Political Violence

With the breakup of the Soviet Union, the North Caucasus became, from the perspective of the Russian federal centre, a politically unstable and at times rather violent borderland. This article examines the political settlements emerging under the broader conditions of state formation in limited-access social orders, i.e. social orders negotiated between the central state and local elites with some violent potential. Analysing the developments in Kabardino-Balkaria (KBR) since the early 1990s, the authors find three types of political settlements that vary in terms of elite figuration, key resources used for rent distribution and the role of violence as a political resource. These political settlements have differing implications for the sustainability of local social order and shed light on the variations in state rule exercised by the federal centre in its political peripheries. Against the backdrop of changing violent challenges, the centre successfully tightened vertical elite control but at the cost of reducing the inclusiveness of political settlements within Kabardino-Balkaria.

Presentation on "Conflict and International Relations: The Impact of Terrorism and Extremism on the Middle Eastern International Politics Agenda" as invited speaker in the Middle East session, 14 April 2021, at the congress "Beyond the West: Politics of the Global South" organized by the Political Science and International Relations Studies Association (NECPRI) and held online 12-14 April 2021.

This article offers a new explanation for why brutalization occurred in only some parts of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. The presence of veterans hardened by war was not enough for a broader brutalization of society to take place; the presence of pre-existing institutions with experience repressing civilian populations was also necessary so that their methods could then be applied more broadly by those in favour of employing brutality in political contestation and warfare. This article examines the repression of the rebellion of October 1934 in the Asturias region and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War as examples of this chain of events. Spain’s militarized police force, the Civil Guard, had a long history of dealing harshly with those who challenged the liberal regimes of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the suppression of the Asturias revolt, colonial officers were able to apply the Civil Guard’s pre-existing methods on a wider scale in th...

Can the 2021 Myanmar coup be understood as part of a broader campaign by the Burmese army to commit ‘politicide’? The recent wave of violent raids, detentions and extrajudicial killings taking place across Myanmar is part of a long‐standing pattern of systematic violence perpetrated against political groups and social movements that challenge military control and dominance. The author reviews the history of persecution directed at the National League for Democracy (NLD), the 88 Generation, All Burma Federation of Student Unions (ABFSU) and others who took part in the Burmese democracy movement. The author also reports findings from a multi‐year ethnography she conducted with a community of activists and former political prisoners. She observes that, like ethnic and religious groups, this political community possesses stable, characteristic features, which are transmitted intergenerationally. She advocates for use of the term ‘politicide’ to understand both the recent coup and the history of violence perpetrated against the NLD, 88 Generation ABSFU and other groups inside Myanmar.

Studies focusing on the relationship between transnational terrorism and tourism examine the effect of terror on tourism, while this study looks at a different question: does international tourism affect transnational terrorism? We hypothesized that the higher the number of international tourist arrivals to a country, the higher the number of terror attacks, and examined this effect from four distinct aspects: perpetration by foreign attackers against local victims, perpetration by local attackers against foreign victims, perpetration by foreign attackers against foreign victims, and perpetration of terror attacks against foreign private parties. We conclude that there is an inverse U relationship between number of arrivals and number of attacks perpetrated by foreigners, and also a robust significant relationship between number of arrivals to a country and terror attacks in which both the attacker and the victim are foreigners. However, it is not unequivocal whether this is a posit...