Violent Profits: The Political Economy of Electoral Violence

Leonardo Arriola, University of California, Berkeley

Research Grant, 2015

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This project examines the role of economic relationships in violence that often erupts during elections around the world. Multiparty elections are meant to provide citizens with a peaceful means for choosing elected leaders; however, in some countries, politicians and their allies regularly use violence to shape electoral processes and outcomes in their favor.

What has yet to be fully understood by scholars and policymakers is whether or how the nature of political-business relationships might affect the outbreak or targeting of election violence. When are business actors targeted by election violence? Does such violence affect the political behavior or preferences of business actors?

We find that shop owners and traders who belong to stronger market associations are less likely to witness election violence or to be threatened with violence. 

Using a multimethod strategy combining in-depth interviews and large-scale surveys, this project shows how business actors adapt to the use of violence during elections. Interviews with businesspeople, politicians, and civil society leaders suggest that businesses are highly sensitive to the economic costs associated with violence (e.g., business closures due to riots). However, some businesspeople still choose to support politicians who employ violent electoral tactics as a form of protection, using their ties to those politicians to insulate their businesses from violence during election campaigns while asking for favors in nonelection years. 

A survey conducted in Lagos, Nigeria, further shows that the experiences of over one-thousand shop owners and traders with electoral violence depend on their membership in market associations, which are often allied to political parties or candidates running for office. We find that shop owners and traders who belong to stronger market associations are less likely to witness election violence or to be threatened with violence. Instead, these association members are more likely to receive gifts (e.g., cash or food) during elections. Importantly, we find that both threats and gifts can increase the likelihood of voting among this set of business actors.

Dominating a Continent: Retribution and Forcible Confinement in North America

Benjamin Hoy, University of Saskatchewan

Research Grant, 2020

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The “Dominating a Continent” project aimed to understand the following dynamics:

1. the ways state-sponsored violence impacted the transnational mobility of Indigenous people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries;

2. how changes in military infrastructure impacted day-to-day violence in areas that recently experienced warfare; and

3. the ways that violence impacted patterns of incarceration in Saskatchewan following the 1885 Resistance.

The project found that in both Canada and the United States throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, inadequate infrastructure around food, water, and housing left both the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police and the American army ill-equipped to exert authority over long distances.

[Limitations] encouraged both governments to rely on the threat of violence to shore up their power when they were unable to patrol the wide swaths of land their governments claimed authority over.

Persistent infrastructure and supply chain problems hampered both organizations’ ability to control the mobility of Indigenous people or to limit the violence between Indigenous people and settlers. These limitations encouraged both countries to rely instead on hunger and deprivation to confine Indigenous people to reserves/reservations, where they could concentrate their authority and power. They also encouraged both governments to rely on the threat of violence to shore up their power when they were unable to patrol the wide swaths of land their governments claimed authority over.

Finally, this project found that, contrary to expectation, Indigenous people do not appear to have been given disproportionate prison sentences in the Prince Albert and Regina Jails in the years and decades that followed the 1885 Resistance. This is surprising because Cree and Métis communities experienced significant reprisals through other avenues of government control including the distribution of food, annuities, farming support, etc. This finding is also notable because prison records indicate that jail time was disproportionately given to Indigenous community members near the Kamsack region in the 1920s and 1930s to force residential school attendance.

These patterns emphasize that Indian agents and federal personnel had a wide range of coercive tools at their disposal to punish recalcitrance and break resistance and that they relied on jail sentences only sporadically to enforce their conceptions of order. 

Victimhood in a Time of Crisis: Muslims and the Riots of 2020 in New Delhi, India

Ankur Datta, South Asian University

Research Grant, 2020

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This project explores how victimhood is expressed by Muslims during a time of violence. It studies the case of a communal riot between Hindus and Muslims that took place between February 23 and 29, 2020, in the Indian capital of New Delhi. While limited to northeastern New Delhi, this was the first communal riot in the city since 1984. Northeast Delhi is home to Hindus and Muslims who inhabit the socioeconomic margins of the city. Muslim citizens occupy a difficult position as a national minority in the face of majoritarian Hindu nationalism in India, and they faced greater losses of life and property in the riots. The riots were followed by legal cases where many witnesses were presented as perpetrators of violence, and by the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown that was implemented by the Indian state.

The project was based on one year of data collection (2021–2022), which involved visits and observation of sites in northeast Delhi; interviews with witnesses, victims of violence, activists, social workers and legal professionals; collection of media reports in English, Hindi, and Urdu as well as fact-finding reports published by civil society groups; and observation of court trials related to the riots.

Concepts of victimhood and injustice are significant in expressing how life for Muslims was affected during and after the riots.

The key findings of the study are reflected in the following themes:

1. Victimhood: 

Among Muslims in the study there is an overwhelming sense of victimhood that has followed actual loss of life or property. This emerges in statements from activists, social workers, and Urdu-language media where concepts of victimhood and injustice are significant in expressing how life for Muslims was affected during and after the riots. For respondents from northeast Delhi directly affected by the riots, this sentiment is tempered by concerns of everyday survival, first in the aftermath of the riot, quickly followed by the COVID-19 pandemic and economic hardship resulting from lockdowns. Even in the present, when life is ostensibly peaceful and economic activities have resumed with the easing of pandemic restrictions, there are concerns regarding economic insecurity. In that sense, riot victims deal with several crises. Some respondents who faced physical violence and had long medical recoveries continue to face difficulties.

2. Victimhood in Public Sites: Law and Media:  

Urdu-language media emphasize losses and suffering of Muslim communities. Hindi-language media present the riots as resulting from an alleged conspiracy by some activists, and focus on acts of violence committed by Muslims in the riots. Hence, Muslim victims have to contend with their presentation in public as perpetrators, not victims. English-language media purports to balance both Hindu and Muslim narratives. In court, Muslims face trial as perpetrators and so have to prove their victimhood. Hence in public spaces, Muslim victims find their experiences doubted and have to prove their condition.

3. Mistrust: 

As a minority affected by violence, there is mistrust among research subjects. There is a mistrust of state institutions such as the police, which are accused of not preventing the riots. Victims seeking compensation from the state for losses in the riots have found the process time consuming. The length of time in courts or in settling compensation has resulted in a mistrust of state institutions and suffering in terms of a suspension of everyday life. Communities in northeast Delhi are observed to also have become more segregated along communitarian lines, implying a loss of trust between Muslims and Hindus in the areas affected.

Geographic Perspectives on the Indonesian Killings of 1965–66 in Central and East Java

Siddharth Chandra, Michigan State University

Research Grant, 2017

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The aim of this project is to use demographic and spatial methods to shed light on the mass killings of 1965–66 in Indonesia. With an estimated death toll of five hundred thousand, these killings comprised the single most traumatic political event in the history of independent Indonesia. Directed against people affiliated with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), the violence killed untold numbers of innocent and unarmed people, many of whom may have had only a peripheral association with the PKI.

With an estimated death toll of five hundred thousand, these killings comprised the single most traumatic political event in the history of independent Indonesia. 

The research findings include the following:

1. The pattern of antileftist violence in Central Java was markedly different from the pattern observed in the neighboring province of East Java. Specifically, in East Java, the killings appear to have been the most severe in areas in which the key political party in opposition to the PKI, the politico-religious Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) party, was strongest. In Central Java, of the three regions in which the killings were most evident, only one area, in the vicinity of East Java, displayed such an association. Locations in the vicinity of the headquarters of the Indonesian Army’s Special Forces and in strongholds of another (secularist) political party in opposition to the PKI, the National Party of Indonesia (PNI), were also severely affected by the violence in Central Java. 
2. In East Java, it was possible to demonstrate an association between the accessibility of areas by road and the severity of killings. This aligns with the multitude of accounts of trucks being used to carry victims away to their deaths or to imprisonment, but had never been established as a systematic and statistically identifiable phenomenon. 
3. The research has also provided indications of locations where the local military or pesantren (religious schools), whose youth organizations were often implicated in the violence, may have been most active.

The project has produced a variety of new and specific research findings that also demonstrate the more general value of using spatial and demographic methods to analyze events of genocide and mass violence. Applied to census data, the methods used or developed during this project can (1) provide estimates about the intensity of violence in different locations, (2) identify hot spots for violence, (3) highlight factors that are associated with variations in violence across space, and (4) use insights from (3) to assign possible responsibility for the violence. The spatial nature of this project also lends itself to the production of maps, which provide an instant and easily interpretable visual representation of the findings of the research for communication to a wider audience. An important insight from this project has been the demonstration of the potential for censuses to be used by independent organizations to monitor anomalous one-time variations in population in times of genocide and mass violence.

Contested Narratives: A Genesis of State Violence in Post-Revolutionary Iran (1979-1988)

Chowra Makaremi, Anthropology, Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les Enjeux Sociaux (IRIS)

Research Grant, 2013

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The study explores dynamics of violence in Iran in relation to state formation after the 1979 revolution. It focuses on episodes of large-scale collective violence against political opponents and mass executions from 1981 to 1988. What happened between 1981 and 1988 in Iranian society while the country was undergoing a long-lasting war with Iraq? How can we approach these events, excluded from the hegemonic historical narratives of the revolution and the Islamic state? How does this genealogy help us understand today’s issues of secrecy and state violence in Iran?

In answering these questions, the study is driven by four main concerns. First, to look at how state apparatuses emerged within an everyday practice of control over society and through overlapping legal, para-legal, and extra-judicial processes. Second, to understand and show how experiences of violence weave into patterns of everyday life. Third, to analyze how memories are transmitted from exiles back to Iranian society, from one generation to the next, whether publicly or as family secrets. These observations lead to examining, lastly, how counter-narratives about state violence persist in different forms of memorialization, solidify through legal claims for truth and justice, and shape collective identities.

Through giving voice to feelings and experiences suppressed for decades, the project elucidates the genesis of state violence in Iran and explores the political subjectivities it has shaped.

These issues are explored in book chapters and a scientific article: “Héritages et Déni de la Violence d’Etat en Iran: Les Tracés du Pouvoir,” “Violence Partout, Justice Nulle Part!,” Monde Commun, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France (2018); “Death Politics and the Economy of Silence in Iran,” in Anstett E. and Dreyfus J.-M., eds., Destruction and Human Remains. Disposal and Concealment in Genocide and Mass Violence, Manchester University Press, 2014, p.183- 204; “’That Buried Secret of Ours!’: Memories of Violence in Post-Revolution Iran,” Allegra Lab, Thematic Threads, Juillet 2015; “États d’Urgence Ethnographiques: Approches Empiriques de la Violence Politique,” Cultures & Conflits 103-104, Winter 2016, pp. 15-34.

Articles and broadcasts aimed at a wider audience include a number of contributions at openDemocracy.net, “Mass Executions in Iran” (BBC radio broadcast on the program “Witness,” 24 August 2015), and a feature-length documentary movie scheduled for release in Fall 2018, for the 30th anniversary of the 1988 prison massacres.

Through giving voice to feelings and experiences suppressed for decades, the project elucidates the genesis of state violence in Iran and explores the political subjectivities it has shaped. Although considerable archival research and ethnographic interviews could be carried out thanks to the HFG grant, the study opened a site of research where much remains to be done. There is almost no empirical or historical scholarship to rely on, and academic knowledge on this disputed past is still to be built. This is why the HFG grant opened the path to a larger research project of digital counter-archives of violence, submitted to the European Research Council in October 2017.

Desistance from Sexual Offending Across the Life Course

Danielle Arlanda Harris, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University

Research Grant, 2013

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Desistance refers to the slowing down or stopping of offending. Although the term is relatively new to those who study sexual aggression, the phenomenon has been a staple of criminological research for two centuries (Laws & Ward, 2011). Crime is a “young man’s game,” and the observation of natural desistance or aging out (when one stops committing crime as they get older) is a key component of the criminal career. One reason desistance is such a new concept for people who have committed sexual offenses is the strong assumption of inevitable recidivism (Willis, Levenson & Ward, 2010). There is a persistent belief among many practitioners, policymakers, and members of the public that sex offenders seldom, if ever, stop and that when they are released from custody, recidivism (or “failure”) is the expected result.

This notion has considerable implications for policy and practice and adds to the growing argument for instituting an "expiry date" for offenses.

This study challenged these long-held assumptions by examining the post-release behavior of more than 500 men convicted of sexual offenses, incarcerated, and released from a purpose built facility for sexually dangerous persons in the Northeastern United States. A subsample of 27 men were ultimately located, contacted, and interviewed. Sixteen of those men were living offense-free lives in the community (and many had done for almost 20 years). The remaining 11 men had been returned to custody and will likely never be released. The most interesting finding in this study was that the majority of the men who were returned to prison had reoffended within just months of their release. This notion has considerable implications for policy and practice and adds to the growing argument for instituting an “expiry date” for offenses, the issuing of “certificates of rehabilitation” after a certain period of time, or an automatic reduction in risk scores over time.

Our results have also contributed to a better theoretical understanding of this phenomenon in men convicted of sexual offenses. Four specific styles of desistance were discovered: “aging out,” “resignation/risk,” “recovery/routine,” and “resilience/redemption.” These distinct styles emerged through thematic and content analysis and are currently being written and organized into a book.

Bibliography

1. Harris, Danielle A. (2015). Desistance from sexual offending: Behavioral change without cognitive transformation. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 1-22, Online first, DOI: 10.1177/0886260515596537.

2. Harris, Danielle A. and Cudmore, Rebecca. (2015). Desistance from sexual offending.  Oxford Handbook Online: Criminology and Criminal Justice, Crime Prevention, Gender, Sex, and Crime, 1-12. DOI:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935383.013.77 

Malvinas/Falklands War: Argentine Experiences of the 1982 Conflict Through Letters, War Diaries, and Amateur Photographs by Soldiers and Civilians Mobilized During the War

Federico Lorenz, CONICET—National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina

Research Grant, 2013

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The objective of my project was to study the war experience that Argentine conscripted soldiers went through during the Malvinas war in 1982. The material basis for the study were letters sent and received by soldiers during the conflict, as well as amateur photographs taken by them. Since the conflict was so short, in most cases, correspondence was not subject to censure: It offers unique, first-hand evidence to get to know how soldiers decided to communicate (or not) what they were experiencing.

Many of the photographs and letters were seized by the British or are scattered around. In order to have access to a representative sample, I visited archives and personal collections on the Malvinas Islands, Great Britain, and different regions in Argentina (mainly Patagonia). From this field work, I was able to build a collection of never-before-seen photographs and correspondence.

Civilian letters show a strong presence of the "national cause" in Argentine political culture and also an idealization about Patagonia and Malvinas.

Additionally, I found a large amount of correspondence from civilians who were volunteers to go to islands after the April 2 Argentine landing. Other noteworthy material that I found and used are the reports drafted by some soldiers shortly after their return to the mainland following orders of their units.

Jointly, correspondence and photos show major differences with the official version about the war created from photojournalism and war chronicles. Photos taken by the soldiers break away from the Argentine propaganda images and from the image built by British photographs after the Argentine surrender. Soldiers appear in their daily activities before, during, and after the combat in the way they chose to depict themselves.

There are also important regional and social differences when referring to the war, the nation, and the sacrifice that, ultimately, soldiers must make. Civilian letters show a strong presence of the “national cause” in Argentine political culture and also an idealization about Patagonia and Malvinas.

I plan to continue working on this research and have published articles focusing on this topic in scientific magazines.

Sexual Justice in the American Civil War

Charles Ritter, History, College of Notre Dame of Maryland

Research Grant, 2005

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The Sexual Justice in the American Civil War Project is the first comprehensive study of the response of the Union military to allegations of sexual assault against women and girls by soldiers and civilians during the American Civil War (1861–1865). In the summer of 1998, we began investigating how the Union military prosecuted crimes of sexual assault. Using Union court-martial records housed in the papers of the United States Judge Advocate General (Record Group 153, National Archives and Records Administration) in Washington, DC, we transcribed the complete testimony of more than two hundred trials, creating the first digital archive of this valuable historical material. We also transcribed the military service records and other relevant documents concerning each alleged assailant and recorded demographic data about each plaintiff. We have also written and presented six conference papers and made several presentations at local colleges. We have written an encyclopedia article on rape in the Civil War, an essay in a collection concerning the impact of Union occupation on southern women, Occupied Women (2012), and a chapter in Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones (2011).

We received funding from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation on two occasions. In 2005 we received a grant for expenses related to the purchase of microfilm and to field research we undertook to contextualize our research. Our approach to contextualization was three-pronged. First, we developed a historical context for the military cases by examining the ways in which civilian courts in Tennessee and Philadelphia treated accusations of rape and sexual assault in the antebellum period. Second, we intended to develop a broader procedural context by exploring the Union Provost Marshal General’s records in the National Archives. We did not undertake this research until 2006, supported by a second grant from the Foundation. Third, we collected data from ninety-three additional courts-martial cases that we identified at the National Archives. These cases represent clear instances of gender crimes although they are not necessarily sexual crimes. Teasing out the differences between these two types of offenses is an important facet of our developing definition of mid-nineteenth-century rape and sexual assault.

Teasing out the differences between these two types of offenses is an important facet of our developing definition of mid-nineteenth-century rape and sexual assault.

The two grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation were indispensable in conducting this research, particularly the field research and, closer to home, our ability to hire student assistants to work with us at the National Archives. The hands-on research experience these grants afforded our students was an added, and not insignificant, benefit of the funding.

Legacies of the Past and Support for Terrorism in the Basque Country

Henar Criado, Political Science and Sociology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Jordi Domenech, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Francisco Herreros, Spanish National Research Council

Research Grant, 2015

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Why do people turn to terrorism? Social scientists have offered many insightful answers to this question ranging from education, poverty, and inequalities to the effects of political regimes. And yet, we are still far from providing a definite solution to this puzzle. Our project, funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, seeks to provide an answer to this question by focusing on the long-term historical legacies of political violence. We analyze how civil wars in the distant past (the nineteenth century) in the Basque Country in Spain could have left an imprint on beliefs and preferences that partly explain the outbreak of terrorism in the 1970s.

We use archival data from the three Basque provinces to collect information about political violence across villages in the nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century, there were two civil wars in Spain that were fought mainly in the Basque Lands. We have collected several indicators from archival and secondary sources of support for one of the warring factions, the one devoted to the defense of Basque autonomy and laws (the “Carlists”), across villages. These indicators include deserters of the Army, votes for Carlist candidates in elections immediately after the second civil war, and subscriptions to the main Carlist journal during the first civil war. We found a positive association between these indicators and support for political violence in the 1970s, which indicates that the legacy of political violence in the past has indeed affected the outbreak of terrorism one hundred years later.

Civil wars left a legacy of distrust and alienation toward the state that can persist through generations, paving the way to violent responses to perceived threats.

Our research has tried to go more in depth into the mechanisms connecting political violence in the nineteenth century and beliefs and preferences in the 1970s. We found that civil wars left a legacy of distrust and alienation toward the state that can persist through generations, paving the way to violent responses to perceived threats. The research also shows that the transmission of these legacies was especially strong in communities that have remained largely isolated in the century that separates the civil wars from the terrorism of the 1970s.