Fomenting Political Violence

This book offers a psychosocial perspective on political violence, employing a strong current of psychoanalytic thinking. In the course of its chapters an international roster of researchers and scholars offers a richly complex and insightful view of diverse forms of political violence and its build-ups. The authors discuss the processes by which the ground for political violence is prepared, and how violent acts are facilitated. They question how social, cultural and political constellations can develop in such a way that, for certain people in this constellation, violence becomes a logical – perversely reasonable – response. This collection demonstrates what a psychoanalytic perspective can bring to existing approaches to political violence, going beyond the social movement approach by unfolding the inherent ambiguity in accepted concepts within the study of political violence.

This book explains the lifecycle of terrorist organizations from an innovative theoretical perspective, combining economics with social psychology. It provides a new approach to understanding human behaviour in organized society, and then uses this to analyze the forces shaping the lifecycle of violent political movements. Economic and rational-choice theorists assume that human beings are motivated only by self-utility, yet terrorism is ultimately an altruistic act in the eyes of its participants. This book highlights the importance of the desire to belong to a group as a motivating factor, and argues that all of us face an eternal trade-off between selfishness and community concern. This hypothesis is explored through four key groups; the IRA in Northern Ireland, Al Qaeda, Hamas, and the Naxalites in India. Through this, the book analyzes the birth, growth, transformation and demise of violent political movements, and ends with an analysis of the conditions which determine the outcome of the war against terrorism. Understanding Terrorism and Political Violence will be essential reading for advanced students of terrorism studies and political science, and of great interest to students of social psychology and sociology.

A study of workers struggles against management regimes in Britain's car industry from the Second World War to the late 1980s.

This book will prepare social workers, psychologists, and counselors for psychosocial work with individuals and groups who are experiencing distress and trauma resulting from historical and current sociopolitical oppression and violence. Sociopolitical oppression is a sustained, systematic catastrophe, which results from social targeting and discrimination such as racism, sexism and misogyny, homophobia, and anti-immigrant fervor. The consequences are profound and debilitating. In some ways, they are similar to reactions to a single event disaster (e.g., hurricane, earthquake, terrorist attack) but even more insidious because the social targeting and harassment have been ongoing and will continue. As a guide for direct clinical practice, this book offers new models for understanding the nature and consequences of sociopolitical disasters as well as guiding a range of interventions – clinical, psychoeducational, advocacy, and social justice – for use on a micro, mezzo, and macro level. Drawing on indigenous and BIPOC knowledge and scholarship and using case studies from around the world, it criticizes while also adapting and integrating knowledge and theory from the fields of disaster mental health, psychosocial capacity building, trauma therapy, psychodynamic theory, cognitive behavioral theories, and theories of resilience and positive psychology, linking them to an understanding of historical and social oppression, social justice, and intergroup conflict and reconciliation. The book offers critiques of dominant Western, Eurocentric visions of personhood and models of intervention and questions assumptions about the roles of "client" and "worker," proposing more egalitarian, collaborative relationships and extensive use of training of trainers. It will prepare graduate students and practitioners across the helping professions for work that promotes the collective and individual strength and efficacy of affected people, while also responding directly to vulnerability, stress, and trauma.

India's explosive economic growth and emerging power status make it a key country of interest for policymakers, researchers and scholars within South Asia and around the world. But while many of India's threats and conflicts are strategized and discussed extensively within the confines of security studies, strategic studies and conventional international relations perspectives, many less visible challenges are set to impact significantly on India's potential for economic growth as well as the human security and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of Indian citizens. Drawing on extensive research within India, this book looks at some of the ‘hidden risks’ that India faces, exploring how a broadened scope of what constitutes ‘risk’ itself holds value for Indian security studies practitioners and policymakers. It highlights several human security risks facing India, including the inability of the world’s largest democracy to deal effectively with widespread poverty and health issues, resource depletion and environmental mismanagement, pervasive corruption and institutionalized crime, communal violence, a protracted Maoist insurgency, and deadlocked peace processes in the Northeast among others. The book extracts common themes from these seemingly disparate problems, discussing what underlying failures allow them to persist and why policymakers heavily securitize some political issues while ignoring others. Providing an understanding of how several lesser-studied risks can pose potential or actual threats to Indian society and its ‘emerging power’ growth narrative, this book is a useful contribution to South Asian Studies, International Security Studies and Global Politics.

Political parties are integral to democracy and yet they frequently engage in anti-democratic, violent behaviour. Parties can employ violence directly, outsource violence to gangs and militias, or form electoral alliances with non-state armed actors. When do parties engage in, or facilitate, violence? What determines the strategies of violence that they employ? Drawing on data from Pakistan, Under the Gun argues that party violence is not a simple manifestation of weak state capacity but instead the intentional product of political incentives, further complicating the process of democratization. Using a rigorous multi-method approach based on over a hundred interviews and numerous surveys, the book demonstrates that a party's violence strategy depends on the incentives it faces in the subnational political landscape in which it operates, the cost it incurs from its voters for violent acts, and its organizational capacity for violence.

This book provides a new approach to explaining prolonged rebellions and insurgent wars, as well as a more nuanced and multi-faceted account of the entire lifespans of rebel and insurgent groups. Since 1945, rebel and insurgent groups have increasingly dragged larger, better funded, and ostensibly militarily superior regimes into protracted intrastate conflicts. This book demonstrates how they were able to endure the hardships of warfare thanks to decisions made before the conflict erupted––a period of time the author refers to as “incubation.” Using case studies on Latin American insurgencies, the author demonstrates that their capacity to endure was directly associated with both the length and quality of each group’s prewar preparations.

Nigeria is mired in a crisis of governance. For decades, Nigeria's governing elite have been widely implicated in acts of violence, corruption and electorial fraud so pervasive as to resemble criminal activity more han democratic governance. Not only has Nigeria's federal government failed to hold these politicians to account, but Nigeria's system of politics has actively rewarded corruption and violence with control governorships, parliamentary seats and other positions of public trust.