POLSCI 329S Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: 2005 Andijan Unrest, Bogotazo, Inverse Relation
17 May 2018
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Politics of Violence
9.01.16 Lecture Notes – (cont.) Types of Violence
Mass protest
o AKA Contentious action
o Collective, typically spontaneous
o Mostly non-violent, but the bigger ones tend to escalate barricades and street fighting
What is classified as violent?
▪ Destroying property?
o Associated with historical revolutions and contagious processe
o Non-territorial, primarily urban; capital-focused
o Democracies – protest is tamed and ritualized, especially in wealthy democracies
▪ No regime change, at most political instability
▪ Nature of democracy, more resilient to protest
o Autocracies – two outcomes: repression or regime change
▪ Repression with mass violence
• Matanza in El Salvador
• Tian An Men Square Massacre, China
• Andijan massacre, Uzbekistan
• Syria, 2011
▪ Regime change
• Iran
• Velvet Revolutions, East-Central Europe
• Orange revolutions, Tunisia and Egypt
o Why is there an option of regime change? Most autocracies have power to repress the
protest, so why implement regime change?
▪ Army in Asia is mostly conscription – loyalty to the civilians than to the army
▪ International dynamics
o What would Arendt say?
▪ When governments use violence, it’s because of decreasing power
▪ Power and violence is not only different, but they are opposites
▪ The violence destroys any power that the government still has – decreases
legitimacy
▪ Violence is utterly incapable of creating power
o Coercion v. power
▪ Coercion is not sustainable
▪ Violence may not be the maintenance of power, but may help a leader gain power
Political assassination – specific tactic targeting state leaders
o Roman empire
o Often bundled under terrorism, can also happen during military coups
o Limited violence but important effects in personalistic authoritarian regimes (inverse
relation to the institutionalization of the regime)
▪ But can escalate (e.g., Bogotazo, Rwandan genocide, WWI)
o Symbolic effects in democracies
Military coups
o Typically low levels of violence
o Non-territorial: urban
o In rare cases, botched coups may escalate into civil war
o Inverse relationship to GDP per capita
o Declining trend in the last 15 years
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