#specifically. i think it's wrong and ahistorical to assume it's an anomaly when non-state actors engage in violence

[senadimell]

Favorite PolSci paper?

...you should really know not to expect anything resembling concision from me, my friend.

So, uh...I'm not even gonna try to pick one.

The thing about me and political science is that I skew a lot closer to the humanities end of the analytical pool; I tend to be more inductive than deductive and it shows. I also tend to be skeptical of most work's explanatory power, and extremely skeptical about anything claiming predictive power. My favorite work tends to incorporate historical research and ethnographic data, and I tend enjoy critique papers and theory building. I tend to like "mid-level" approaches, where people try to study a specific phenomenon rather than going for large unifying theoretical questions, because I favor smaller knowledge claims with more data behind them. It's harder to build than tear down, and unfortunately I just love "tearing down" work. That said, there are some things that are really hard to research, and I'm always impressed by scholars who manage to do it well, either by spending a lot of time building trust or else by thinking of novel measures.

Kathleen Collins has a neat paper that tries to understand something really dang hard to research: banned underground movements in Central Asia. It's called "Ideas, Networks, and Islamist Movements: Evidence from Central Asia and the Caucasus." Specifically, she's looking at the spread of social movements that politicize Islam, and why they might succeed and take root in the face of governmental opposition or fail.

What I like in particular about the piece (in addition to the interview data she managed to collect from people involved in very illegal movements in generally illiberal states) is that she proposes mechanisms for the spread of a particular ideology in the face of state repression rather than just assuming "well, it's an Ideology! It's powerful!" She looks specifically at ideational fit and recruitment/idea networks (i.e. how the word is spread), and whether they're inclusive or exclusive networks (more about the "not us" or more about "join together").

It's ultimately case study research, but unlike a lot of case studies, convenience is decidedly not a driving factor behind her particular cases because she picked one of the hardest things to get people to talk about outside of a war zone. And of course, she gains a lot of respect from me by realistically assessing the implications for her paper (nothing turns me into a shark faster than people claiming greater explanatory power than their paper actually provides). So. Great insights, she really interrogates the mechanisms she proposes (which is absolutely what you have to do if you're theory-building with case studies), and she incorporates both extensive interviews from focus groups, political leaders, and surveys.

There's a series of pieces about Euromaidan by Volodymyr Ishchenko that I really enjoyed. The first is more or less introducing a database recording Euromaidan protest events that I admire. It does a good job being thorough and controlling for common biases from databases made up of media reports (skews towards big cities, sensationalist events, etc). I'm impressed by the dataset, and find the analysis particularly interesting.

Ishchenko really digs into what Euromaidan looked like on the ground and how it manifested regionally, who was involved, and what happened at protests. A bunch of scholars were going back and forth on whether Euromaidan was actually violent or not or what the degree of state involvement was, but he pretty convincingly argues that most of these arguments are based on...well, not cherry-picked exactly, but non-comprehensive evidence.

So you get one person who is saying stuff like "it was totally organized violence" and another saying "it was totally peaceful and state-escalated" and "it was mostly organized by the far-right" and "it was totally a popular protest" and frankly, based on their evidence, none of those contradicting claims were wrong because nobody was comprehensively analyzing what actually happened in all the protests and paying specific attention to who, what, where, and when incidents happened.

So he argues that most protests were peaceful, but there are specific regional trends, and eastern protests tended to be much less popular but had a higher concentration of far-right organizers, which is why some people can honestly say it was like a coup while a lot of other people can say "it was just a popular protest." He also identifies who exactly was involved, and when, and where, which is really important; in a followup article, Ishchenko IDs the groups with the resources to "[initiate] and [diffuse] efficient, coordinated, and strategic violence" and talks about how when Euromaidan was violent &/or radicalized, who was involved, and why. So who specifically was involved, who had organizational knowledge and violent knowledge, and when/where were they involved?

The concept of violent organization or escalation to violence is really interesting because people tend to separate peaceful from violent organization like they're two separate phenomenons or people assume that violent stuff was always going to be violent (scholars of violence are especially prone to only studying events where violence occurred, and when you want to know why something happens, it's really really important to look at why it might not happen). So I like what Ishchenko does.

My appreciation for Ischenko comes largely from a neat article by Charles King called "The Politics of Microviolence" which makes the assertion I just mentioned about violent and non-violent events being part of the same phenomenon. His piece is mostly a critique of the literature that then highlights two papers doing it well. (he argues we need to think smaller instead of only looking at large-scale violent events, and we need to consider when violence doesn't happen when it could have).

Oh man, there's a lot of really good work that I'm leaving out. Most of it is on civil war, paramilitaries and militias, and socialization to participate in violence (there's a really interesting study that says we basically assume it's easy to get people to be violent, then says that's not necessarily the case because that socialization fails, then works with with Israeli defectors). But my list kept growing and so I'll stop here.

The challenge with all scholarly work is that the more specialized you get, the easier it is to get siloed and unfortunately, it does get easier to take methodological assumptions as facts. For all the buzz around interdisciplinary stuff, there is a reason people specialize. I tend to be a connection-minded person and so I eat up work that combines disciplines well or critiques methodological assumptions that put two things into stark categories. But there's often a pretty good reason why those categories develop. Thus is the nature of scholarship...

Bibliography

Collins, Kathleen. 2007. "Ideas, Networks, and Islamist Movements: Evidence from Central Asia and the Caucasus." World Politics; World Pol 60 (1): 64-96. doi:10.1353/wp.0.0002.

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2016. "Far Right Participation in the Ukrainian Maidan Protests: An Attempt of Systematic Estimation." European Politics and Society (Abingdon, England) 17 (4): 453-472. doi:10.1080/23745118.2016.1154646.

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2020. "Insufficiently Diverse: The Problem of Nonviolent Leverage and Radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan Uprising, 2013–2014." Journal of Eurasian Studies 11 (2): 201-215. doi:10.1177/1879366520928363. https://doi.org/10.1177/1879366520928363.

King, Charles. 2004. "The Micropolitics of Social Violence." World Politics; World Pol 56 (3): 431-455. doi:10.1353/wp.2004.0016.