The fineline between peaceful protest and violent escalation
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2019-01-17
Language
en
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Abstract
In the past few years incidents of political violence by extreme organizations got often highlighted in the media. Political violence is not only an issue in the media, but also a widely studied phenomenon by researchers, who try to find explanations on different levels of analysis. In this thesis, I approach political violence from a Social Movement Theory perspective on a macro-, meso-, and micro-level. By applying process tracing as a research method I seek to uncover the causal mechanism at stake. I approach political opportunities on a macro-level, and mobilizing structures on a meso-level by using primary and secondary sources. I approach individual motivations on the micro-level via semi-structured interviews with right-wing activists in The Netherlands. Noteworthy, I show that protest policing is not a good barometer to measure political opportunities in order to explain political violence in four Western-European countries. Subsequently, I show that internal and external organizational structures of a radical social movement organization influence its engagement in political violence. Furthermore, I show that instrumental, identity, and ideological motivations do influence activists’ engagement in political violence. More importantly, this thesis contributes to the existing literature by acknowledging the relational, constructivist, and emergent sphere in which political violence develops and escalates.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen