The Oxford Handbook of Terrorism

Erica Chenoweth (ed.) et al.

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198732914.001.0001
Published: 2019 Online ISBN: 9780191796944 Print ISBN: 9780198732914

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CHAPTER

2 The Landscape of Political Violence 

Stathis N. Kalyvas

https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198732914.013.1 Pages 11–33

Published: 04 April 2019

Abstract
The chapter surveys the extremely varied and fragmented landscape of research on political violence
and proposes a way to unify the study of its various manifestations in a way that is tractable,
consistent, and analytically fruitful. Drawing on research that has focused on distinct types of political
violence, it identi es eleven basic types. Classi cation is based on two key dimensions: whether the
perpetrator of violence is a state or a non-state actor and whether the target of violence is a state or a
non-state entity. The chapter brie y discusses key research ndings associated with each type of
political violence and explores how they are linked with each other by pointing to four connecting
logics: hierarchy, instrumentality, escalation, and substitution. It concludes by drawing the
implications.

Keywords: political violence, war, terrorism, civil war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, assassination, military
coup, intercommunal violence, mass protest
Subject: Political Behaviour, Politics
Series: Oxford Handbooks
Collection: Oxford Handbooks Online
 Introduction

THE study of violent human con ict is fragmented across many di erent elds and sub elds, spanning
several disciplines. The phenomena studied range from violent street protests all the way up to genocide.
This fragmentation represents perhaps the biggest obstacle to the development of this research eld. On the
one hand, the boundaries that separate the di erent sub elds are insu ciently porous, poorly demarcated,
constantly contested, and often policed with zeal by armies of experts who, nevertheless, seek to expand
them at the expense of neighboring sub elds. This is particularly obvious, but hardly limited to the study of
terrorism, whose well-known de nitional battles (Schmid 2004) have led to a considerable degree of
“conceptual stretching” (Sartori 1970) and fragmentation (Sánchez-Cuenca and de la Calle 2009). It is quite

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common, as attested in the present handbook, to observe that the empirical study of terrorism often
overlaps with the study of rebel violence against non-combatants in civil wars and other settings.

And yet, political violence is a genuinely multifaceted and varied phenomenon. A street protest entailing
scu es between demonstrators and the police, like Occupy Wall Street, and a genocide costing the life of
millions, such as the Holocaust, could only be fused together at the cost of severe loss in understanding. In
other words, research fragmentation re ects the underlying reality of extreme diversity in the expressions
of political violence. Yet there is no denying that it is highly problematic for at least three reasons.

First, established distinctions between various types of violent human con ict are not always spelled out
clearly and explicitly vis-à-vis each other. Typically, they do not result from an overarching conceptual
perspective; rather they are the result of practical considerations and the often-arbitrary (and solitary)
development of a given sub eld.

Second, because the various types of political violence are not demarcated analytically, similar or closely
overlapping phenomena are studied simultaneously from multiple conceptual angles by di erent teams of
p. 12 researchers seeking to make distinct political, legal, and normative claims. This can be the source of
considerable confusion, as the same phenomenon can be studied simultaneously as an instance of a very
di erent type of political violence. For example, the violence that targeted civilian populations in Guatemala
during the early 1980s has been approached as an instance of genocide (Higonnet 2009), state terror (Sluka
2000), and the twin processes of insurgency and counter-insurgency (Stoll 1993). Conversely, empirical
studies of terrorism lump together instances of transnational violence perpetrated by tiny clandestine
groups or even single individuals, such as the 2017 massacres in Paris and Nice, with large-scale massacres
of civilians planned and ordered by rebel groups such as the Colombian FARC in the context of civil wars.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly from a theoretical perspective, the study of the onset of each type of
political violence tends to be automatically contrasted with the absence of political violence as a whole,
which is conceptualized as some kind of “peace,” domestic or international. For example, the absence of
civil war onset is thought to imply the presence of domestic peace, even though this might be a peace
characterized by, say, high levels of state-initiated violence. As a result, researchers can be blinded to the
fact that various types of political violence coexist on a broad continuum, as fundamentally non-peaceful
alternatives to each other. Seen from this perspective, the absence of civil war onset might entail the
presence of terrorism. More importantly perhaps, the presence of terrorism might be explained by the
impossibility of launching a civil war. These problems result in ndings that can be contradictory, hard to
reconcile with each other, but also biased and misleading.

To tackle these problems, I introduce a typology of political violence that aims to cover the entire span of
the phenomenon in a way that aims to be analytically productive. I begin by inductively identifying eleven
types of political violence based on the existing research programs. I then proceed to categorize these eleven
types along two key dimensions: whether the perpetrator of violence is a state or a non-state actor; and
whether the target of violence is a state or a non-state entity. Finally, I discuss how these types are linked
 with each other, and discuss four distinct logics of connection: hierarchy, instrumentality, escalation, and
substitution.

I begin with some general de nitional observations about delimiting the empirical space covered by
political violence; I then introduce the typology, discuss the broad characteristics of each type and key
research ndings, and explore how they are connected with each other. I conclude with a discussion of a
future research agenda for the study of political violence.

A Typology of Political Violence

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Political violence is an exceedingly broad and ill-de ned term and, as such, its meaning and contents can be
stretched almost in nitely. This stretching potential extends to both components of the concept. On the one
p. 13 hand, the political can be de ned so broadly as to t almost all human activity, as in the popular quip
“the personal is political;” on the other hand, violence also can be stretched to t almost all types of
behavior; indeed “structural violence” is understood to include very broad phenomena such as poverty and
inequality (Galtung 1969); likewise, “psychological violence” is often amalgamated with physical violence.
However, if we are to study political violence in a meaningful way, we must somehow rein in this colossal
scope.

While recognizing that violence can be an extremely varied and multidimensional concept, it can still be
usefully restricted to the actual in iction of physical harm, with death being perhaps its most extreme and
visible form. Likewise, we can think of the political in a more restricted way, as an action that explicitly and
directly aims to impact on governance. As we will see, these narrower bounds still de ne a vast swath of
human activity.

My aim here is to identify broad yet distinct macro-level types of political violence rather than meso-level
mechanisms (as in Tilly 2003) or micro-level repertoires or patterns (as in Gutiérrez-Sanín and Wood
2017). I also use existing categories that have already generated a substantial research program and avoid
neologisms. Based on a review of the literature, I identify eleven fundamental types of political violence that
have been studied as distinct processes. I leave aside over-aggregated concepts that merge processes,
causes, and outcomes, such as “social revolution.” I relate these eleven types to each other, thus generating
a “conceptual typology” (Collier et al. 2012). On an organizational dimension, we can observe at one end of
the spectrum the highly organized phenomenon of interstate or international war; at the other end, we nd
disorganized, low-violence, contentious action, mass protest, and rebellion. In between these two poles, I
identify the following phenomena: civil war, genocide, ethnic cleansing, terrorism, intercommunal
violence, military coup, political assassination, state repression, and lastly the violence associated with
organized crime and cartels.

As a way to reduce complexity and gain analytical tractability, I classify these eleven types of political
violence on two axes. The rst one de nes the perpetrator of violence and the second one the target of
violence. More speci cally, to classify these types, I ask whether the originator of violence is a state or a
non-state actor and, likewise, whether the target (direct or indirect) of violence is the state or a non-state
actor. The intersection of these two axes generates four broad empirical areas allowing the placement of all
eleven types of political violence in one of four separate cells, as depicted in Table 2.1.
 Table 2.1 Perpetrators and Targets of Political Violence

Target: State Target: Non-State

Perpetrator: State Interstate war State repression

Genocide

Ethnic cleansing

Perpetrator: Non-State Organized crime/Cartels

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Mass protest/Rebellion

Military coup Intercommunal violence

Political assassination [Political assassination]

Civil war

Terrorism

Six caveats are in place. First, the placement of each type into the appropriate cell is based on who is the
most immediate agent implementing the violence. For example, mass protests are typically a non-state
activity, yet sometimes they might be instigated by rival states in the context of an interstate rivalry. Often,
non-state rebel groups are abetted or even directed by a rival state. Nevertheless, even when this is the case,
rival states could not have instigated the violence in the absence of these non-state actors, who are,
therefore, critical in its implementation. The same holds for military coups, political assassinations, civil
wars, terrorist actions, and intercommunal violence: non-state actors tend to be both immediate and
critical actors for its production irrespective of the assistance they might have received. In contrast, state
p. 14 repression, genocide, and ethnic cleansing sometimes are perpetrated by non-state actors (such as
crowds or militias), but typically these are not critical actors in the sense that the violence would have been
likely implemented directly by states if these actors had not been available. The same applies for many
(though not all) pro-government militias operating in the context of civil wars: they are part of the state
machinery (Jentzsch et al. 2015). Second, rogue state actors might participate in, or even instigate any of the
eleven forms of non-state political violence but this does not turn them into state actions. For example,
military coups are organized by rogue military personnel who may also participate in anti-regime
demonstrations, as was the case in Syria. Yet, through their very actions, rogue state actors lose their status
as state actors. Third, an actor’s status is not predicated on the outcome of the violent con ict. When
successful, non-state actors ultimately accede to state status, from rag-tag opposition groups launching a
street protest that may escalate into a successful social revolution to insurgents who emerge victorious out
of a civil war. However, they initiated the violence as non-state actors. Fourth, the initiation of a campaign
of political violence is often related to preceding (or even anticipated) activities by its target. An opposition
terrorist campaign is often a response to state terror; this does not detract from the fact that it is launched
by a non-state actor. As we will see, political violence is almost always interactive; mapping out this
interaction, however, requires a prior distinction between types. Fifth, particularly in the context of war,
civilians are often targeted by both state and non-state actors because of their presumed association with
their rival; in these cases, violence directed against them is typically understood as directed against their
rival, regardless of the foundation of such beliefs. Lastly one type, political assassination, can be placed
simultaneously in two cells. It is typically used by non-state actors against state targets but sometimes,
notably in the case of drone operations by the US in Pakistan and elsewhere, it can be also used by states
against non-state actors.
 With these caveats in place, it is possible to make two observations about Table 2.1. First, symmetric
interactions (state versus state and non-state versus non-state) tend to produce a limited repertoire of
political violence. Asymmetric interactions, on the other hand, are characterized by a much broader
p. 15 repertoire, with the broadest one entailing the interaction between non-state perpetrators and state
targets. This pattern re ects the fact that challenging a state, by de nition the monopolist of the means of
legitimate violence, is inherently di cult and risky, hence necessitating a broad repertoire.

Second, this typology allows us to approach the concept of revolution, on which a vast literature exists
(Goldstone 2001), in perhaps a more tractable and integrated way, as an over-aggregated type of political
violence. Social revolutions have been famously de ned as “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state

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and class structures … accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below”
(Skocpol 1979, 4). As is clear, this de nition merges cause, process, and outcomes. One way to simplify the
concept of revolution is to see it as a process that begins as a mass protest and escalates into rebellion. In
contrast, a revolutionary outcome can emerge from all kinds of political violence, including coups and civil
wars—a distinction that bypasses the line that students of revolution tend to draw between revolutions and
most civil wars (Goldstone 2001, 140–2).

Lastly, although all these types of political violence are conceptually distinct from each other and can be
empirically observed in isolation, they are dynamically interlinked. For example, a civil war can emerge out
of a military coup (as was the case in Spain, in 1937) or out of mass protests (as was the case in Syria, in
2011). Likewise, a genocide can be implemented by means of intercommunal violence (Gross 2001) and can
take place within the context of an interstate war (Snyder 2010). The main strength of the typology
presented here is that it o ers the possibility of mapping out of these connections, as I discuss below. Before
getting there, however, I brie y turn to each type of political violence.

Varieties of Political Violence

Interstate War
International or interstate war (or, simply, “war”) is generally not thought of as a form of political violence,
one among several others. Instead, it is generally approached as a sui generis human phenomenon that can
only be studied in its own right (Gat 2008). Yet, it is hard to argue with Clausewitz’s famous dictum about
war being the continuation of politics by other means. In fact, interstate war is clearly the highest, most
sophisticated manifestation of collective violence, simply because it is produced by the highest, most
sophisticated form of collective human organization: the state. The military clash between rival states
mobilizes enormous resources which are naturally multiplied when the number of states involved in the
clash goes up. Obviously, “world wars” constitute the apex of this process, with nuclear war as its epitome.

The association between interstate war and violence is so obvious as to preclude comparisons between war
and other forms of political violence. Research on the violence produced by interstate war has tended to be
limited to the legal realm (related to “just war” theories or the laws of war), and violence has been often
p. 16 been approached as a natural and unproblematic consequence of war, worthy of less scholarly attention
than more celebrated topics like war strategy or leadership. Into this mix, one must add the powerful
ideological and normative dimension of interstate war. On the positive side, dying for one’s country in an
interstate war is a cornerstone of nationalism and is widely considered as the ultimate honor and sacri ce,
while killing others at war in the name of the state is not perceived as murder. On the negative side,
however, paci st theories have attempted to relegate both war and violence to the realm of human
pathology. As a result, interstate war has not been approached as one among many forms of political
violence (Joas and Knöbel 2013, 1).
 However, once researchers became aware of the puzzling variation in the levels of civilian victimization
produced by interstate war, they began to turn their attention to the study of violence in war as something
deserving of a study on its own right. In a parallel fashion, the growing attention paid to the distinction
between jus ad bellum and jus in bello—or the justi cation a belligerent has to go to war versus its behavior
within it—a process facilitated by the rise in prominence of humanitarian laws and human rights norms
(Keck and Sikkink 1998; Simmons 2009), has encouraged the theoretical and empirical decoupling between
war and violence (e.g. Pinker 2011). Recent work has focused on the relation between regime type and
civilian victimization (Downes 2004), yet the two most striking empirical observations about interstate war
constitute a paradox: as the potential destructiveness of war has risen, its incidence and actual damage have
experienced a drastic decline (Pinker 2011; Goldstein 2011; Mueller 2007). As this decline has occurred in

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parallel with the spread of democracy, one of the most hotly debated empirical issues is the so-called
“democratic peace” thesis (Russett 1993), i.e. the observation that democracies do not ght each other. One
of the consequences of the decline of interstate war has been a boom in the study of civil wars. In a sense,
civil wars became more visible once interstate war became scarcer (Mueller 2007).

Civil War
Civil (“internal” or “intrastate”) war is primarily fought between domestic factions within a state,
sometimes in the name of political and social change and sometimes to promote a secessionist agenda and
the creation of a new state. Although neighboring states, regional powers, and superpowers have been
consistently involved in civil wars (hence their frequent moniker of “proxy wars”), they can do so only in
alliance with domestic factions, thus rendering these wars distinct from their interstate counterparts.

Unlike interstate war, civil war has been typically perceived as closely intertwined with violence, partly
because of its (supposed) pronounced or even extreme victimization of civilians and partly because of its
transgressive, “fratricidal” nature (Kalyvas 2006). Nevertheless, civil war remained until recently
understudied, frequently thought of as a sort of second-rate war, not even really worth calling a war
(Armitage 2017; Kalyvas 2007). Fortunately, such neglect is no longer the case. Indeed, four distinct trends
came together during the late 1990s and early 2000s to reignite interest in the study of civil wars. First,
p. 17 political economists of development, some connected to the World Bank, realized they needed to better
understand how con ict might have impeded development (Collier and Hoe er 1998, 2004); second, the
continuing decline of interstate war prompted a few of its students to explore whether their theoretical
insights could travel to the universe of civil wars (David 1997; Posen 1993); third, the traumatic experience
of the Yugoslav wars brought ethnicity back into the center of the sub eld of comparative politics (Fearon
and Laitin 2003); lastly, the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the ensuing “perpetual” “war on terror”
generated considerable policy interest in the study of insurgency and, in particular, counter-insurgency
(Berman et al. 2011).

Initially, research focused on establishing a clear set of structural, cross-national correlates, and potentially
causes, of civil war onset in the post-World War II period, with the ultimate goal of developing some kind of
policy prevention plan. The most robust nding out of this research program has been that poorer countries
face a higher risk of civil war onset—a risk, however, that remains, overall, tiny given how rare occurrences
civil wars are. Many other potential causes have been explored yet remain at best contested, most notably
the role of ethnicity, which has been measured in a variety of ways, as either diversity or political exclusion
(Cederman et al. 2013). State weakness has also been associated with civil war onset (Fearon and Laitin
2003), though it remains unclear whether this is epiphenomenal to poverty. Lastly, it has been argued that
civil war is more likely in regimes that are neither clear democracies nor strong autocracies and in times of
political change and transition (Fearon and Laitin 2003; Hegre 2001).
 A sometimes-heated debate about the comparative role of opportunities versus grievances in igniting civil
war also proved hard to adjudicate, only to be eventually abandoned given that grievances and opportunities
are much more intertwined than initially argued. Cross-national studies have also focused on questions
such as the variable duration of civil wars (Hironaka 2005), as well as their termination and third-party
intervention, most notably peacekeeping (Fortna 2008). A parallel strand of research has focused on micro-
level dynamics with an emphasis on subnational variation and the dynamics of violence (Balcells 2017;
Kalyvas 2006). More recently, research has turned to rebel–civil relations (Arjona 2016) and to
organizational dynamics within armed groups (Staniland 2014).

Civil wars experienced an upward tick in the period leading to the end of the Cold War, a process that was

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due less to higher levels of onset and more to the accumulation of ongoing con icts caused by the slower
rate of con ict terminations (Fearon and Laitin 2003). The end of the Cold War, however, led to a wave of
negotiated settlements typically instigated and sustained by the UN, thus reducing the overall stock of civil
wars, until an uptick was observed in the second decade of the 2000s, mostly driven by Islamist “jihadi”
insurgencies (Kalyvas 2018; Fearon 2017).

State Repression
There is little doubt that the violence used by states against those among their own populations that,
p. 18 correctly or not, are suspected to oppose them, is a clear instance of political violence. State repression,
violence or terror are terms used to describe this type (Sluka 2000), although a variety of terms also have
been deployed, including “democide” (Rummel 1994) and “politicide” (Har and Gurr 1988). Although
state repression can be understood to include both realized and threatened coercive action by state
authorities (Ritter and Conrad 2016, 86), the bulk of the research focus has been on violent repression (Poe
and Tate 1994).

Usually, this type of violence is deployed by autocracies, which frequently use it in a limited way to deter
opposition. It is by de nition unilateral and is encountered where the opposition is either (initially)
unarmed or very weak, like in Argentina, in 1974–83. In some instances, however, autocracies launch
extensive campaigns of mass violence against their own unarmed citizens causing thousands and, in a few
cases, millions of deaths among them. Often, this violence follows on the heels of mass contestation (for
example, in Egypt following the eruption of the “Arab Spring” in 2011) or a period of political instability
(e.g. in Argentina during the 1970s)—in what is sometimes referred to as “coercive responsiveness”
(Davenport 2007, 7–8). In other cases, however, such violence can be deployed in a pre-emptive or entirely
arbitrary way. The worst o enders in this respect were Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China.

Coercive power in ways that fall short of open or deadly violence is obviously used by democracies as well,
particularly when facing threats perceived to be existential—e.g. the mass internment of Japanese-
Americans during World War II. Nevertheless, there is a strong association between democratic political
institutions and low levels of overt state repression, a relationship that has been described as the “domestic
democratic peace” (Davenport 2007, 11).

Summarizing the literature on state repression, Chenoweth et al. (2017, 1957–) describe six consensus
ndings. First, dissent provokes state repression; second, state repression is more likely under autocracy;
third, the short- and long-term e ects of repression on the opposition tend to vary so much as to be
essentially indeterminate; fourth, state repression is less e ective against well-organized nonviolent
opposition movements; fth, nonviolent opposition tends to provoke less intense government repression
than violent dissent; and sixth, the e ectiveness of repression is a function of a regime’s capacity to
maintain the loyalty of its security apparatus.
 Approaching state repression as a form of political violence also helps address a widespread critique of the
concept of terrorism that decries its exclusive focus on non-state actors (e.g. Jackson 2009). Moreover,
precisely because state repression is most unambiguously observed in times of interstate peace, it is distinct
from war. In contrast, so-called “one-sided” violence (e.g. violence against non-combatants) tends to
occur mainly (and is best studied) in the context of civil war where combatants operate openly—hence, it is
more productively approached in that context, although researchers should undertake comparisons
between state repression under peace and war. Lastly, state terror is distinct from genocide, where the
intention behind the use of violence is extermination rather than compliance.

Genocide

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p. 19

Described as “a crime of crimes” (Schabas 2009), genocide is simultaneously an empirical, moral, legal, and
political concept, in other words a de nitional mine eld. Because of this, there is now a sustained call for
positioning the study of genocide within a broader political violence framework (Straus 2012; Verdeja 2012).
An important stream of thinking about genocide has stressed the fact that it is not merely an instance of
politically motivated mass murder but is rather de ned by its intention to achieve the complete
extermination of a particular group—although how exactly this intention emerges and how it translates
into action are questions that remain debated. Indeed “intentional group annihilation” is the intuition
characterizing its core (Straus 2001).

Precisely because genocide is an enterprise that requires a considerable degree of planning, coordination,
and organization it is typically state-led. There is a broad consensus that the basis for targeting a group is
ascriptive (the targeted group is de ned on the basis of characteristics determined by birth, as selected and
interpreted by the perpetrator), thus pointing to the perpetrators’ essentialized motivation (Straus 2001,
366). In fact, it is the emphasis on this particular feature that led some researchers to label the targeting of
non-ascriptive groups as “politicide” (Har and Gurr 1988), so as to distinguish them from genocide.

Research on genocide has focused on its causes, including the role of deep-rooted exclusivist ideologies and
the impact of war, both interstate and civil (Straus 2015), but also on its microdynamics, including its
geographic spread (Straus 2006), and the role of individual choices in its implementation (Finkel 2017). The
“ rst generation” of research on genocide was driven by the study of the Holocaust and stressed “some
combination of hatred, totalitarianism, and scapegoating” (Straus 2012, 546). Since then, two streams of
research and interpretation have emerged. The rst one, mainly located in political science, underlines the
strategic rationale behind genocide with a particular emphasis on political survival during wartime, while
the second one focuses on the ideology of the perpetrators which is based on some combination of
exclusionary, organic nationalist, purity-seeking, and revolutionary beliefs (Straus 2012, 546–50). A
parallel development has been the development of micro-level studies of genocide carefully tracing its local
dynamics (Braun 2016).
 Ethnic Cleansing
Ethnic cleansing, a term popularized during the Yugoslav wars of the early 1990s can be thought of as a
variant of genocide (Lieberman 2010; Mann 2005). Like genocide, a group is targeted in a way that is
essentialized, direct, and total, but instead of exterminating a group, the goal is instead territorial removal
with the aim of creating an ethnically homogeneous state. Naimark (2001) ascribes ethnic cleansing to the
p. 20 most advanced stage in the development of the modern state and Man (2005) to the pressures of
democratization, while Bulutgil (2016) stresses the comprehensive nature of targeting (along with the
ascriptive character of the group targeted) which parallels genocide and shows that war is a key factor in its
manifestation. Wartime threats, she argues, radicalize the preferences of political elites and steer them

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toward the targeting of minorities that are connected with neighboring rival states. As in the studies of
genocide, recent research has focused on both wartime dynamics and ideological preconditions, although
the exact causal mechanisms at work remain under-explored (Bulutgil 2018).

Intercommunal Volence
Communal or intercommunal violence or con ict describes situations whereby both the perpetrators and
targets of violence are non-state actors. This term covers what is still widely referred to as riots and
pogroms, a type of violence described by Horowitz (2000, 1) as intense, sudden (but not necessary
unplanned), lethal attacks by civilian members of one ethnic group on civilian members of another ethnic
group. Sundberg et al. (2012) broaden this de nition by referring to non-state violence and including in it
rebel groups that ght one another, supporters of political parties that take to the streets to intimidate and
kill opposing party supporters, or identity groups that attack one another (like Hindus and Muslims in
Gujarat). An obvious issue with this de nition is that it includes intra-rebel ghting that occurs in the
context of civil war and is directly connected to it. Intercommunal con icts are typically fought over local
issues: control of local government, rural land, access to mining and other resources, or urban real estate. In
some cases, notably in Nigeria, Sudan, or Indonesia, intercommunal con ict can escalate in terms of
organizational capacity and fatalities, thus becoming a “communal war” (Krause 2018). Some of the best
studied instances of intercommunal violence focus on urban riots between Muslims and Hindus in India
(Brass 1997; Varshney 2003; Wilkinson 2004) and have traced their underlying variation to either an
absence of civic interaction between them or the dark machinations of political elites seeking to score
electoral victories in ethnically and religiously divided societies. Indeed, an emerging theme of this edging
literature is the role of elections in triggering such violence (Dunning 2011). Unlike some of the other types
of political violence which tend to be associated with autocracies, intercommunal violence is often
positively associated with democratization: the “third wave” of democracy has been accompanied by a
worldwide wave of opposition-initiated, election-related protests often characterized by violence (Beaulieu
2014).

A type of intercommunal violence that is attracting considerable attention is that which occurs between
pastoralists or between pastoralists and sedentary farmers, a form of violence that is seen as being
connected with climate change and resource stress (Meier et al. 2007), but is also sensitive to the type of
existing customary institutions which can promote peace through credible nonviolent bargaining (Wig and
Kromrey 2018).
p. 21 Organized Crime/Cartel Violence
On its face, the violence produced by organized criminal organizations (frequently referred to as cartels)
diverges widely from what we intuitively take to be political violence. Criminal organizations maximize
illicit pro ts and even when they try to subvert governments, they do not seek to replace them. Their goal is
to exercise indirect in uence on state authorities so as to be able to conduct their business and continue to
extract illicit pro ts. Furthermore, criminal organizations tend to shun high levels of violence since it
generally impedes their business and attracts unwanted attention (Gambetta 1996).

Nevertheless, there are good reasons to think of organized crime as a form of political violence. First, in
some instances criminal organizations produce levels of militarized violence against both civilians and the

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state that match those encountered in full- edged wars, as illustrated most tellingly by the cases of Mexico,
Guatemala, or Colombia (Lessing 2017, 2015; Schedler 2013). Second, some prominent theories of state
formation have linked aspects of criminal activity to both state-building (Olson 1993; Tilly 1985) and
political contention and rebellion (Hobsbawm 1965). Third, organized criminal groups engage in practices,
such as recruitment and local rule of civilian communities, paralleling those of rebel armed groups in civil
wars (Kalyvas 2015).

Like intercommunal violence, large-scale organized violence has been linked with processes of
democratization and electoral competition (Trejo and Ley 2017); it is also associated with post-con ict
settings, where the violent skills gained by former combatants can be put to a new use (Kaplan and Nussio
2016). Indeed, there is a signi cant body of research focusing precisely on how policies of combatant
demobilization and reintegration can be used to minimize post-con ict criminal activity (Rozema 2008).

Military Coup
Although instigated, planned, and organized by individuals hailing from within the military, a military coup
(or coup d’état) is directed against a country’s government and therefore constitutes a particular instance of
rebellion. More speci cally, it is a particular technology of rebellion entailing the forceful seizure of
executive authority and o ce by a dissident faction operating within the security/military apparatus,
mobilizing a faction within it, and using military means (Luttwak 2016). Unlike civil wars, military coups
tend to be over quickly and to produce low levels of violence, although there are some notable exceptions,
with either short but intense ghting (such as the Chilean coup of 1973 or the Cyprus coup of 1974) or their
transformation into civil wars (such as in Spain, in 1936). The reason for this is that their fate hangs on the
ability of their organizers to convince the broader military and political apparatus that they have won, thus
causing a cascade of defections (Singh 2014). Seen from this perspective, coups are fundamentally
coordination games rather than military or popularity contests.

Like civil wars, there is an inverse relationship between successful coups and high levels of income; and,
p. 22 again like in civil wars, a coup trap might emerge, whereby coups appear to lead to a chain of
countercoups (Londregan and Poole 1990). However, coups have been declining following the end of the
Cold War, even in Africa where they have persisted more than everywhere else (Marinov and Goemans 2014;
Clark 2007; McGowan 2003). Democratization has generally been a factor contributing to the decline of
coups, and military coups have been (surprisingly perhaps) a leading pathway to democratization. Indeed,
whereas the vast majority of successful coups during the Cold War period led to stable authoritarian
regimes, the majority of coups after 1991 have been followed by competitive elections; the main reason
behind this shift is quite straightforward and can be summarized as dependence on Western donors for
development aid (Marinov and Goemans 2014). This trend has led some scholars to argue that “coups and
the threat of coups can be a signi cant weapon in fostering democracy” (Collier 2009), a claim that has
been challenged because, in spite of the rise of democratizing coups during the post-Cold War period, more
 coups directed against autocracies still end up ushering in new autocracies and the concomitant repression
(Derpanopoulos et al. 2016). Conversely, an emerging trend during the same period is the subversion of
democratic regimes via executive takeover rather than military coup, by an initially democratically elected
incumbent, as illustrated by the examples of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Recep
Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey (Svolik 2017).

Mass Protest/Rebellion
Also referred to as contentious collective action (Tarrow 1998), mass protest is typically a peaceful activity
associated with the expression of group claims and the activity of social movements in democratic settings.

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Sometimes, however, mass protest escalates into low-intensity violence primarily directed against material
objects. Rarely but consequentially, it might escalate into an uprising or rebellion, and rarely into a social
revolution. As mentioned above, treating revolution as an extreme version of mass protest provides, a
tractable way to approach the over-aggregated concept of revolution.

When mass protests erupt in democracies, the police might exceptionally over-react causing casualties and,
exceptionally, fatalities. Things diverge in authoritarian settings, however. There, mass protest is either
nipped in the bud through the surgical use of violence or repressed violently—part of the so-called dissent–
repression nexus (Moore 1998; Pierskalla 2009). Not infrequently, however, repression fails and mass
protest in authoritarian settings might lead to authoritarian breakdown and even democratization
(Beissinger 2002). As already mentioned, our understanding of phenomena such as mass uprising,
insurrection, rebellion, and revolution is closely connected to large-scale mass protest, either in its violent
or nonviolent form. On the one hand, campaigns of nonviolent resistance in authoritarian states turn out to
be more e ective than armed rebellions and insurgencies—twice as e ective as their violent counterparts in
achieving their stated goals (Chenoweth and Stephan 2011). On the other hand, authoritarian repression
p. 23 may fail and back re. Indeed, many famous revolutions, from the French to the Iranian, began with
people taking to the streets and escalated to the point of regime change. This type of mass protest is often
contagious, crossing national borders with remarkable speed (such as the European Revolutions of 1848, the
“Velvet Revolutions” of 1989, the “Color Revolutions” of the 2000s, or the “Arab Spring” of 2011) (Mitchell
2012; Weyland 2009). Lastly, in democratizing settings, mass protest is often articulated around elections
(Beaulieu 2014) and often takes the form of intercommunal violence.

Political Assassination
Among the “highest-pro le acts of political violence” (Iqbal and Zorn 2008, 385), the assassination of
heads of states, high government o cials, and public gures for political reasons is a practice that spans
history: from Julius Caesar and Abraham Lincoln to John F. Kennedy and Yitzhak Rabin (Jones and Olken
2009). This type of political violence should not be bundled under the category of terrorism, because its
objective is not merely to terrorize the population at large but to produce a direct political e ect. Likewise,
the targeting of opposition leaders by authoritarian regimes is best subsumed under the category of state
repression, unless taking place in the context of civil war. Known as “decapitation,” it is launched in the
(rather vain, as it turns out) hope that it could bring an end to the war (Johnson 2012; Jordan 2009; Bob and
Erickson Nepstad 2007). However, the targeting of foreign rebel leaders does constitute an instance of
political assassination by states against non-state actors. The use of drones by the US to target rebel leaders
in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere, is such a case.

Political assassination is a form of political violence whose implications are in theory more important than
its limited lethality. It is more likely in unfree, fragmented, and polarized countries; in turn, it causes a
further decline in democratic prospects (Perliger 2015). A key insight is that its impact depends on the
institutionalization of the political regime whose leader is targeted (Havens et al. 1969). Weak, repressive
 leaders in non-democratic systems face the highest risk of assassination (Iqbal and Zorn 2006), but
successful assassinations of political leaders in autocracies often produce sustained moves toward
democracy (Jones and Olken 2009).

Terrorism
The study of terrorism has been plagued by endless de nitional debates and disputes (Schmid 2004; Schmid
and Jongman 1988). The hallmarks of most de nitions are the non-state character of the perpetrators of
violence and the use of violence as a means to intimidate a large audience beyond that of the immediate
victims (e.g. Enders and Sandler, 2012). In turn, terrorist groups are de ned simply by their use of terrorism.

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p. 24 This chapter places terrorism in the broader context of political violence by seeking to minimize conceptual
overlaps with other types of violence, and hence eshing out its distinctive character. Therefore, political
assassination, and violence exercised in the context of civil wars should be distinguished from terrorism.
That leaves us with a phenomenon that consists of non-state violence exercised primarily during times of
peace. A distinguishing feature of terrorist groups is that they target their own state but also operate
internationally, targeting foreign states: they are domestic and/or transnational rebels.

This raises the critical question of how terrorists are di erent from other types of rebels or what Sánchez-
Cuenca and de la Calle (2009) label the “actor-sense” of terrorism as opposed to the “action-sense.”
According to the latter, terrorism is a type of political violence that can be carried out by very di erent
actors as long as there is a distinction between the target of violence and the audience, and as long as the
intention is to spread fear in the civilian population. However, both these features are common to many
forms of coercive violence; likewise, targeting noncombatants is encountered very widely, while terrorist
attacks often target security forces and combatants. In contrast, the actor-sense of terrorism focuses on
insurgent actors who by virtue of being extremely weak vis-à-vis the state, are unable to control territory
and deploy militarily. Unlike rebel groups in civil wars, these groups must always operate in a clandestine
fashion which goes a long way toward explaining the kind of violence they engage in (Sánchez-Cuenca and
de la Calle 2009, 33–5).

As Sandler (2014, 263) acknowledges, “Insofar as terrorism has myriad root causes, it is not surprising that
the empirical literature has come to little consensus on the root cause of domestic and transnational
terrorism.” Nevertheless, many studies of terrorism have highlighted a relation to regime type that takes an
inverted-U shape between domestic terrorist violence and level of democracy: highly repressive regimes
and fully democratic ones are inimical to terrorist activity, resulting in a concentration of terrorist violence
in semi-repressive regimes (Gates et al. 2006). However, there is also evidence that the relationship
between economic development and terrorist violence by clandestine actors is concave; unlike civil wars,
violence by groups that do not control territory is more likely in middle-income countries as well as
democracies (de la Calle and Sánchez-Cuenca 2012). Generally, the ndings of the empirical literature are
highly contingent on the coding of terrorism in the rst place: does the coding distinguish between
domestic and transnational terrorism? Militarized rebels and clandestine ones?
 Four Connecting Logics

A key theme that emerges from this brief discussion is the relation between each type of political violence
and four overarching processes: war, regime type, economic development, and ethnic divisions. Some types
of political violence “thrive” under war, authoritarianism, and poverty, especially in ethnically divided
societies. But even if we were able to suddenly get rid of war, autocracy, poverty, and ethnic divisions, we
p. 25 would not be able to guarantee peace, because political violence can be observed in prosperous and
peaceful democracies as well; what is more, the transition from poor autocracies to prosperous democracies
also appears to open the door to violence, as some types of political violence are replaced by others. This
observation calls for a discussion of how the di erent types of political violence are connected to each other.

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Typologies are analytical heuristics, useful only insofar as they allow us to derive original hypotheses and
chart new research directions. The typology presented here suggests four kinds of logics linking these
eleven types of political violence: hierarchical, escalation, instrumental, and substitution.

Hierarchical Logic
Some types of political violence are so transformative that they endogenously create the conditions for the
emergence of other types which would have arguably not appeared otherwise. This is a logic of hierarchy,
whose clearest instance is interstate war, and particularly global and total war. Interstate war has been
credited with creating the conditions that make genocide and ethnic cleansing possible (Shaw 2003; Bulutgil
2016); the exploration of the precise mechanisms linking them is still ongoing and ranges from ideological
radicalization to the activation of ethnic over class cleavages (Har 2003; Straus 2012; Bulutgil 2016). Less
explored is the connection between interstate and civil war. As the example of Iraq recently suggests,
interstate wars often give way to civil wars in the context of occupation regimes (Edelstein 2010). World War
II provides a broad range of illustrations (Kalyvas 2006). In fact, this war was clearly connected to genocide
(Holocaust), widespread ethnic cleansing, both during and following its end, civil wars in several occupied
countries, violently repressed mass protests, political assassinations, and terrorism by various resistance
groups, state repression, and military coups in many countries. In this sense, interstate war can be thought
of as the “mother of all political violence.”

Civil war may also generate the conditions for the appearance of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass terror
(Har 2003), while it is common for processes of organized crime to emerge in its context (Andreas 2008).
In turn, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass terror also open the door to all kinds of organized crime,
especially related to the looting of the properties of the targeted populations. Lastly, intercommunal
violence can emerge during mass protest, as when rival groups of government supporters and opponents
clashed in the streets of Cairo in 2012.

Instrumental Logic
Unlike the hierarchical logic, the instrumental one entails the explicit deployment of a type of political
violence as a tool for the implementation of another one. For example, intercommunal violence is
sometimes used to implement genocide, i.e. by inciting neighbors to turn against each other in a way that
might appear spontaneous yet is engineered as part of a broader, systematic plan. The Holocaust was
implemented in part by such means in Nazi-occupied Poland and the Soviet Union (Snyder 2010; Gross
2001), as was the Rwandan genocide (Straus 2006) or the massacre of Indonesian communists in 1966
(Cribb 1991).

p. 26 Likewise, civil war is a setting that encourages the deployment of terrorism as one among several possible
military tactics used by the rebels. Several insurgent groups have relied on the use of indiscriminate attacks
 against soft targets, particularly in areas that are not controlled by the state (Fisher 2018; de la Calle and
Sánchez-Cuenca 2012). Fortna (2015) examines the use of terrorism within civil war. She argues that it is
used in spite of the fact that its disadvantages appear to outweigh its advantages: although it is a cheap way
to in ict pain on one’s enemy, it is useless for taking or holding territory, signals weakness rather than
strength, and can undermine legitimacy among potential supporters—although it may help rebel groups to
survive longer. An extensive debate has taken place about whether the Ottoman authorities used the ethnic
cleansing of their Armenian population as a means toward genocide (Akçam 2012). Less obviously perhaps,
civil war provides a cover for the launch of campaigns of ethnic cleansing under the pretext of counter-
insurgency. The case of the Rohingya in Myanmar might be such an instance. Reasons why certain types of
political violence are used as a means to accomplish others vary and may range from low cost to plausible

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deniability.

Escalation Logic
The logic of escalation also resembles the hierarchical logic, but instead of a broader type of political
violence engendering a narrower one, it operates in the opposite direction. This is the case, for instance,
when mass protests escalate into a large-scale urban uprising (or revolution) and civil war as in Iran in
1978–9, or into a civil war, as in Syria in 2011. Likewise, a political assassination can escalate into civil war,
as was the case with the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the leader of the Liberal Party of Colombia, in
1948. Mass protests and riots ensued in Bogota and eventually, they escalated into a generalized communal
war and a full- edged civil war known as “La Violencia.” The assassination of the Rwandan President
Juvénal Habyarimana in 1994 is widely seen as the catalyst of the Rwandan genocide, although the exact
details remain disputed. The failed military coup of General Francisco Franco in Spain, in 1936, escalated
into a civil war. More generally, there is evidence of an interactive relationship between assassination and
political turmoil, especially where the process of leadership succession is informal and unregulated (Iqbal
and Zorn 2008). Alternatively, there is much talk of the danger that a civil war might escalate into an
interstate civil war through foreign intervention, but it appears to be more common for “internationalized”
civil war to act as a substitute rather than a cause of interstate war. For example, although the Second Congo
War (1998–2003) saw various interstate clashes, such as Angola against Rwanda, it did not escalate into
full- edged interstate war.

Substitution Logic
The Cold War can be thought of as a period when internationalized civil wars (or “proxy wars”) became
p. 27 substitutes for an impossibly destructive clash between the United States and the Soviet Union. Moving
further into the past, Wimmer (2012) suggests a logic of substitution between interstate and civil wars that
emerged as part of the replacement process of multiethnic empires by nation-states. The logic of
substitution implies a strategic choice whereby one type of political violence substitutes for another one
which is deemed either impossible or ine ective.

A substitution logic has been suggested for terrorism and civil war: terrorism can be understood as a
substitute for (territorial) civil war, by rebels operating in the context of very strong states who prevent
them from launching a full-scale insurgency; terrorism, in that framework, constitutes a non-territorial
insurgency (de la Calle and Sánchez-Cuenca 2012). A substitution logic also exists between mass protest and
terrorism. For example, the emergence of terrorist activities in Italy during the 1970s has been explained as
a process of strategic adaptation by radical protesters unhappy with the perceived ine ectiveness of the
student social movement and its protest activity (Della Porta 1988; Della Porta and Tarrow 1986). Likewise
Roessler (2016) points to a substitution logic between military coups and civil wars in the ethnically divided
societies of sub-Saharan Africa: African rulers face a trade-o when it comes to power-sharing. On the one
 hand, they face a high likelihood of being overthrown in a military coup by members of their own military-
political faction who also have ties with a di erent ethnic group. On the other hand, however, if they exclude
them from the ruling coalition, they face the danger that these individuals may mobilize their ethnic power
base to launch an insurgency against them. Given this stark choice and the fact that rulers are more
vulnerable to a military coup than a civil war, they are attracted by the choice of exclusion, leading them to
increase the likelihood of a civil war. In this formulation, “civil war represents the consequences of a
strategic choice by rulers, backed by their coethnics, to coup-proof their regimes from their ethnic rivals”
(Roessler 2016, xvi).

The landscape of political violence provides many opportunities for the exploration of substitution e ects.

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For example, it is argued that the genocide of the European Jews was launched once an alternative project of
ethnic cleansing (known as the “Madagascar Plan”) became impossible (Browning 1992, 18). Likewise,
coup-proo ng, a term describing the various methods used to deter military coups, might increase the
likelihood of civil war through the military’s reduced capacity to ght insurgents (Houle 2016). More
broadly, it might be the case that defeating insurgents and mass protesters makes terrorism more likely or
that reducing state repression raises the odds of intercommunal violence. The methodological implications
of taking the logic of substitution seriously are considerable, since they point to a range of counterfactuals
that tend to be ignored.

Conclusion

In this chapter I have proposed a typology of eleven types of political violence, discussed their main
characteristics, and explored four distinct logics that shape the ways they are connected to each other. The
discussion provides a way to think about political violence in a way that overcomes the fragmentation of the
p. 28 eld without, however, sacri cing the distinctiveness of each type and without over-aggregating
di erent kinds of political violence into arti cial categories. Most importantly, this typology alerts us to the
fact that the counterfactual to the absence of a certain kind of political violence is not necessarily peace as
typically implied but, rather, a di erent type or types of political violence. This makes the study of political
violence more complex than usually assumed, but also both more realistic and intriguing.
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