Jackson and Dexter The Social Construction of Organized Political Violence: An Analytical
Framework
Introduction
There is a tendency in civil or intrastate war research to give singular explanations of
conflict. This article does argue for a particular cause of war. Rather, it presents a framework
for how we might think about intrastate war by examining the structures, agents and
practices that make war possible. The article is founded on two premises:
● Even with more and better information we will never have access to the ‘truth’ or
essence of a war. The framework presented in this article allows for a non-
determinist way of thinking about war.
● War and violence are neither spontaneous nor inevitable. War requires supportive
structures.
The authors argue that organized and sustained political violence requires the presence of:
● A particular set of material and discursive structures, including military instruments,
an economic basis for prosecuting war as well as an established set of society-wide
military norms, values and practices.
● Willing and capable agents who can transform the structural potential of the society
into active participants in violence within a given historical and social context.
These two factors are interdependent and co-constitutive. The structures that enable
organized political violence require human agents to trigger their violence-generating
potential and the deliberate creation of organized political violence is an almost impossible
task without an underlying set of conditions.
A Framework for Understanding Organized Political Violence
The ability of structuralist and rationalist explanations to properly account for political
violence is belied by three intersecting questions relating to the location and timing of
organized political violence:
● Why do very similar societies that share the same structural features most commonly
associated with conflict produce radically different conflict histories?
● Given the longevity and persistence of the structural conditions in most conflict-
ridden states, how do we account for the timing of outbreaks of political violence?
● Why is it that similar kinds of conflicts can lead to organized political violence in some
kinds of states but not others?
War studies have focused mainly on the structural characteristics of societies in conflict and
the processes of bounded rational decision-making. These explanations fail to explain why
societies that share structural features most commonly associated with conflict produce
radically different conflict histories and why wars erupt when they do.
A Note on Agency and Structure
The authors’ framework for understanding political violence is based on three related
elements:
● The structures of political violence
● The agents of political violence
● The discursive practices that construct political violence
It is widely accepted that agency and structure are interdependent and co-constituted:
structures are the product of social actions; social actions are shaped and made possible by
structures. The authors define structure and agency as follows:
, ● Structure
All social practices take place within a set of conditions that enable certain actions
and constrain others. It is the relations between the conditions for actions that
constitute the structures of the social world. These structures are themselves
produced through human action. Structures are not fixed, though they may appear
that way.
● Agency
The authors reject the notion of an autonomous individual, but do not view agency as
the automatic product of a particular discourse. Agency may be structurally derived,
but is not structurally determined. The authors aim to explain political violence as
human action involving intentionality, and not simply as the result of determining
structural features.
The Structures of Political Violence
The social construction of organized and sustained political violence requires the presence
of a particular set of material and discursive structures:
● A sufficient material base for sustained violence
● A series of material conditions correlating with the outbreak of violent conflict (‘weak
state’ structures, poverty, transitions to democratic forms of governance, intense
social divisions, presence of lootable resources, breakdowns in law and order, large-
scale unemployment). Events or conditions that can be interpreted as constituting a
social crisis (economic downturn, social tensions, security threats) can also constitute
a conflict-generating structure.
● A set of society-wide military norms, values, identities, institutions and practices
which both enable and legitimize political violence by giving meaning to materiality. In
turn, these social norms and institutional practices are rooted in a series of meta-
narratives and public narratives. At the same time, these meta-narratives can be
understood to produce the audience they wish to speak to (identity-forming
narratives). The discursive potential for violence exists in all states and societies.
Violence is deeply embedded in the idea of the state and is reproduced through the
practices that constitute the sovereign state. Meta-narratives are not deliberate, elite-
driven attempts at securitization. They are woven into the fabric of society,
constituting and being constituted by a particular culture.
The Agents of Political Violence
Organized and sustained political violence also requires willing and capable agents. Two
types of agents are necessary in the process of enacting political violence:
● Conflict entrepreneurs: agents who can contingently transform the structural potential
of the society or group into active participants in violence. In most cases of intrastate
war, it takes an interlocking set of national level and local level elites across a wide
variety of social sectors to coordinate their message, and organization to create the
widespread social consensus necessary for enacting violence. Such actors may be
driven by political or material gain, or may be in pursuit of ideological goals. Without
them the underlying structural conditions will not spontaneously produce organized
and sustained political violence. The role of such agents is not only contingent on the
existing structures, but also on their skill, determination and the human and material
resources at their disposal. This contingency is related to the fact that it is not any
agent that can construct political violence with their words, as not every speaker is
, authorized to speak. The extent to which a particular actor is considered legitimate to
speak and whether what they say resonates with, or produces, an audience is
determined by existing society-wide meta-narratives.
● Human agents: people to participate in or instrumentalize the violence. At the very
least, weak opposition to the organization of political violence is required. It is not
necessary to convince every single person in the community to support political
violence. Therefore, understanding how certain voices are silenced is as important as
understanding dominant violent narratives. Violent discourses are often presumed to
be all pervading and wartime identities are treated as though they trump other
competing, pre-existing identities. However, not everybody is motivated by the same
things or will respond to discourses in the same way.
Discursively Constructing Political Violence and the Silencing of Marginalized Voices
The social construction of political violence is a discursive process in which agents
intentionally construct narratives and broader society-wide discourses in order to transform a
set of existing structures into the practice of organized political violence. Once established,
these discourses can be instrumentalized for a variety of purposes by a variety of actors. In
the authors’ framework, discourse is defined as ‘a socially and historically specific system of
assumptions, values and beliefs which materially affects social conduct and social structure.’
The discourses of political violence are large-scale power-knowledge regimes which achieve
hegemony at particular historical junctures. Discourses are broader than language, being
constituted not just in texts, but also in definite institutional and organizational practices; they
are discursive practices. Discourses can be considered as an amalgam of material practices
and forms of knowledge.
In the authors’ framework, there are two levels at which narrative and discourse functions to
construct and enable political violence:
● For the principal organizing agents themselves, language, narrative and discourse
constructs the basis for action choices by making some options seem legitimate and
commonsensical and others impossible.
● For the audience, language, narrative and discourse is employed instrumentally by
elites to construct the violence as inherently legitimate and necessary.
A close analysis of numerous cases of organized political violence reveals two main
discursive processes by which elites construct organized political violence. The first process
involves conflict entrepreneurs attempting to deconstruct or discredit alternative discourses
that oppose their own violent aims:
● At the political level, this often involves restructuring political rules and institutions to
centralize power and limit the activities of opposition groups.
● At the social-cultural and individual level, the rules and norms of ethical behavior
regarding the killing of an enemy ‘Other’ must be deconstructed and replaced by the
justified belief in self-defensive preemptive violence.
● At the material level, the increasing replacement of spears with guns in regional
patterns of warfare created a degree of ‘social distance’ and ‘spiritual ambiguity’
about the ethical and spiritual ramifications of homicide.
● Once underway as a kind of practice, violence can have a number of functions,
including ritual initiation, the creation of collective guilt and to polarize attitudes,
heighten fear and neutralize moderates. Violence itself acts as a discursive practice,
, reproducing the norms and beliefs required for its organization, continuance and
spread.
● Conflict entrepreneurs have to work to overwhelm and submerge alternative
oppositional spaces and voices.
The Mobilization of Discursive Sites
The second simultaneous process in the creation of violent discourses, involves the
mobilization and coordination of multiple discursive sites in the pursuit of the conflict
entrepreneurs’ designs. A sustained and carefully choreographed assault on the collective
psyche can create new collective norms, new groups and audiences, and new or altered
collective memories and histories. There are several discernible characteristics of violent
discourses that these sites are mobilized to promote:
● Identity formation: the creation of ‘the Other’ as a constitutive outside of the Self is a
critical precondition to intrastate war and organized political violence.
○ Separate identities form the initial bedrock of the ‘imagined differences’
between groups that can then be exploited by conflict entrepreneurs, usually
through transforming ordinary feuds and ‘normal’ political grievances into
grievances expressed in ethnic terms.
○ The (re-)creation of ethno-national identities is carried out most powerfully
through the discourses of ‘symbolic politics’. However, this is not the only
means of constituting identity. Education and family socialization are also
sites for the discursive formation of ethnicity.
○ Stereotyping, dehumanizing and scapegoating the Other
■ Stereotypes can be used to justify harsh or disproportionate measures
against the Other. An important consequence of such discourses is
the creation of a world divided between two camps in which there is
no neutral place to stand, and those who do not support the cause
and its leaders are by definition supporters of the ‘enemy’.
■ Creating discourses of the enemy typically involves a deliberate and
sustained effort to characterize the Other as aliens or interlopers.
○ Once group identities have been established and made concrete, and
stereotyping has helped to dehumanize the Other and identify them as the
enemy, it is also possible to create a sense of victimhood based on real or
perceived grievances, which can then function as another precursor to
organized political violence. The role of the press is crucial in this process.
● The creation of new norms of violence and the destruction of old norms of tolerance,
ethical behavior and peaceful conflict management.
○ The foundation for the discursive legitimation of violence already exists in
most societies through doctrines of just war, the state monopoly of violence,
the justified use of revolutionary violence and the defence of the family. It is a
relatively small step to convince people that political violence is legitimate if it
is argued to be in defence of homes and families, or a revolution against an
oppressive and illegitimate regime.
○ Typically the threat posed by the Other is expressed in zero-sum terms.
● The creation of violent discourses is not a linear or deterministic process whereby
conflict entrepreneurs take control of discursive sites and then proceed to construct a
new social reality. Rather, it is a positive feedback or dialectical process where all the
contributing factors reinforce each other in an escalatory and contingent cycle.
