Barriers to Nonviolent Resistance: Identities, Aims and State Responses to Dissent Dragana Vidović A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Politics 2018 Copyright Contents 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Protest Attributes and Government Responses 7 1.2 Overview of Research Chapters: Datasets and Findings 9 1.3 The PhD Thesis Outline 16 2 Divided We Fall: Ethnic Diversity and Obstacles to Nonviolent Mobilization 19 2.1Introduction 21 2.2Ethnicity, Nonviolence and Potentials for Change 25 2.3Nonviolent Campaigns: Incentives and Barriers in Autocracies 31 2.4 Propositions 38 2.5 Data and Model Specifications 41 2.5.1 The Dependent Variable 41 2.5.2 Explanatory Variables 43 2.5.3 Control Variables 45 2.6 Results 47 2.7 Model Validation: Simulated Predicted Probabilities 50 2.8 Robustness Checks 52 2.9 Discussion 53 2.10 Conclusion 54 3 Framing and Undermining Dissent: The Case of Bosnia and Herzegovina 56 3.1Introduction 58 3.2 Framing Processes: Protest Movement and Government Perspective 62 3.3Background: What were B&H 2014 protests about? 71 3.4 Data and Method 77 3.4.1Topic Modelling 79 3.5 Results 82 3.6 Discussion 91 3.7 Conclusion 92 4 Ignoring Demands: Is the Law of Coercive Responsiveness Wrong? 97 4.1 Introduction 99 4.2 Government Responses: Repression, Accommodation or Neither? 102 4.3 Propositions 110 4.4 Data and Research Design 113 4.4.1 The Dependent Variable 115 4.4.2Explanatory Variables 116 4.4.3 Control Variables 120 4.5 Results 122 4.6 Robustness Checks 130 4.7 Discussion 131 4.8 Conclusion 133 5 Conclusion 137 6 Appendix 6.1 Onset of nonviolent campaigns (NVC) in a country-year, ethnic diversity (ED) levels and regime type (polity2 scores) 146 6.2 Robustness Check. Onset of nonviolent campaigns (NVC) in a country- year, Freedom House (FH) civil liberties scores 147 6.3 Onset of nonviolent campaigns (NVC) in a country-year with cubic polynomials included to control for temporal dependence 148 6.4 The dominant topics in the corpus and the three most prominent topic words 149 6.5 Map of Bosnia and Herzegovina with territorial divisions: Republic of Srpska (RS) in white colour and the FB&H in the grey colour 151 6.6 Top 20 countries with highest numbers of protest events based on the MMD dataset (1990-2014) 152 6.7 Count of protest demands across protest size categories 153 6.8 Count of Government Responses by Protest Size Categories 154 6.9 Robustness Checks. Multinomial Logit. Government Responses: ignore, accommodate, repress (baseline category). Inconsistency Response Additional Analyses 155 6.10 Robustness Checks. Multinomial Logit. Ethnic Diversity. 157 List of Tables 2.1 Summary Statistics 46 2.2 Onset of Nonviolent Campaigns (NVC) /Country Year 48 3.1 Total unemployment rates in FB&H, RS and B&H, 2012-2014, by gender 74 3.2Number of protest events and participants 74 4.1 Multinomial Logit Model 123 List of Figures 2.1 Count of nonviolent campaigns (NVC) over years Events included in the current analysis 43 2.2 Boxplot: Ethnic Diversity and Regime Type 45 2.3 Marginal effect of autocracy on the onset of nonviolent campaigns (NVC) across Ethnic Diversity (ED) values 49 2.4 Simulated predicted probabilities (y axis) of the onset of nonviolent campaigns (NVC) in ethnically diverse (x=1) in comparison to ethnically homogenous states (x=0), conditional on Autocracy, across average values of other variables. 52 3.1 Nezavisne Novine (NN) and Oslobodjenje (OS) count of protest related daily articles for February 2014. The x-axis shows the dates, y-count of the protest related articles, the orange bars are NN and blue are OS news articles. 79 3.2 Estimated optimal number of topics based on held-out log likelihood 83 3.3 The dominant topics in the corpus: associated words and their proportions 84 3.4 The number of the documents and the proportion of the document Content that relates to the Topic 1, RS independence, (x axis) over the month of February (y axis). Nezavisne Novine-NN, Oslobodjenje-OS. 87 3.5 The number of the documents (circle radius) and the proportion of the document content that relates to the Topic 2, B&H/FB&H Officials support protests, (x axis) over the month of February (y axis). Nezavisne Novine-NN, Oslobodjenje-OS. 89 3.6 The number of the documents (circle radius) and the proportion of the document content that relates to the Topic 3, FB&H officials discredit protests (x axis) over the month of February (y axis). Nezavisne Novine-NN, Oslobodjenje-OS 90 4.1 Frequency of Government Responses (1990-2014) 116 4.2 Frequency of protest size (1999-2014) 118 4.3 Frequency of protest demands (1990-2014) 119 4.4 Predicted probabilities of government responses across protest size categories 128 4.5 Predicted probabilities of government responses across protest demand categories 129 Abstract The second chapter of this PhD thesis examines the barriers to nonviolent resistance and explains why, despite the grievances, we see uprisings in some states and not others. I argue that a lack of common ties and the existence of ethnic cleavages create additional barriers for nonviolent mass mobilization in ethnically diverse states. I test the argument by using the Ethnic-Power Relations (EPR) and Nonviolent and Violent Campaign and Outcomes (NAVCO.2.0) datasets. The results show that the probability of nonviolent campaign onset is conditional on both, the levels of ethnic diversity and the regime type – the onset being less likely in ethnically diverse non-democracies. The third chapter illustrates how ethnic divides can be used to undermine mass-scale nonviolent mobilization by examining government framing of protest events during the 2014 spring protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Automated text analysis approach is used to discover the types of narratives (frames) that the Bosnia and Herzegovina‘s government officials used to respond to protest demands. The results show that the Government officials have predominantly used the following types of frames: delegitimizing (ex. calling protesters traitors, hooligans), demobilizing (sympathetic statements – ex. saying that protests are justified), and alternative views (sidelining/ignoring grievances by discussing more salient issues). The results indicate that ethnic divides were exploited to prevent cross-ethnic mass mobilization. In the chapter four, I explore the variability of government responses to protest events using the Mass Mobilization Data (MMD), focusing on the ignore category - the response not commonly studied in the literature. I find that contrary to the expectations, governments are more likely to ignore than repress protest events. In particular, governments are more likely to ignore protests with 1000 or more participants, and more likely to accommodate than repress protests above 5000 participants. In conclusion, this PhD thesis shows that ethnicity increases costs of cooperation and lowers potentials for nonviolent resistance. In addition, this thesis demonstrates that governments might often choose to neither repress nor accommodate protest events, choosing instead to ignore grievances and demands. In summary, the aim of this PhD thesis is to examine barriers to nonviolent resistance and state responses to dissent. Acknowledgement Completing my PhD studies and producing this thesis has been an experience which I have found both challenging and enjoyable. This work has been made possible through the support and encouragement of various individuals who have positively contributed towards both my work and my life, and I want to express to these individuals my unreserved gratitude. Primary acknowledgement goes to my wonderful family, both in the UK and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, who have always supported and encouraged me to achieve. In particular I would like to thank my husband Joe, his parents George and Janet for many amazing ―thesis survival‖ dinners, my brother Duško and my parents Drago i Zagorka, for their continual support, patience and love. I am very thankful to my friends Siobhan Hobbs, Kateřina Tkáčová and Belén González who kept me on the track and sent many encouraging thoughts and valuable comments on my work. My friend, Lorena Castilla, for her wisdom – long talks and short walks, and all her support. Also, to all of my other friends, running buddies, landlords and neighbours who rallied around me throughout my marriage and the pregnancy, as Joe and I welcomed our first child, Jack, in December 2017. I would like thank my fellow PhD students, many of whom I consider friends, for their guidance and expertise, which has allowed me to shape my arguments and develop my academic skill. Special thanks to Wakako Maekawa for her invaluable comments on the fourth chapter. And others for their useful comments and encouragements: Baris Ari, Roman Olar, Sinem Arslan, Lorena Castilla, Philip Nelson, Rebecca Cordell, Vlatka Jakir, Sara Polo. I am grateful to many other people who gave me support during my time as a student, particularly the Administration Team, Sarah Lawson, Alex West, Sallyann West and Nicola Rowley. Many thanks to discussant Manuel Vogt for his detailed comments and suggestions at the 2016 ISA meeting and Janina Beiser McGrath for her feedback at the CRS 2015 conference for the second chapter of this thesis. Final huge thank you to my supervisors Professor Kristian Skrede Gleditsch and Professor Rob Johns for their encouragement, patience and guidance throughout my PhD study and research. Thank you both for your detailed reading of my work and all the comments over the years! I am very thankful to Professor Gleditsch for the numerous research and work opportunities and for providing financial and teaching support for me to travel and present my research in many inspiring places. I am eternally grateful to Professor Gleditsch for involving me into his project ―Conflict, Strategies, and Violence: An Actor-based Approach to Violent and Non-Violent Interactions (CSV)‖ and providing scholarship for my PhD studies.