Molotov Cocktails to Mass Marches: Riots and Nonviolent Protests in Social Movement Uprisings

• In Event: 4360 - Mobilizing for and Against Violence in Pursuit of Social Justice

Abstract

We are living in a time of volatility. Amid the cascading effects of climate change and skyrocketing inequality, the world appears to be fissuring. As people lose faith in legal avenues, they are turning to more direct means of expression. From Paris to Athens to Caracas to Baltimore, populations are taking to the streets to protest state violence, political ineptitude, and declining standards of living. How we understand riots and violent protest in civilian uprisings is one of the most salient questions for sociology today. This paper asks: How do violent protests affect social movements? While many sociologists have noted a shift away from armed struggle toward civilian-based uprisings in recent decades, few have investigated the role of unarmed violent tactics within civil uprisings in this era. The field of civil resistance studies, which in many ways has functioned in parallel to the sociological study of movements, has framed that the shift away from armed struggle as a shift toward specifically nonviolent campaigns, and has argued for the superior efficacy of nonviolent tactics. The central argument is that violent tactics reduce participation in nonviolent demonstrations, the escalation of which is what leads to success. However, prominent studies focus on comparisons to armed struggle and armed “radical flanks,” ignoring unarmed violence. I mobilize data on riots and nonviolent protests from the Banks Cross-National Time-Series Data Archive and from the World Handbook on Political Indicators Series IV, and use autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) time-series analysis to test the effects that riots have on nonviolent mobilizations. I find that not only do riots not demobilize nonviolent protests, they are correlated with increased social movement activity. I argue that in unarmed social uprisings, violent and nonviolent tactics do not constitute distinct and opposing forms of contention; they often go together.

Author

• Benjamin Steinhardt Case, University of Pittsburgh