomes more prevalent. I substantiate this argument with an in-depth exploration of the Syrian uprising. I show that as two distinct networks-one that emerged around nonviolent activism, another that emerged around a violent uprising-increasingly intersected, activists began to use specific discursive strategies. On the one side, a strategy emerged that emphasized the nonpolitical nature of mobilization, distancing activism discursively from intersecting networks. On the other side, a strategy emerged of politicizing collective identities, thereby bridging discursively various mobilization networks. The article thereby adds to existing studies on the intersection between network structure and individual activism. The analysis builds on more than a hundred primary sources from various rebel groups and relevant local actors in addition to thirty interviews with relevant players among activist, rebel and public services organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
  11. Yassan, Y. (2021). Reactive, cost-beneficial or undermining legitimacy: How disempowered protestors explain their part in violent clashes with the state. Social Movement Studies, 20(4), 478–494. sih.
    Among cases of violent clashes between states and citizens, that of disempowered minorities is particularly paradoxical. The use of violence can negatively undermine the protest’s public legitimacy, and violence is likely also to extract a personal price from those using it, especially from disempowered protestors. Yet, violent clashes occur. This article, based on sixty in-depth, semi-structured interviews with protest activists, twenty of them Israelis of Ethiopian descent, focuses on ex-post explanations of disempowered protestors for their part in violent clashes with the state. Three non-mutually exclusive explanations can be offered: First, violence may be described as reactive, take place in clashes with the police during demonstrations, and therefore not a matter of strategy. Second, violent clashes can be perceived retrospectively as cost-beneficial, even if they were not a planned strategy. The potential benefit of raising problems to social discourse, despite the high cost of violence, can explain that. Finally, violent clashes can indicate undermining distinct components of state legitimacy. A combined analysis of the current case study, and of findings from other struggle arenas worldwide, provides a broad picture that could be generalized: while disempowered protestors tend to undermine state legitimacy based on the components trust, procedural justice, distributive justice, and effectiveness, they usually would not tend to undermine legitimacy based on the components identification and legality. The case of the Israelis of Ethiopian descent may be the exception that proves the rule, regarding trust and ex-post explanations for violent clashes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
  12. Zlobina, A., & Gonzalez Vazquez, A. (2018). What is the right way to protest? On the process of justification of protest, and its relationship to the propensity to participate in different types of protest. Social Movement Studies, 17(2), 234–250. sih. This study explores how citizens in Spain perceive different tactics employed in anti-austerity protests in 2011–2013, and tests the model of the process of justification of protest. This model combines the elements of Gamson’s collective action frames theory (effectiveness, anger and grievances, operationalized as appraisal of harm) with the concept of legitimacy. It also links justification to the intention to participate. We empirically differentiate between three protest tactics: normative demonstrations, non-normative peaceful strategies, and non-normative violent actions. We find that demonstrations are perceived to be more legitimate, but less effective than non-normative peaceful protests. Violent strategies, on the other hand, are seen to be more effective than legitimate. We postulate and find that legitimacy and effectiveness partially or fully mediate the impact of political ideology, anger, and appraisal of harm on the probability of participation in non-normative protest. Finally, we establish meaningful differences in the predictors of the likelihood of joining normative, non-normative peaceful, or non-normative violent protests. Overall, our results suggest that the study of justification of collective action and especially, the inclusion of the notion of legitimacy, enriches our understanding of the popular approval of and propensity to participate in different forms of collective protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
  13. Eddy, M. P. (2014). ‘We Have to Bring Something Different to this Place’: Principled and Pragmatic Nonviolence Among Accompaniment Workers. Social Movement Studies, 13(4), 443–464. sih.Many scholars of social movements and nonviolence frame the salient ideological divisions among nonviolent activists as a dichotomy or a continuum between principled and pragmatic nonviolence. Yet, there is a notable lack of empirical analyses on the prevalence of these nonviolent orientations among activists, and how they might contribute to tactical choices and shape emotional fields of interaction with opponents. Building from fieldwork and interviews (N = 25), this case study analyzes the nonviolent performances of Christian Peacemaker Teams and the International Solidarity Movement in Israel–Palestine. It is contended that international accompaniment workers perform nonviolence in starkly divergent ways depending on their personal commitments to either principled or pragmatic nonviolence, as well as organizational norms on this dimension. It is proposed that linking ‘tragic’ and ‘comic’ dramaturgical styles to the performance of nonviolent activism offers a route for specifying the mechanisms of pragmatic and principled nonviolence while helping to explain diverse outcomes in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
  14. Dynamics of Contention (McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly) Part 1, 
  15. Freedom is a constant Struggle (Andrews) Ch. 3.
  16. Dissident Groups, Personal Networks, and Spontaneous Cooperation: The East German Revolution of 1989.  Karl-Dieter Opp, Christiane Gern. American Sociological Review, Vol. 58, No. 5. (Oct., 1993), pp. 659-680. Stable URL