Kurt Schock

A Conjunctural Model of Political Conflict

Violent political conflict has typically been studied either from an economic discontent or a political opportunity framework. This study proposes a conjunctural model, which hypothesizes that the production of grievances due to economic inequality varies systematically and interacts with political opportunities to generate violent political conflict. Using multiple regression analysis, this cross-national research examines the interaction between economic inequality and political opportunities, and their direct effects on political violence. Findings provide support for the conjunctural model propositions that political opportunity structures moderate the relationship between economic inequality and violent political conflict. Specifically, the positive effects of income inequality and separatist potential on political violence are enhanced in weak states. The impact of class exploitation on violent political conflict is moderated by regime structure and political institutionalization. Findings suggest that political opportunity structures may operate in different ways for challenges rooted in class as opposed to ethnic inequalities.

Mapping Mass Political Conflict and Civil Society

Mass political conflict is typically examined in terms of violence and in isolation from routine civil interactions. The authors argue that mass conflict is multidimensional and that violence should be treated as an outcome of conflict, as well as a form of action. They define three dimensions of conflict—contentiousness, coerciveness, and change goals—and indices of the civil society that are central to mapping global trends in mass conflict. A strategy for mapping mass conflict and civil interactions using the PANDA protocol to generate highly reliable event data is outlined, and these indices are used to trace two democratic transitions (in Poland and South Korea), a conflict crisis that was repressed (China), and a conflict escalation that flared into a civil war (the former Yugoslavia). Automation has major advantages over human coding in terms of transparency, integration with existing event data series, real-time availability, and long-term maintenance costs. It also opens new ways of thinking about event data and the assessment of reliability.

People Power and Political Opportunities: Social Movement Mobilization and Outcomes in the Philippines and Burma

This study assesses the relevance of the political opportunity framework for social movements in non-democratic contexts by applying it to two people power movements that occurred in the Philippines and Burma during the 1980s. The movement in the Philippines culminated in the toppling of the Marcos dictatorship and a democratic transition. The movement in Burma was violently suppressed, and although multiparty elections were subsequently held as a result of the protest movement, the military regime refused to honor them and remained in power. The core dimensions of political opportunity are used to account for the mobilization of the two movements and their divergent outcomes. As expected by the political opportunity framework, influential allies and elite divisions influenced the mobilization and outcomes of the movements. The application of the political opportunity framework to non-democracies uncovers some limitations with the framework as well: the under-theorized role of the international context and the importance of press freedoms and information flows. A comparative approach uncovers limitations with the additive enumeration of political opportunities for single movements. Violent and indiscriminate repression was found to have a differential effect on mobilization depending on whether other opportunities were present or absent. More generally, a configuration approach to political opportunities is proposed that incorporates a multiple and conjunctural conception of causation. This approach assumes that political opportunities may not be independent of each other and that political opportunities may have differential effects on dissent depending on the larger configuration of opportunities in which they occur.

The practice and study of civil resistance

This article provides an overview of the practice and study of civil resistance. First, historical roots of modern civil resistance are discussed, including the emergence in the 19th century of mass-based campaigns of non-cooperation to promote nationalist and labor interests, as well as the significance of Mohandas Gandhi and the widespread use of nonviolent resistance in the 20th century. Second, perspectives of scholars of social movements and revolution are compared with those of scholars who focus more specifically on nonviolent resistance. Despite studying much of the same phenomena, separate literatures have developed that are ripe for cross-fertilization and synthesis. In the third section, a literature review is organized around three key concepts for understanding civil resistance: mobilization, resilience, and leverage. Fourth, consequences of nonviolent resistance relative to violent resistance are discussed. Finally, areas for future research are identified.

Nonviolent Action and Its Misconceptions: Insights for Social Scientists

Prior to the wave of people power movements that erupted across the globe in the late twentieth century, scholars of social movements and revolution rarely addressed nonviolent action as a strategy for political change in non-democratic contexts. By the beginning of the twenty-first century this changed, as increasingly more social scientists began turning their attention to a topic once addressed primarily by peace studies scholars. The analysis of nonviolent action by social scientists other than peace studies scholars should be welcomed. Yet, since popular and scholarly misconceptions about nonviolence abound, it would be useful to examine some of these in the hope that biases in the social scientific analysis of nonviolent action can be attenuated.

A Long, Hard Slog: Political Opportunities, Social Networks and the Mobilization of Dissent in Non-Democracies

The inadequate consideration of how forms of the state variously structure politics is identified as a significant flaw in political opportunity theory. This deficiency leads to conceptual “stretching” and frustrating contradictions between research findings in the social movement literature. For political opportunities to be correctly specified, differences in the mobilization contexts across democracies and non-democracies must be explicitly addressed. This article suggests how the institutional differences between democracies and non-democracies influence the prospect, form, and impact of social mobilization against the state. It also suggests the crucial role of social networks for mobilization in non-democracies. A reformulation of the research problem and a set of sensitizing propositions based on the theoretical reconceptualization are offered.

Do Contemporaneous Armed Challenges Affect the Outcomes of Mass Nonviolent Campaigns

Civil resistance is a powerful strategy for promoting major social and political change, yet no study has systematically evaluated the effects of simultaneous armed resistance on the success rates of unarmed resistance campaigns. Using the Nonviolent and Violent Conflict Outcomes (NAVCO 1.1) data set, which includes aggregate data on 106 primarily nonviolent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006 with maximalist political objectives, we find that contemporaneous armed struggles do not have positive effects on the outcome of nonviolent campaigns. We do find evidence for an indirect negative effect, in that contemporaneous armed struggles are negatively associated with popular participation and are, consequently, correlated with reduced chances of success for otherwise-unarmed campaigns. Two paired comparisons suggest that negative violent flank effects operated strongly in two unsuccessful cases (the 8-8-88 challenge in Burma in 1988 and the South African antiapartheid challenge from 1952 to 1961, with vio...

Political Process, International Dependence, and Mass Political Conflict: A Global Analysis of Protest and Rebellion, 1973–1978

Abstract: Protest and rebellion are often assumed to be qualitatively distinct strategies of civil contention with the former prevailing in developed democracies and the latter in socially polarized, dependent less developed countries. Confirmatory factor analysis of civil contention in a global cross-national sample of countries finds significant overlap between protest and rebellion. Regression shows that protest and rebellion also share common origins in terms of political opportunities created by elite divisions, repression, and democratization and military dependence in semiperipheral countries. Large decentralized states and foreign investment spur protest while weak “anocratic” regimes spur rebellion. We find no evidence that collective grievances stemming from economic stagnation and social polarization contribute to civil contention.

Rightful Radical Resistance: Mass Mobilization and Land Struggles in India and Brazil*

An examination of mass mobilizations to promote land rights of the landless and near-landless by Ekta Parishad in India and the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil identifies a similar strategy of rightful radical resistance that incorporates key elements of rightful resistance but also transcends it. The comparable strategy is due to similarities in context: India and Brazil are semiperipheral countries with relatively high-capacity states and representative democratic political structures, but have inequitable distributions of agricultural land despite constitutional principles and laws that embody equitable land distributions. However, given the substantial variation across India and Brazil in culture, geography, and demography, the specific forms assumed by rightful radical resistance vary. This study contributes to the social movements and civil resistance literatures by explicating the strategic logic of the mass mobilizations, explaining similarities and differences across the two cases...

Free Burma: Transnational Legal Action and Corporate Accountability

the differences between the Klan of Mississippi and Alabama fame, with its litany of murders, bombings, and law enforcement collusion, and a North Carolina version that ‘‘deftly balanced public civic action and clandestine violence’’ (p. 10)? If the book is powerful, indeed exemplary, in explaining the trajectory of Klan activism, it is perhaps less so in parsing the significance of the North Carolina model, on its own and in concert with more mythic forms and Deep South manifestations.