Reputation Effects and Strategy of Resistance in Self-Determination Movements

• In Event: Civil War Tactics

Abstract

It has been argued that governments of multi-ethnic societies have strong incentives to invest in reputation building to deter future demands and armed conflict. Forward-looking governments prefer to fight early challengers to send potential challengers signal of high resolve. We argue that the current studies of self-determination movements (SDM) based on the reputational theory overlook important heterogeneity in the type of strategies groups can employ. Groups seeking self-determination can use different strategies of resistance: they can seek concession via nonviolent mass mobilization or pressure government through violent armed violence. Do we see similar reputational dynamics in cases where concessions are granted after nonviolent mobilization versus after armed conflict? One of the scope conditions of the reputation theory, issue specificity, sheds light on this question. Issue specificity necessitates that both the actions and the actors should be sufficiently similar to one another, and that potential challengers should be able to observe the relevance of concessions granted to another actor to their own situation. This suggests that concessions granted after nonviolent mobilization should trigger additional nonviolent mobilization but not armed conflict. We also argue that governments do not need to worry as much about the demonstration effects of concessions granted to nonviolent resistance. The fact that successful nonviolent resistance requires different type of mobilization, which relies on high number of participants, denotes the limited applicability of demonstration. Using recently available data set on SDM for the period from 1945 to 2012 (Sambanis, Germann, Schädel 2018), we find supporting evidence for our argument.

Authors

• Nils-Christian Bormann, Witten/Herdecke University

• Burcu Savun, University of Pittsburgh