Political non-state groups (PNSGs) make use of violent tactics to a highly varying degree, both in quality and quantity, even across comparable contexts. Many groups that escalate their protest behaviour towards violent forms do not only target military forces or political decision-makers, but also commit abhorrent brute force against civil populations. Other groups demonstrate much more restraint, even within the same context.
Research on why some groups at a certain point turn towards destruction and atrocities while others resist to do so has been scarce and fragmented. It is the objective of this contribution to analyse the shift from non-violent to violent collective action in the field of contentious politics. More precisely, it focuses on the dynamics that influence the selection of tactics by PNSGs from a repertoire of various forms of political violence, directed against security personnel, politicians and civilians. It aims to examine the relationship between violence against these target types and how and why transitions in protest behaviour take place.
The theoretical background of this paper is informed principally by social movement studies, terrorism studies and by civil war studies. The underlying approach is based on the political process model, as put forward by McAdam’s seminal contributions, with a particular focus on resources. Resources are divided into moral, tangible and organisational categories. While it often has been claimed that violence against civilians is a ‘weapon of the weak’, there has been insufficient systematic research on the role that resources play for PNSGs in escalating political violence.
The theoretical model presumes that a group’s selection of tactics is (to a significant degree) based on rational cost-benefit calculations, with the aim to maximise the payoff in reaching its goals. This means that tactics are adjusted to the capacities of the group, the type of targets and the anticipated responses of the audiences. Principal-agent relationships and legitimacy costs affect the interactions between sponsors, audiences and the group and, hence, its behaviour.
In this integrated approach, the origin and type of resources are interlinked and provide two major research questions to be tackled:
Which types of resources are pivotal in explaining shifts in tactics, i.e. do particular types of resources provoke certain tactics?
Does the origin of resources matter, i.e. do certain sponsors promote certain protest tactics?
For the empirical analyses, a comprehensive novel dataset is presented that that combines information on groups’ types of resources, sponsors, and non-violent or violent tactics. Relevant data from several seminal datasets was identified, transformed and matched, inter alia including extractions from datasets such as: the Global Terrorism Database, the Minorities at Risk Organisational Behaviour datasets, UCDP’s External Support Project dataset, UCDP’s One-Sided Violence dataset, the Non-State Actor dataset, the Big Allied and Dangerous (BAAD) Dataset and others. The data has been amended and amplified by own codings and additional variables, currently providing detailed information on more than 500 PNSGs over time.
