Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence

Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence PDF Author: Deborah Avant
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190056924
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Many view civil wars as violent contests between armed combatants. But history shows that community groups, businesses, NGOs, local governments, and even armed groups can respond to war by engaging in civil action. Characterized by a reluctance to resort to violence and a willingness to show enough respect to engage with others, civil action can slow, delay, or prevent violent escalations. This volume explores how people in conflict environments engage in civil action, and the ways such action has affected violence dynamics in Syria, Peru, Kenya, Northern Ireland, Mexico, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Spain, and Colombia. These cases highlight the critical and often neglected role that civil action plays in conflicts around the world.

Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence

Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence PDF Author: Deborah Avant
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190056924
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
Many view civil wars as violent contests between armed combatants. But history shows that community groups, businesses, NGOs, local governments, and even armed groups can respond to war by engaging in civil action. Characterized by a reluctance to resort to violence and a willingness to show enough respect to engage with others, civil action can slow, delay, or prevent violent escalations. This volume explores how people in conflict environments engage in civil action, and the ways such action has affected violence dynamics in Syria, Peru, Kenya, Northern Ireland, Mexico, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Spain, and Colombia. These cases highlight the critical and often neglected role that civil action plays in conflicts around the world.

Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence

Civil Action and the Dynamics of Violence PDF Author: Deborah Avant
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190056916
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Many view civil wars as violent contests between armed combatants. But history shows that community groups, businesses, NGOs, local governments, and even armed groups can respond to war by engaging in civil action. Characterized by a reluctance to resort to violence and a willingness to show enough respect to engage with others, civil action can slow, delay, or prevent violent escalations. This volume explores how people in conflict environments engage in civil action, and the ways such action has affected violence dynamics in Syria, Peru, Kenya, Northern Ireland, Mexico, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Spain, and Colombia. These cases highlight the critical and often neglected role that civil action plays in conflicts around the world.

Why Civil Resistance Works

Why Civil Resistance Works PDF Author: Erica Chenoweth
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231527489
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 451

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Book Description
For more than a century, from 1900 to 2006, campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as effective as their violent counterparts in achieving their stated goals. By attracting impressive support from citizens, whose activism takes the form of protests, boycotts, civil disobedience, and other forms of nonviolent noncooperation, these efforts help separate regimes from their main sources of power and produce remarkable results, even in Iran, Burma, the Philippines, and the Palestinian Territories. Combining statistical analysis with case studies of specific countries and territories, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan detail the factors enabling such campaigns to succeed and, sometimes, causing them to fail. They find that nonviolent resistance presents fewer obstacles to moral and physical involvement and commitment, and that higher levels of participation contribute to enhanced resilience, greater opportunities for tactical innovation and civic disruption (and therefore less incentive for a regime to maintain its status quo), and shifts in loyalty among opponents' erstwhile supporters, including members of the military establishment. Chenoweth and Stephan conclude that successful nonviolent resistance ushers in more durable and internally peaceful democracies, which are less likely to regress into civil war. Presenting a rich, evidentiary argument, they originally and systematically compare violent and nonviolent outcomes in different historical periods and geographical contexts, debunking the myth that violence occurs because of structural and environmental factors and that it is necessary to achieve certain political goals. Instead, the authors discover, violent insurgency is rarely justifiable on strategic grounds.

Civil Resistance

Civil Resistance PDF Author: Erica Chenoweth
Publisher: What Everyone Needs to Know(r)
ISBN: 0190244399
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
Exploring both historical cases of civil resistance and more contemporary examples such as the Arab Awakenings and various ongoing movements in the United States, Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know® provides a comprehensive and engaging review of the current field of knowledge.

The Logic of Violence in Civil War

The Logic of Violence in Civil War PDF Author: Stathis N. Kalyvas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113945692X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 20

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Book Description
By analytically decoupling war and violence, this book explores the causes and dynamics of violence in civil war. Against the prevailing view that such violence is an instance of impenetrable madness, the book demonstrates that there is logic to it and that it has much less to do with collective emotions, ideologies, and cultures than currently believed. Kalyvas specifies a novel theory of selective violence: it is jointly produced by political actors seeking information and individual civilians trying to avoid the worst but also grabbing what opportunities their predicament affords them. Violence, he finds, is never a simple reflection of the optimal strategy of its users; its profoundly interactive character defeats simple maximization logics while producing surprising outcomes, such as relative nonviolence in the 'frontlines' of civil war.

Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence

Perpetrators and Perpetration of Mass Violence PDF Author: Timothy Williams
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135117584X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
As the most comprehensive edited volume to be published on perpetrators and perpetration of mass violence, the volume sets a new agenda for perpetrator research by bringing together contributions from such diverse disciplines as political science, sociology, social psychology, history, anthropology and gender studies, allowing for a truly interdisciplinary discussion of the phenomenon of perpetration. The cross-case nature of the volume allows the reader to see patterns across case studies, bringing findings from inter alia the Holocaust, the genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, and the civil wars in Cambodia and Côte d’Ivoire into conversation with each other. The chapters of this volume are united by a common research interest in understanding what constitutes perpetrators as actors, what motivates them, and how dynamics behind perpetration unfold. Their attention to the interactions between disciplines and cases allows for the insights to be transported into more abstract ideas on perpetration in general. Amongst other aspects, they indicate that instead of being an extraordinary act, perpetration is often ordinary, that it is crucial to studying perpetrators and perpetration not from looking at the perpetrators as actors but by focusing on their deeds, and that there is a utility of ideologies in explaining perpetration, when we differentiate them more carefully and view them in a more nuanced light. This volume will be vital reading for students and scholars of genocide studies, human rights, conflict studies and international relations.

Order, Conflict, and Violence

Order, Conflict, and Violence PDF Author: Stathis N. Kalyvas
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521722391
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
There might appear to be little that binds the study of order and the study of violence and conflict. Bloodshed in its multiple forms is often seen as something separate from and unrelated to the domains of 'normal' politics that constitute what we think of as order. But violence is used to create order, to maintain it, and to uphold it in the face of challenges. This volume demonstrates the myriad ways in which order and violence are inextricably intertwined. The chapters embrace such varied disciplines as political science, economics, history, sociology, philosophy, and law; employ different methodologies, from game theory to statistical modeling to in-depth historical narrative to anthropological ethnography; and focus on different units of analysis and levels of aggregation, from the state to the individual to the world system. All are essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand current trends in global conflict.

The Role of External Support in Nonviolent Campaigns

The Role of External Support in Nonviolent Campaigns PDF Author: Erica Chenoweth
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781943271368
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
Nonviolent campaigns usually take place in complex domestic and international settings, where support from outside actors can be a double-edged sword. We argue that nonviolent campaigns tend to benefit the most from external assistance that allows them to generate high participation, maintain nonviolent discipline, deter crackdowns, and elicit security force defections. But various forms of external assistance have mixed effects on the characteristics and outcomes of nonviolent campaigns. We use original qualitative and quantitative data to examine the ways that external assistance impacted the characteristics and success rates of post-2000 maximalist uprisings. Among other findings, we argue that long-term investment in civil society and democratic institutions can strengthen the societal foundations for nonviolent movements; that activists who receive training prior to peak mobilization are much more likely to mobilize campaigns with high participation, low fatalities, and greater likelihood of defections; that donor coordination is important to be able to effectively support and leverage nonviolent campaigns; and that concurrent external support to armed groups tends to undermine nonviolent movements in numerous ways. Flexible donor assistance that supports safe spaces for campaign planning and relationship-building, and multilateral diplomatic pressure that mitigates regime repression can be particularly helpful for nonviolent campaigns.

Breaking Laws

Breaking Laws PDF Author: Isabelle Sommier
Publisher: Protest and Social Movements
ISBN: 9789089649348
Category : Civil disobedience
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book questions the complex relationship between social movements and violence, and shows how and why violence occurs or does not, and what different meanings it can take.

Confronting the Curse

Confronting the Curse PDF Author: Cullen S. Hendrix
Publisher: Peterson Institute for International Economics
ISBN: 0881326763
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
The political economy of natural resource wealth poses two interrelated challenges for American foreign policy, both involving governance issues in countries that are abundantly endowed with natural resources. The potentially negative impact of natural resources on development is captured in the phrase "the resource curse". The implications are the greatest for the commodity producers themselves, ranging from complications for macroeconomic management to political authoritarianism and, in the extreme, the precipitation of violent civil conflict. For US policy, the resource curse presents challenges with respect to coping with state failure and associated transborder phenomena. The issues extend to broader geopolitics. Resource abundance confers financial and political power on producers. China's emergence as a major importer and investor in extraction, willing to accommodate authoritarian producers, exacerbates the challenge, potentially undercutting international efforts to encourage greater transparency and improved management of natural resource wealth. This issue is of particular importance for US policy toward Africa