Summary of the course ‘MVCA’
Week 1
Week 1 Articles
Mason - The puzzle of revolution in the third world
What is different about the last half of the twentieth century is that, the dominant form of armed
conflict since 1945 has not been interstate war between two sovereign nations but civil war within
nations. Until 1989 these wars occurred almost exclusively in the Third World. For at least three
centuries prior to World War II, interstate wars involving the central system states of Europe and
North America dominated the patterns of armed conflict in the world.
Three features of the post-cold war environment are noteworthy.
1. The end of the cold war and the disintegration of the Soviet Union have ended Europe’s forty-
year immunity to armed conflict.
2. More hopeful trend in the post-Cold War environment has been the successful mediation of
peaceful settlements to a number of protracted civil wars in the Third World.
3. Overall there has been no significant decline in the frequency or destructiveness of civil wars.
Indeed quite the opposite appears to be the case.
The focus in this book is on the social, economic, and political roots of Third World revolutions.
Revolutions of the Third World have some common elements:
1. They are rural-based, with peasant farmers and landless rural labores providing the primary
base of popular support and sources of recruits for the rebel movement.
2. The issues that gave rise to these revolutions, the sources of the grievances that motivated
peasants on the other non elites to support the revolutionary movement, originated in the
rural economy. The involve issues of land use and land tenure.
3. Conflict between the state and society escalates to the point of armed conflict because;
a. Dissident leaders emerge to mobilize aggrieved peasants for various forms of collective
action aimed at remedying their economic distress.
b. The state responds to dissident collective action with repression rather than
accommodation
c. Civil war occurs when the state’s response is predominantly repressive.
The argument: why peasants revolt
Collective action problem: everyone will be able to enjoy the benefits of the post revolutionary
order, regardless of whether or not they participated in the revolution.
Two points are salient
1. Rarely do peasants spontaneously organize for revolutionary violence against the incumbent
regime.
a. For such action to become revolutionary requires the intervention of outside actors;
dissident leaders who can harness peasant support for their challenge against the
incumbent regime. More often than not, those are from the white-collar urban classes.
2. It is easier for dissident leaders to mobilize peasants for nonviolent collective action than for
violent collective action, because of the risks. It is then much easier to move them towards
the support of revolutionary collective action.
Definitions: civil war, revolution and secession
The writer uses the term of civil war as a generic concept; to include all forms of armed conflict
within a nation. As such, civil wars are distinct from interstate wars, which involve armed conflict
between two or more sovereign antin states.
Within the category of civil war the writer distinguished two subcategories:
- Revolutions: in a revolution, the rebels seek to overthrow the existing government and take
its places as the new government of the nation.
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,- Secessionist revolt: the rebels seek not to overthrow the existing government but to gain
independence from it. They seek to create a second sovereign nation state out of some portion
of the territory and population of an existing nation state.
The distinction of ethnic civil wars and ideological civil wars applies mainly to revolutions: alle
secessionist revolts are ethnically based.
In an ideological revolution, the issues that divide rebels from the government are matters such as
inequality of land ownership, wealth, income and political power. The goals of the rebels is still to
overthrow the existing government.
In ethnic revolutions, the same issues of inequality and repression generate the grievances of the
rebels. But, ethnicity ads other dimensions to the conflict between the state and society:
- Those who are victims of various forms of inequality are from one ethnic group, while those
who enjoy a disproportionate share of the advantages available in the nation are from another
ethnic group.
- Ethnic divisions add further issues to the fuel of the conflict. Members of the ethnic group fear
the suppression of their culture, language, religion and heritage of the regime dominated by a
rival ethnic group.
Forms and frequency of civil war
Civil war in the Third World replaced interstate war among central system members as the
dominant conflict modality in the post-1945 era because;
- The incidence of interstate war has declined dramatically. This development is largely a
function of the nuclear standoff between the UN and SU, which made war between the two
superpower led alliances unacceptable.
- The dismantling of European colonial empires after WWII resulted in the creation of well over a
hundred new nation states.
Civil war vs. interstate war
Civil wars have become more prevalent than interstate wars in part because of the absence of
interstate war in Europe. While the nuclear stalemate precluded direct conflict between major
powers, it did not prevent them from intervening in, subsidizing and occasionally instigating
conflict within Third World nations.
Civil war as the third world phenomenon
- One factor contributing to the rise of armed conflict in Third World has been simply the
increase of newly independent nation states in the Third World. There are simply more nations
in which revolutions can occur.
- The colonial powers disrupted the existing patterns of social organization in those societies.
- The post-colonial state often lacked the institutional capacities to provide peace, order and a
reasonable level of material well-being for its citizens.
The destructiveness of civil wars
Civil wars become so deadly because their destruction is not confined to conventional battles
between organized armies. A revolutionary insurgency has to be sustained by a base of civilian
supporters, who provide the rebels with supplies, information, and protection against government
troops. These civilians riks reprisals at the hands of government forces. In many cases, unarmed
civilians are targeted by the combatants.
Revolution of the countryside
The differences between ‘classic’ revolutions of the early modern era and ‘revolutions in the
countryside’
- Contemporary revolutions in the Third World are catalyzed by international forces and
dynamics that are not of their own making and over which they have little or no control.
- Revolutions in the countryside also differ from classic social revolutions in that they originate
as guerrilla insurgencies in rural areas. They are not primarily urban based in their origines,
their base of popular support or their strategy and tactics.
- Contemporary revolutions in the countryside have been from their inception truly
revolutionary in their goals their organization and their scope.
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, Mason - Chapter two: Theories of revolution: The evolution of the field
The writer reviews the contribution of scholars in contemporary frameworks, that analyse
contemporary revolutions and civil violence. The reveal some of the fundamental questions that
have guided research on the causes, dynamics, and outcomes of contemporary revolutions.
Sources of popular discontent: inequality and deprivation
- The inequality-instability research program focuses on inequalities in the distribution of
wealth, income, land and power as causes of political violence.
- A second prominent school focuses on psychological processes of frustration and aggression
that result from conditions of relative deprivation.
Inequality and political violence
One intuitively appealing explanation of the sources of revolutionary discontent is the existence of
extreme inequality with respect to income, land tenure or both.
The inequality-political violence research program has been plagued by two persistent puzzles:
1. There has been little effort to spell out conceptually the causal links between inequality and
political violence
a. Some degree of inequality is found in all societies, but not all societies - in fact, very few -
are torn by political violence.
2. The empirical findings on the inequality-political violence link have been inconclusive,
inconsistent, and at times contradictory.
The central task for this research tradition, then, is to determine what intervening variables might
account for the indirect relationship between inequality and political violence.
Relative deprivation theories
Relative deprivation (RD) is were people’s expectations about what they should be achieving
exceed their actual level of achievement:
A crisis such as a depression or a war brings about a sharp reversal in the level of achievement.
Popular expectation continue to rise, or at lest they do not adjust downward with declining
achievement. The widening gap between the expectations and achievements produces mounting
frustration. At some point, frustration generated by the gap becomes so intolerable that aggression
results. If the frustration is widespread throughout society, the aggression will assume the form of
collective action.
Gurr proposes two other patterns of relative deprivation.
1. The first is what he terms decremental deprivation, where expectations remain constant but
achievements decline.
2. The second is termed aspirational deprivation, whereby expectations rise while achievements
remain constant.
Gurr also introduces the critical variabel of the coercive balance between the government and the
dissidents. Frustrated people will not take up arms against their government if the government’s
exercise capacity is substantially greater than the dissident’s own coercive capacity.
David’s and Gurr’s works were provocative for a number of reasons:
1. By grounding RD in frustration-aggression theory, they draw attention to the individual and
what motivates him or her to participate in a revolution.
2. By spelling out the dynamics of social and economic change that produce frustration, they link
individual behavioral propensities to macrosocial developments.
3. RD theory explicitly rejects the notion that the revolutionary state of mind is more likely to
arise among the most severely deprived, or that revolution is more likely to occur the more
severely deprived the population is.
It is relative deprivation, not absolute deprivation, that produces the ‘revolutionary state of mind’:
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,- People who have become accustomed to steady improvements in their standard of living but
are confronted with a sharp and sudden decline in living conditions are the ones most likely to
revolt.
- Because they are not absolutely deprived, they have some resources to contribute to the
revolutionary effort, which is not the case with those suffering from absolute deprivation.
Generally, the inequality-political violence literature and the relative deprivation literature suffer
from the problem of over predicting revolution.
Both theories do not adequately address the question of why people who are frustrated would
resort to revolutionary violence rather than some other response.
Rational actors approaches
In large groups, each person’s contribution is such a small share of the total amount needed to
produce the good that the contribution or non contribution of a single individual will not determine
whether or not the good is produced. Rational individuals will be tempted to ‘free ride’.
>>> The collective action problem, then, is that if everyone acts according to this logic, public
goods will never be produced.
Olson concludes: ‘rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group
interests’
The only way to induce people to participate in collective action or contribute to the provision of
public goods is to offer them selective incentives: divisible benefits that can be withheld from
those who do not participate in the collective action.
The incentives to free-ride are especially powerful in the case of revolutionary collective action.
Participation in revolution is risky behavior: it involves the possibility of physical injury and death
as well as fines, incarceration, and torture if one is apprehended by the government.
The goals of revolution - that is the public goods that will result from revolutionary victory - are
irrelevant to the individual’s choice between participating or not. The individual will be able to
enjoy them whether they participate or not.
This model has several troubling implications:
- It implies that revolutions will never occur, because everyone will free-ride.
- The only way to avert this outcome is to offer selective incentives
- Yet, we know that revolutions do occur. They do not all fall victim to the inertia of free-
rider temptations.
- The ideological goals of the revolution or the promise of a new social order are largely
irrelevant to person’s choice between participating or free-riding.
The problem created by this version of the rational rebel is that in underpredicts revolution.
Social movements, contentious politics and resource mobilization
A number of scholars began focusing on:
1. The critical role of revolutionary leadership and revolutionary organization in mobilizing
dissatisfied people for the purpose of collective action.
2. The role of political opportunity structure, framing processes and mobilizing structures in
determining timing, forms and likely outcomes of collective action.
Social movements theorists highlight the critical role of changes in the dissident’s political
opportunity structure in determining when and if they will undertake collective action, what form
that action will assume, and what the prospects of success might be for that action.
Multiple sovereignty
For Tilly a revolutionary situation arises ‘when the government previously under the control of a
single sovereign polity becomes the object of effective, competing and mutually exclusive claims
on the part of two or more distinct polities’. This condition is multiple sovereignty.
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,Any polity consists of three sets of actors: a population, a government and a set of contenders. The
government is the entity that ‘control the principal concentrated means of coercion within the
population’. It is the sovereign authority that enjoys a monopoly over the legitimate use of
coercion. A contender is any group that applies pooled resources in competition with other groups
to influence the government in ways that advance that group’s interests.
There are two types of contenders:
1. Contenders who are members of the polity and enjoy ‘routine, low-cost access to resources
controlled by government’. They are accepted by the government as legitimate players in the
political process.
2. Challengers are contenders who are not members of the polity. They are not recognized by the
government as legitimate contenders for power, and they are excluded from conventional
political contest over power and resources.
Contenders arise because the social transformations that occur during the course of modernization,
undermine existing structures of social organization and social control.
While these tectonic social changes may dissolve existing ties between elites and non elites and
generate grievances among disaffected non elites, grievances alone are not sufficient to guarantee
collective action. This requires organization and leaders capable of persuading the aggrieved
populace to contribute to and participate in the activities of the dissident organization.
Mobilizing structures
To overcome free-rider tendencies among the population they seek to mobilize, challengers rely on
pre-existing mobilizing structures, including social networks, community organizations and other
such entities. Mobilizing structures are ‘those collective vehicles, both formal and informal,
through which people come together and engage in collective action.
Dissident leaders must be able to persuade the aggrieved population that their grievances are
widely shared and they can be remedied through collective action. This is referred to as the
framing process. Through words and actions, leaders attempt to shape reality for their potential
supporters by identifying injustices and attributing them to the state or to other parties that are
the target of their contentious movement.
The struggle between the state and challengers is most likely to escalate to a revolutionary
situation of dual sovereignty when a coalition of challengers arises.
Political opportunity structures
The circumstances most likely to bring about a critical shift in popular allegiance from the
government to the challengers are 1) the sudden failure of the government to meet specific
obligations that the populations regards as deserved and crucial to their well-being 2) a rapid and
unexpected increase in the government’s demands on the population for the surrender of
resources.
The state response
Just as important for revolution, is the capacity or unwillingness of the government to suppress the
challenger coalition.
Bringing the state back in
Skocpol and Goldstone contend that whether or not this clash of interests leads to social revolution
is contingent upon, first, characteristics of the state itself and, second, certain structural features
of the pattern of society-state relations.
Skopcol’s work does succeed in bringing the state back in, to the analysis of revolution. The state is
more than just a neutral arena in which contending groups play out their struggles for power. The
state plays an active role in generating the crises that aspiring revolutionaires exploit.
Conclusions
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,Skocpol point at least three aspects of commonality between classic revolutions and contemporary
revolutions:
1. In all of the classic revolutions, peasant rebellion played a critical role in weakening the
economic control of the dominant economic classes and the coercive monopoly of the state.
2. All of them point the coincidence of social revolution with the fundamental social, economic,
and political transformations that occurred in these societies as a direct result of
industrialization.
3. International forces played a central role in generating the crises that gave birth to
revolutions, and those same forces influenced the course of the revolutions once they were
under way.
Duyvesteyn and Fumerton - Insurgency and terrorism: is there a difference?
The article states that there is a difference between insurgency and terrorism: terrorism and
insurgency are two distinct strategies of irregular war. The key differences can be found in
political, organizational and relational features of the strategy. The key difference is that of the
nature of the organizations.
Differing political objectives
Insurgency
- The ultimate political objective of insurgency is to gain political military control of a
population and its territory.
- Direct interaction with the population
- An insurgency movement’s ability to metamorphose from irregular to regular armed force has
depended on several factors (the extent of mobilization, competence of leaders, level of state
repression and access to heavy weapons).
- According to Kilcullen, insurgency today follows state failure and is not directed at taking over
the body politic, but at dismembering or scavenging its carcass.
Terrorism
- The political end goal of terrorism is to provoke response form the opponent that will bring
about a desired political change, without the explicit objective of directly establishing
political control over a population and its territory.
- It seems that fewer conditions are required for initiating armed struggle through the strategy
of terrorism.(Low start up cost and relative immunity to all, but most repressive of political
conditions makes it appealing for disaffected groups).
- Terrorism aims to create ‘public awareness of a political grievance’ through acts of terror in
order to elicit a response from the opponent that in turn erodes it legitimacy and authority,
and facilitates the collapse of government or withdrawal of an occupying force.
- Terrorism can be used as a tactic within the strategy of insurgency.
- The principle and practice of establishing political-military control over a population and its
territory is absent in the strategy of terrorism.
Organizational difference
Insurgency
- Requires increasing the number of its active militants and auxiliary support base in order to
build up a military force, its practices and methods for recruitment and obtaining popular
collaboration have been much less selective.
- Insurgency often feature a relatively well-defined political-military core structure, with a more
or less formal hierarchy of ranks and positions within the organization.
Terrorism
- Involvement of the population at large is virtually irrelevant to strategic succes
- Groups of terrorist inclined to be ‘elitist’ in composition. New members are inducted
individually or in small groups mainly through friends, kin or acquaintances. Strangers are
rarely inducted.
- Trust and commitment between terrorist members can only be obtained voluntarily.
- The control over the population is NOT a strategic concern for terrorists.
- An informal horizontal network of like-minded individuals seems best suited for this strategy.
Differences in social relations
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, Insurgency
- Strategy of insurgency is conducted through the people
- Popular support is deemed one of the necessary conditions for an insurgent organization to
survive and achieve success.
- Insurgents try to win the goodwill and trust of the local population.
- Difference between active support, passive support and sympathy.
- Sympathy means a general or specific agreement with the actions or philosophy of the
guerillas.
- Passive support refers to a willingness to tolerate the presence of the guerillas and an
aversion to take any action against them, including informing the police.
- Active support refers to acts of commission.
- Insurgent leaders hope to obtain widespread sympathy, passive and active support are also
easier to obtain if genuine sympathy is already present within the population.
Terrorism
- The secrecy on which the strategy of terrorism is based can have profoundly negative
consequences on the relations that terrorists have with the public.
- Obtaining mass support has proven more an aspiration by way of inspiration, than the
anticipated outcome of a strategy of terrorism.
- Yet, members of a wide variety of terrorists groups say they joined terrorists groups to
maintain or develop social relations with other terrorists members.
Lecture 1 - Introduction
Collective action: collaborative action in pursuit of common goals
- War is a form of collective action
- War requires collective action
- Collective action makes war possible
Since the WWII there is a shift from wars between states (intrastate) from wars within states
(interstate).
> Decolonization and therefore the emerge of new states. In the process of decolonization group
begin to fight each other.
Another term for interstate wars is civil war: A militant opposition group fighting against the
government armed rebellion.
Insurgency: an organized, protracted politico-military struggle designed to weaken the control and
legitimacy of an established government, occupying power, or other political authority while
increasing insurgent control.
Why does armed rebellion happen?
- Weak state
- Deprivation of human needs
- Strong leaders that mobilize groups of people
- Repression
- Distribution of power (to certain ethnic groups)
Discontent/grievance (psychological explanations)
Relative deprivation
Over time, what one expects to get is not what one actually gets. For example, kids with better
education than their parents or grandparents have expectations that become greater. Over time
when this gap widens, people feel relatively deprived.
When there is a consciousness of this relative deprivation > frustration can build up > aggression
can build up.
Critique of Relative Deprivation
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