Pathways to Insurgency among Violent and Nonviolent Convicts of the January 6 U.S. Capitol Insurrection

• In Event: Peace, War, and Social Conflict Panel Session: Culture and Conflict

Abstract

The goal of this project is to identify pathways that led individuals to insurgency in the United States, in the case of the U.S. Capitol insurrection of January 6, 2021. The project focuses on the similarities and differences between individuals convicted for violent or for nonviolent crimes in relation to the insurrection. Participants in the January 6 events shared similar concerns about the 2020 U.S. presidential election outcome and showed up at the U.S. Capitol on that day to express these concerns. Some of these individuals’ actions led to criminal convictions by courts of law[1] (NPR 2025). While similar in many ways, January 6 convicts differ in one crucial way: some were convicted for violent crimes; others were convicted for nonviolent crimes. Examining the similarities and differences between violent and nonviolent January 6 convicts has the potential to shed light on the dynamics of insurgency and on factors associated with violent and with nonviolent protest more broadly.
Theoretically, we aim to examine a new practical socialization theory of violence (Velitchkova 2022) against traditional normative socialization models emphasizing the norms and rules of the community. We hypothesize that the difference between insurgents who commit acts of violence and insurgents who do not engage in violence is due to their different prior experiences of violence. We expect that repeated exposure to, and especially engagement in, prior acts of violence in various institutional contexts, including the private sphere (Velitchkova 2015), can desensitize persons to violence and allow them to engage in violence during an insurgency. In addition, we examine the importance of relational factors, organizational membership, identity, and fame seeking as alternative explanations for the differences between violent and nonviolent January 6 convicts.
This study relies on a mixed-method approach, combining qualitative content analysis and quantitative analysis of data we have collected for the January 6 convicts. Our dataset consists of 249 cases of participants in the January 6th Capitol insurrection who were convicted by a court of law for unlawful acts during the riot.

Authors

• Ana Velitchkova, University of Mississippi

• Ava Horton

• John Amburgy

• Sarah Dapaah, The University of Mississippi

• Taufiqul Bari, University of Mississippi