Framing political violence

Explanations of political violence typically refer to two main schools, one that ascribes violence to state capacity (or the lack thereof) and one that describes violence as functional to political strategies.

Theoretical approaches focusing on state capacity connect the onset of violence to the breakdown of state structures. In establishing a link between institutional characteristics and the onset of collective contentious action, these arguments suggest that weak or transitional regimes offer incentives to non-state actors for organising and using violence, while the government is unable to contain behavioural challenges effectively. Recent research has studied the relationship between regime characteristics and civil war onset to conclude that weak governments and mixed regimes, or anocracies, are more

vulnerable to violent collective action and insurgencies (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Hegre et al. 2001).

Violence is therefore the product of chaos, exacerbated by pervasive state failure and weakness in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War (Kaldor 1999). Across much of Africa and the Middle East, instability is primarily driven by the proliferation of failed states, territorial entities characterised by an inadequate exercise of sovereign authority and the predominance of non-state actors over institutional structures (Rotberg 2002).

Tackling domestic and regional insecurity therefore requires that a government can establish its monopoly over the use of physical force, restoring the necessary condition of statehood.

Hence the ‘failed state’ argument, which was popularised in academic debates and in the practice of states and international organisations (International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty 2001; Thürer 1999), reduces the onset of violence within a territory to the mere capacity of a state of exercising sovereign authority. This arises from the predication that functioning states possess fully-fledged Weberian statehood, whereby the state is able to enforce its authority across the territory. However, the reality of many African and Middle Eastern states is different, because political institutions are characterised by uneven ‘topographies of power’ (Boone 2003) and the spatial and temporal persistence of ‘areas of limited statehood’ structured along unconventional governance hierarchies (Risse 2017; Polese and Santini 2019). While uneven state outreach may provide incentives for the emergence of armed non-state actors, the notion of ‘ungoverned spaces’ bears little resemblance to reality and ignores the “local and national contexts and mechanisms that promote violence within a state”

(Raleigh and Dowd 2013: 11).

Additionally, by treating states as unitary entities, these approaches have limited the analysis of violence onset to specific national and structural characteristics, failing to address how subnational geographies of power can produce different institutional outcomes or conflict patterns across countries. They also do not account for how political elites may activate or de-activate violence domestically and for how conflict may cluster in specific subnational geographies. The absence of the state – and not intra-elite dynamics – are key to determining the manifestation of instability.

A second school interprets violence as a strategic tool serving political goals. Within this framework, authors either ascribe violence to the ideological agendas of specific political groups (see Durac 2019 and Dowd 2016: 42) or explain the role within wider political processes. According to the ‘political opportunity’ argument developed in the work of McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, the form and the timing of contentious politics are conditional on the political opportunities arising from the institutional and power structures of a given political system (McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001; Tilly 2007; Tilly and Tarrow 2007). These political opportunities relate to the characteristics of a regime, and include the presence of multiple centres of power, the coercion capacity, the degree of opening, the cohesion of the ruling coalition and of the opposition, and the level of repression. The authors therefore link the emergence of specific forms of contention to institutional frameworks that can prescribe, tolerate or prohibit such collective action and enforce their authoritative in a more or less effective way (2007: 72-74)¹. Changes in the political opportunities structure of a specific regime can thus explain variations in the emergence and modes of collective action across time and space focusing on the interaction between state and non-state actors.

Despite the limitations of the ‘political opportunity’ framework, including its reliance on measures of democracy to explain the likelihood of regime accommodation and repression (Gleditsch and Ruggeri 2010), it importantly highlights how violence is situated within a wider quest for power involving multiple political groups. Violence is a tool of political bargaining that actors use for several political goals, including to signal resources and interests, eliminate political opponents or frustrate collective action and mobilisation (Birch, Daxecker and Höglund 2020). Its onset is facilitated when ruling elites are fragmented and unable to act collectively, or when the stakes of political competition are high: this strategic perspective is used to explain, among other things, electoral violence, where violence becomes one of the tools that candidates and groups use to achieve electoral ends (Hafner-Burton 2014).

1 High-capacity non-democratic regimes typically repress any form of active dissent, outlawing a wide range of repertoires of contention and making it more likely that political conflict will occur clandestinely, outside institutional borders (what the authors term ‘transgressive contentious politics’). At the other side of the spectrum stand low-capacity non-democratic regimes, where the government is typically unable to repress non-state contentious action and lethal conflicts are therefore a likely outcome. Suffering from chronic instability and institutional weakness, low-capacity democratic regimes are prone to military coups, ethnic, political or religious uprisings, and other violent forms of contentious action. Finally, high-capacity democratic regimes create the conditions for social movements to emerge and organise their claims (Tilly and Tarrow 2007).

The conceptualisation ofviolence as a tool for political bargaining implies that a multitude of actors have access to it. In many contexts, governments, political militias, rebel groups, party chiefs and local authorities have access to violent means, and do not hesitate to use force, or threaten to use it, to achieve political goals. Before explaining how this negotiation occurs, and how violence upholds armed political settlements, I now turn to discuss the notion of political elites, the key notion underpinning this research project.