The Application, Functioning and Failure of the ‘Internal Brakes on Violent Escalation’ during Two Waves of Far-Right Mobilisation in Britain

The scholarship on why violent escalation often does not take place, or on why it only happens to a limited extent, has for some time now lagged behind that which seeks to explain why, how and when violent escalation does occur. This paper contributes to current efforts by several scholars to address this relative imbalance in the literature. It does this by tracing the application, functioning and, occasionally, failure, of the ‘internal brakes on violent escalation’ – the mechanisms through which members of the groups themselves contribute to establish and maintain limits upon their own violence – during two waves of far-right activism in Britain: in the 1990s, as the British National Party (BNP) began to transition towards a focus on electoral politics whilst struggling to contain the increasing violence of Combat 18, initially set up by the BNP itself as a stewards’ group; and the wave of activism associated with the rise to prominence of the English Defence League (EDL) in 2009, as anti-minority politics moved back onto the streets. While violence, and the threat of violence, has been integral to each of these waves of anti-minority politics, violence has in both cases usually operated within fairly stable parameters, making these good cases in which to explore the application, functioning and failure of the internal brakes on violent escalation, and how these interact with the changing operating environment. For example, the use of lethal violence has been rare, and even when far right activists have had access to firearms and explosives, they have rarely made use of them. What is revealed as we trace the application, functioning and occasional failure of the internal brakes on violent escalation is that these brakes are configured across three different levels of proximity to the potential act of violence: the level of campaign planning; the level of action planning and the situational level – where activists are actually undertaking actions. We propose that by tracing how these different levels interact with one another we can begin to capture and comprehend the dynamic nature of processes of non-, limited- or truncated-escalation.