Keeping Vigil: The Emergence of Vigilance Committees in Pre-Civil War America

Abstract

What explains the emergence of organized private enforcement in the United States? We study the formation of vigilance committees—that is, coercive groups organized in a manner not officially sanctioned by state law and with the purpose of establishing legal and moral claims. We argue that these committees were primarily intended to help create civic political identities in contexts of social ambiguity and institutional instability, what we call social frontiers. Relying on quantitative and qualitative analysis, we find that these committees were more likely to form in contexts where levels of ethno-nationalist heterogeneity were high and where political institutions had recently changed. Contrary to common wisdom, vigilance committees were much more than functionalist alternatives to an absent state, or local orders established by bargaining, or responses to social or economic conflict. They constituted flexible instruments to counteract environments characterized by social and political uncertainty.

Vigilantism and Institutions: Understanding Attitudes toward Lynching in Brazil

“…Asian respondents, however, rated fellow Asians as their least preferred choice. Taken together, the results provide experimental evidence that support for lynchings in Brazil does not resemble the typical racial patterns scholars have observed in the United States (Dray, 2003;Obert and Mattiacci, 2018;Seguin and Rigby, 2019). These findings are consistent with recent research on vigilantism in Haiti (Jung and Cohen, 2020) and with journalistic observations.…”

The Politics of Vigilantism

“…106–107). To be sure, some political scientists have written more substantively about vigilantism, notably Rosenbaum and Sederberg (1974, 1976) and more recently Roessler (2005); Kirkpatrick (2008); Stan (2011); Reno (2011); LeBas (2013); Schuberth (2013); Phillips (2017); Moncada (2017); Obert and Mattiacci (2018); Smith (2015, 2019); Zizumbo-Colunga (2017, 2019); Osorio et al (2019); and Jung and Cohen (2020). But as Moncada (2017) observes, their work has not coalesced into a coherent research agenda because political scientists lack a common vocabulary to understand, measure, and study vigilantism.…”

The “Dark Side” of Community Ties: Collective Action and Lynching in Mexico

“…In line with this definition, lynching is most commonly a spontaneous form of collective violence (Senechal de la Roche 1996). This is in contrast to the concept of vigilantism, which involves a higher level of organization (Moncada 2017(Moncada , 2023 although it may happen in similar contexts as lynching (Martinez 2018;Obert and Mattiacci 2018). Vigilantism also includes the prevention and investigation of violence (Bateson 2021).…”