Processes of Violent Political Mobilisation: an Overview of Contemporary Debates and CRISE Findings Yvan Guichaoua
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NUMBER 5 JUNE 2010 Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity Processes of violent political mobilisation: an overview of contemporary debates and CRISE findings Yvan Guichaoua OVERVIEW NUMBER 5 JUNE 2010 Processes of violent political mobilisation: an overview of contemporary debates and CRISE findings Yvan Guichaoua OVERVIEW Copyright © Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity The UK Department for International Development (DFID) supports policies, programmes and projects to promote international development. DFID provided funds for this study as part of that objective, but the views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s) alone. Design and layout: Richard Boxall Design Associates 2 NUMBER 5 OVERVIEW JUNE 2010 Table of Contents Glossary ...........................................................................................................................................3 Executive summary ........................................................................................................................4 1. Introduction: disentangling conflict and violence .................................................................4 2. Entrepreneurs of violence .......................................................................................................10 2.1 How the Oodua People’s Congress emerged: the political patronage and social embeddedness of a grassroots movement .....................................14 2.2 How personal and clan-based grudges nurture guerillas: the history of Niger’s insurgent leader Rhissa ag Boula ......................................................16 2.3 The uncertain tenure of insurgent leaders: Niger’s short-lived, circumstantial alliances among ‘social bandits’ ...................................................................18 3. Participating in organised violence .......................................................................................23 3.1 Greed versus grievances: an analytical stalemate .........................................................23 3.2 Non-rival explanations of violent engagement ..............................................................25 3.3 The club goods model: The O’odua People’s Congress (OPC)’s protective moral economy ......................................................................................................32 3.4 ‘Moral outrage’ and combatants’ solidary ethos: Tuareg ‘ishumar’ ............................39 4. Pending puzzles: understanding the diversity of organised violence and the dynamics of armed groups ...................................................................................... 44 4.1 Making sense of the behavioural diversity of armed groups ....................................... 44 4.2 How do armed organisations perpetuate themselves, or disappear? .........................47 5. Policy implications ...................................................................................................................49 References .....................................................................................................................................51 CRISE WWW.CRISE.OX.AC.UK 3 Glossary Achamor An unemployed Tuareg youth (singular of ishumar) Forces Armées Nigeriennes (FAN) Niger armed forces Forces Armées Révolutionnaires du Sahara (FARS) Tubu militia in Niger Forces Nationales d’Intervention et de Sécurité Niger military body intended to monitor desert areas (FNIS) Front de Liberation de l’Aïr et de l’Azawak (FLAA) Niger rebel group active in the 1990s Niger rebel group which splintered from the MNJ in Front Patriotique Nigérien (FPN) 2009 Front des Forces de Redressement (FFR) Niger rebel group which splintered from the MNJ in 2008established by Rhissa ag Boula Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Marxist-Leninist revolutionary group in Colombia Ejército del Pueblo (FARC) (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) Ishumar Unemployed Tuareg youths Jeunesses Arabes Arab militia in Niger, active in the 2000s Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola - The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola – Partido do Trabalho (MPLA) Party of Labour Mouvement des Nigériens pour la Justice (MNJ) Short-lived rebel group in Niger, founded in 2007 O’odua People’s Congress (OPC) Ethnic militia in Nigeria Resistência Nacional Moçambicana (RENAMO) The Mozambican National Resistance Revolutionary United Front (RUF) Sierra Leonean militant group lifestyle of exiled Tuaregs, by extension Tuareg teshumara nationalist ideology União Nacional para a Independência Total de The National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) Angola 4 NUMBER 5 OVERVIEW JUNE 2010 Executive summary This paper reviews the recent literature on processes of violent mobilisation. It highlights the need to distinguish between conflict and violence, arguing that violence deserves spe- cific attention, separate from an analysis of the macro-cleavages which lead to social con- flict. It goes on to detail those circumstances which result in political violence. Political vio- lence is generally initiated by ‘specialists’, people with the specific skills and desire to trigger such conflict, and we analyse what makes non-specialists follow them. We question the validity of a dichotomy between greed and grievances as drivers of violent engagement. Instead we show that participation in violence could be seen, from an individual perspective, as a constantly changing process of ‘navigation’. However, this makes establishing motiva- tions for violence difficult, both analytically and empirically. We therefore suggest an alter- native way of studying the causes of the worst forms of collective violence, shifting attention from the individual to armed organisations. Indeed, these armed organisations are where the external constraints on insurgency (logistical, political, military) and the internal impera- tives of military cohesion and efficiency are dealt with. The forms of collective violence (of high intensity or not, targeted or indiscriminate etc.) stem from how such organisational puzzles are solved. We detail some of the causal mechanisms that could be significant in shaping the histories and routes taken by such armed organisations. The last section dis- cusses the policy implications of these findings. CRISE WWW.CRISE.OX.AC.UK 5 Introduction: disentangling 1 conflict and violence Even where violence is clearly rooted in pre-existing conflict, it should not be treated as a natural, self-explanatory outgrowth of such conflict, something that occurs automatically when the conflict reaches a certain intensity, a certain temperature. Violence is not a quanti- tative degree of conflict but a qualitative form of conflict, with its own dynamics. (Brubaker and Laitin, 1998, p. 426) One frequent pitfall when dealing with political violence is to equate it with conflict. While political violence does generally signal the existence of a pre-existing conflict, most con- flicts do not result in violence. Statistically, political violence remains a rare and localised phenomenon. Why it happens deserves attention in its own right, as well as specific ana- lytical tools. One should not conceive of political violence as a higher degree of conflict, but as a process following its own logic, whose episodes and bifurcations are largely endog- enous. The root causes of conflict such as horizontal inequalities (HIs, as detailed in Stewart, 2008) or the collapse of the state following decades of neo-patrimonial rule (Bates, 2008) may certainly raise the risk of political violence, but they do not fully explain it. One very 1 We do not go as far as obvious reason for this is that violence not only requires specific weapons; more important- Kalyvas (1999) to ly, it requires specific individual skills and inclinations; specific organisational skills; and – whom ‘civil war one might argue – a specific political culture where shared norms make the use of force a violence should be viable option. In contrast, non-violent protesters and rebels are likely to be heterogeneous, distinguished from violent collective with very varied personal histories, and to become active for different reasons. action (such as riots and pogroms) because To illustrate the specific ‘skills’ conducive to violence, we need only look at the decisive role war structures choices played by veterans or ex-combatants in igniting political violence. For example, the Islamist and selects actors in forces of the Algerian Civil War were organised around a core of combatants who had previ- fundamentally ously fought the Russians in Afghanistan. In Côte d’Ivoire, General Gueï’s coup d’état of 1999 different ways than peace – even violent followed hard on the heels of a mutiny involving military units who had been posted to the peace’ (p. 245). This Central African Republic, and Gueï’s coup in turn led to the failed coup of 2002 and subse- paper will touch on quent civil war. And the initiators of the 2007 Tuareg rebellion in Niger all had a military back- riots and communal violence as, in the case ground. Indeed, a recent statistical analysis has suggested that partition violence in India studies presented, after World War II may well have been greater in districts where veterans had been on the there does not appear frontline for prolonged periods during the war (Jha and Wilkinson, 2010). Political violence to be a neat, clear boundary between the may also erupt more easily in environments where violent individuals are commonplace, states