Violence as a Catalyst for Voice: When and Why War Breeds Mobilization

• In Event: 50455 - Open Session on Issues in Peace, War and Social Conflict

Abstract

What is the relationship between the outbreak of militarized violence and the public’s political participation in democratic processes? More specifically, does a deterioration in militarized violence bring citizens out into the streets and encourage them to get involved in protests, and, alternatively, do military gains/decrease in violence make the public more politically quiescent? Empirically, I tackle this question by collecting novel historical data from Armenia--a state that has experienced over 30 years of militarized conflict violence with neighboring Azerbaijan. To enable this contribution, I extracted the data from over 50,000 newspaper articles to assemble a unique time series event dataset of political activism in Armenia–proxied through protests–and a granular assembly of various conflict-related violence activity. Preliminary findings suggest that the nature and scope of protest activities change following a shift in conflict dynamics, however, the sequencing and the causal relationship between conflict and protest occurrence is more tenuous. I find that not all instances of violence act as sufficient triggers to motivate political mobilization: instead, only the violence that is relatively distinct from recent violence patterns is consistently shown to motivate an increase in popular mobilization. Violence acted as a particularly strong force multiplier for political activism when it revealed the gaps in the political system–such as large-scale corruption, embezzlement and lack of discipline in the army. These findings offer a novel perspective on the relationship between protest activity and violence in the environment of existential insecurity, and, equally importantly, further our understanding of the conditions that amplify or weaken this causal linkage.

Author

• Evgenia Jane Kitaevich, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor