The Structure of Success: How the Internal Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness

Krause, Peter

doi:10.1162/isec_a_00148

Cited by 51 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Electoral armed groups themselves can radicalize and moderate their ideological positions, both in and outside of these transitional periods. A powerful cause of uncompromising or radicalizing ideological positions is the existence or threat of intra‐movement competition and splintering (Pearlman ; Krause /2014). Adopting a rigid stance may be necessary to avoid charges of selling out or being co‐opted, heightening ideological tensions and limiting opportunities for electoral cooperation.…”

Section: Theorizing Armed Group Trajectoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Armed Groups and Militarized Elections

Staniland

2015

Int Stud Q

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Nonstate armed groups are often involved in electoral violence, but we know little about the origins or fates of these groups. This article develops an interactive theory of relations between governments and electoral armed groups. Governments assign different political roles to armed groups that reflect their ideological position and electoral value. State strategies flow from these political roles, but groups’ organizational capacity can allow them to resist government efforts to control, destroy, or incorporate them. The interaction of regime political interests and armed group autonomy leads to five distinct government‐armed group trajectories, ranging from incorporation to violent conflict. I use comparative evidence from militarized elections in Karachi to illustrate the validity of the concepts and assess the power of the theory, while also exploring its limits and the need for future research. My argument and findings matter for our understanding of the linkages between democracy, civil conflict, and state power.

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Section: Theorizing Armed Group Trajectoriesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Armed Groups and Militarized Elections

Staniland

2015

Int Stud Q

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“…Adjudicating between these reasons for terrorism's persistence in the face of failure is challenging. Militant groups are not unitary; leaders and followers, and different factions can have contrasting motivations which shape decision-making (Krause, 2014). The interaction between different outcome measures can make it difficult to develop a holistic interpretation as to why terrorism continues to be used (Marsden, 2012).…”

Section: Terrorism's Impact and Persistencementioning

confidence: 99%

Terrorism: Its Past, Present & Future Study - A Special Issue to Commemorate CSTPV at 25

Brunton

Wilson

2020

CVIR

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Contemporary Voices, Handa CSTPV 25 th Anniversary Special Issue 3 Discussion 1-Revisiting the wicked problem of defining terrorism by Alex P. Schmid Contemporary Voices, Handa CSTPV 25 th Anniversary Special Issue 6 5. Terrorism is an act of political violence which means that in the end it is intended to force senior decision makers to change their policy radically…; 6. The violence of terrorism is primarily directed at civilians; 7. The direct victims of terrorism are selected at random from a general target group; 8. The actual victims of terrorism, its direct targets, are not identical to its target group, which is the indirect but principal objective of the violence; 9. Between the violence of terrorism and its political consequences, or, between the direct victims of terrorism and its target group, there is an intermediate variable: fear; 10. The scene of terrorism is a monumental drama that arouses primordial, primitive instincts; 11. Behind the active aspect of terrorism there is an underground group that is either more or less autonomous or a secretive executive arm of a large and well-known organisation; 12. The terrorist group is a non-state organ or, at most, only partially associated with an established governmental institution and under its control (Aran, 2019. For an alternative list of twelve elements defining terrorism, see: Schmid, 2011, pp. 86-7). While this is a very useful list, there is one crucial element missing. Propaganda by the deed The crucial element that has stayed central with the tactic of terrorism is the role of witnesses and the media. While in the late eighteenth century serial public executions of 'enemies of the revolution' by the guillotine were used to create and spread terror, in the nineteenth century a sensationalist rotary press amplified the impact of terrorist bombings. Anarchist and social-revolutionary theorists and practitioners discovered that one could use demonstrative acts of public violence as a way to enter the news system. They called it 'propaganda by the deed'. To quote one of them, the German-American Johannes Most (1885): 'Everyone knows […] that the more highly placed the one shot or blown up, and the more perfectly executed the attempt, the greater the propagandistic effect. […] What is important is not solely these actions themselves but also the propagandistic effect that they are able to achieve. Hence, we preach not only action in and for itself, but also action as propaganda' (quoted in Laqueur, 1978, pp. 100, 105). By killing heads of state and government, ranging from the Russian Czar Alexander II (1881) to the Italian King Umberto (1900), terrorists made headlines without paying a penny in advertising costs. The principle of accessing the world's news system by deliberately creating bad news has remained the same. As one German terrorist explained in 1970: 'We give the media what they need: newsworthy events. They cover us, explain our causes and this, unwittingly, legitim...

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“…35Cunningham, Bakke, and Seymour 2012; Krause 2014; Sinno 2010; Bakke, Cunningham, and Seymour 2012; Johnston 2008; Shapiro 2013.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…16Pearlman 2011; Staniland 2014, 2012; Lawrence 2010; Sinno 2010; Cunningham, Bakke, and Seymour 2012; Pearlman and Cunningham 2012; Krause 2014; Bakke, Cunningham, and Seymour 2012; Driscoll 2012; McLauchlin and Pearlman 2012.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Money Talks: Discourse, Networks, and Structure in Militant Organizations

Parkinson¹

2016

Perspect. polit.

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Scholarship on militant organizations and rebel movements emphasizes the effects of fragmentation and disunity on military and political outcomes. Yet this scholarship’s focus on formal, durable, and externally observable aspects of organizational structure omits the social practices that constitute, reinforce, and reproduce intra-group schisms. How do intra-organizational divisions calcify into permanent cleavages? What processes reproduce factions over time? Using the case of Fatah in Lebanon, I argue that informal discursive practices—e.g., gossip, jokes, complaints, storytelling—contribute to the maintenance and reproduction of intra-organizational factions. Specifically, I focus on how networks of meaning-laden, money-centric discourse structure relations among militants who identify as being “Old Fatah.” I demonstrate that while these practices frequently originate in the organizational realm, cadres subsequently reproduce them within kinship, marriage, and friendship networks. This “money talk” between age cohorts within the quotidian realm connects younger members of Fatah to older cadres through collective practices and conceptions of organizational membership. These practices both exemplify an intra-organizational schism and constitute, in part, the faction called Old Fatah. Examining how symbolic practice comprises social structure thus provides important insight into the politics of organizations such as militant groups, social movements, and political parties.

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The Structure of Success: How the Internal Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness

Cited by 51 publications

References 18 publications

Armed Groups and Militarized Elections

Armed Groups and Militarized Elections

Terrorism: Its Past, Present & Future Study - A Special Issue to Commemorate CSTPV at 25

Money Talks: Discourse, Networks, and Structure in Militant Organizations

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