Violence Elections And Party Politics

As the United States and the countries of Western Europe have sought to promote democratic rule in those parts of the world that have not enjoyed the blessings of liberty, they have failed to consider an important factor. Competitive elections, the sine qua non of democratic government, often gives rise to serious bouts of political violence: mob riots, inter-party fighting, and internal wars. The essays collected in this volume evaluate the relationship between terrorist activity and electoral politics. Do democratic elections themselves undermine the development and stability of the democratic institutions the United States and its allies seek to promote? Under what conditions are democratic elections effective at bringing terrorist organizations into the political process, thereby quelling violence? When and how might terrorist organizations use democratic elections to foment violence? This book was published as a special issue of Terrorism and Political Violence.

This book interrogates the nature of elections and election violence in the African countries. It traces the causes of the governance menace to multiple factors that are not limited to poverty, unemployment, and media. The book documents how election violence cripples the nation-building process across many African countries. Consequently, it reveals that states have lost their manifest destiny of national transformation in Africa because they cannot guarantee that legitimate candidates, who should win elections, due to the widespread manipulation of violence at all levels of electoral engineering. The chapters rely on the cases and changing dynamics of elections and electoral violence in the different Nigerian states. It traces the origins of elections, the nature and patterns of a number of past elections as well as the roles of youth, judiciary, electoral umpire, social media, and gender on the changing nature of elections in Nigeria.

Multiparty elections have become the bellwether by which all democracies are judged, and the spread of these systems across Africa has been widely hailed as a sign of the continent’s progress towards stability and prosperity. But such elections bring their own challenges, particularly the often intense internecine violence following disputed results. While the consequences of such violence can be profound, undermining the legitimacy of the democratic process and in some cases plunging countries into civil war or renewed dictatorship, little is known about the causes. By mapping, analysing and comparing instances of election violence in different localities across Africa – including Kenya, Ivory Coast and Uganda – this collection of detailed case studies sheds light on the underlying dynamics and sub-national causes behind electoral conflicts, revealing them to be the result of a complex interplay between democratisation and the older, patronage-based system of ‘Big Man’ politics. Essential for scholars and policymakers across the social sciences and humanities interested in democratization, peace-keeping and peace studies, Violence in African Elections provides important insights into why some communities prove more prone to electoral violence than others, offering practical suggestions for preventing violence through improved electoral monitoring, voter education, and international assistance.

An analysis of land and natural resource conflict as a source of political violence, focusing on election violence in Kenya.

An incisive analysis of the connections between democracy and violence by acknowledged experts in the field. The connection between the two activities has often been largely ignored because of a widespread reluctance among democrats to consider the possibility that democratic forms perhaps encourage violence. This challenging volume opens up the debate.

The key to the impact of international election support is credibility; credible elections are less likely to turn violent. So argues Inken von Borzyskowski in The Credibility Challenge, in which she provides an explanation of why and when election support can increase or reduce violence. Von Borzyskowski answers four major questions: Under what circumstances can election support influence election violence? How can election support shape the incentives of domestic actors to engage in or abstain from violence? Does support help reduce violence or increase it? And, which type of support—observation or technical assistance—is better in each instance? The Credibility Challenge pulls broad quantitative evidence and qualitative observations from Guyana, Liberia, Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Bangladesh to respond to these questions. Von Borzyskowski finds that international democracy aid matters for election credibility and violence; outside observers can exacerbate postelection violence if they cast doubt on election credibility; and technical assistance helps build electoral institutions, improves election credibility, and reduces violence. Her results advance research and policy on peacebuilding and democracy promotion in new and surprising ways.