When do nonviolent protests escalate into violence? Existing literature has focused primarily on campaign-level escalations and only recently has work begun to examine protest event-level escalations. We build on this emerging literature and develop an argument for why some protests escalate to violence. We use statistical analysis and find that violent escalations are more likely to occur following recent repression and when protests are unorganized. Our results offer insight into the conditions in which protests remain peaceful and offer citizens a channel to pursue their goals as well as the conditions in which protests become violent and destabilizing.

Why are some factions fighting for greater national self-determination (SD) more violent than others? While previous explanations of violence in these disputes have focused on the number of factions, their internal structures, and power distributions among factions, we find many factions that do not follow the expectations of these theories. In this article, we center on religious ideology, its unique transnational character, and the opportunity it creates for political elites from competing factions within the same SD movement to mobilize support. We argue that “religious factions” have a greater incentive to use violence than other factions. Violence serves as a costly signal, and it can be used to demonstrate a faction’s religious credentials to transnational networks and contacts, as they compete with each other on the international stage for the same potential benefactors. We code original data on the religious ideology of factions. We find that an increasing number of religious factions is associated with increased religious faction use of violence. Furthermore, our findings point to a critical insight: it is not religious ideology, but competition between religious factions, that generates violence.

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Education is widely known for its positive effect on conventional politics and nonviolent protest as well as its suppressive effect on violence. However, recent studies have connected education to violence through its effect on relative deprivation and frustration–aggression mechanisms. We address these divergent findings by presenting a theory of the conditional effect that education has on violence. To do so, we build on literature addressing education’s positive association with political participation, such as voting and protests, and question how this relationship translates to contexts in which conventional and nonviolent channels are unlikely to be effective – specifically, in cases of politically excluded ethnic groups. We argue that education increases ethnic group members’ resources and desire to address grievances. Yet, because the ethnic group is politically excluded, opportunities for conventional politics and nonviolent protest are limited. Educated ethnic group members are limited in political options, and are thus more likely to address their grievances through the support of rebel groups, increasing the probability of violence. Violence then occurs in localities where members of a politically excluded ethnic group are located and where those members have higher levels of education. Using geo-spatial data and statistical analysis, we demonstrate that education has divergent effects on violence in areas populated by politically excluded versus politically included ethnic groups in Africa and Central America. Areas with highly educated politically excluded ethnic group members are the most likely to experience violent events.

When do excluded ethnic groups obtain more political inclusion? Scholarship demonstrates that ethnic minority-based behavior is consequential for more inclusion. Yet we know little of the consequences of national resistance campaigns for ethnic minorities. Building on literature identifying non-violent national resistance (NVR) campaigns as consequential for outcomes such as democracy, this article identifies non-violent tactic use as key to understanding when national resistance campaigns trickle down to benefit excluded ethnic groups. It establishes empirically that an excluded ethnic group whose country experiences an NVR campaign has a higher probability of more political inclusion.

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