Private Gun Ownership in Modern China, 1912–1949

Lei Duan, History, Syracuse University

Dissertation Fellowship, 2015

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This dissertation examines private gun ownership and its sociocultural and political implications in modern China from 1860 to 1949, a period characterized by foreign invasion, constant military conflicts, and political decentralization. During this period, foreign guns, along with their Chinese imitations, flooded society. In response to the social disorder, many Chinese civilians turned to this new class of weaponry for self-defense. While historians have understood the gun in China in terms of military modernization, this dissertation sets the privately owned gun in its social and political context, and studies why Chinese civilians chose to arm themselves with guns and how governments of different periods responded to their armed civilians.

This study argues that growing social violence and the state’s inability to respond to it led Chinese men and women to seek to obtain their own weapons. This demand was fueled by the gun’s powerful symbolism in public culture and social life, and by beliefs that guns were a source of social status and self-empowerment. Civilian ownership of guns contributed to persistent social violence, and also transformed power structures in local society and accelerated local militarization, impacting the balance between state and society. Both late Qing and Republican governments’ regulation and control over armed civilians was a dynamic and contingent process, hovering between two practices: the state’s resolute maintenance of its monopoly on the uses of guns, and its reliance on armed civilians in local defense.

This study chronicles both the state efforts to deal with armed civilians and the reactions from the bottom.

This study argues that the state’s dilemma over whether to control private guns or rely on them prevented the formation of an effective and consistent gun policy. In contrast, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adopted a different policy towards private gun ownership, by making the mobilization of an armed populace part of its mass line policy. The CCP’s private gun policy played an important role in strengthening the CCP’s presence and authority in wartime China.

Drawing from a variety of sources such as government documents, legal cases, social survey reports, and popular writings, this study chronicles both the state efforts to deal with armed civilians and the reactions from the bottom. This dissertation engages with and complements wider research on modern Chinese history in examining violence, social life, and the dynamic state-society relationship.

King George’s Generals: How the British Army Lost America, 1774-1781

William Anthony Hay, History, Mississippi State University

Research Grant, 2013

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My research project examines how successive British commanders understood the problem they faced during the American Revolution, the ways in which they responded, and why they ultimately failed. The five commanders on whom I focus—Thomas Gage, William Howe, John Burgoyne, Sir Henry Clinton, and Lord Cornwallis—each brought to the task wide experience and a strong record. Their careers reflected the growth of military professionalism in the British army from the mid-18th century, and they scored important successes against the Continental Army of the United States. Far from being incompetent or hidebound aristocrats unable to overcome antiquated assumptions, British commanders demonstrated impressive skill. As Andrew O’Shaughnessy has pointed out, the war’s outcome remained uncertain to the very end. The failure by the British commanders I study lay in their inability to translate operational success into political outcomes by dismantling the revolutionary government they fought. Survival meant success for the fledgling United States.

This research gave me a deeper understanding of how British insiders saw events in America as the war continued along with the civilian side of developing policy and strategy.

Along with its substantial contribution to historical scholarship on the American Revolution and the 18th century British Atlantic world, my project has contemporary relevance. Britain’s position in the American Revolution significantly resembles that of the United States today. Its army had significant experience with irregular warfare from the Seven Years’ War and Jacobite Rebellions, along with conventional operations against comparable opponents. But a small, professional army of long-serving regular soldiers proved a very fragile instrument of war. Possessing the most powerful navy of the age, Britain struggled to turn advantages in weapons, training, and capabilities into strategic success in America. With forces operating across the Atlantic at the end of an extended logistics chain, British policymakers had to balance the American crisis with global commitments and politics at home. Despite changes in technology and differences in context, these points capture problems the United States faces with overseas expeditionary warfare. They also point to the difficulty of coordinating policy and strategy to guide military operations effectively.

Research supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation enabled me to work extensively with British manuscript sources unavailable in the United States. Besides letters and reports by the main figures in my study, I saw a range of material, including private letters and diaries. This research gave me a deeper understanding of how British insiders saw events in America as the war continued along with the civilian side of developing policy and strategy. It pointed me toward the role that sea power, including water transport and navigation on lakes and rivers, played for both sides. Howe’s partnership with his brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, who commanded naval forces, became an important part of my chapter on his tenure. Overall, the research gave me a fuller perspective of the British side that set each of my protagonists in context and showed the pressures they faced from superiors at home. Two of five chapters are drafted, along with a thematic introduction. Writing expanded the scope of my project, drawing it back into the 1760s to explain the conflict’s origins. I anticipate drafting the remaining chapters this year. Material from my research supported a chapter entitled “An End to Empire? British Strategy in the American Revolution and Making Peace” in Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American Revolution (Oklahoma: June 2018).

Bibliography

1. An End to Empire? British Strategy in the American Revolution and Making Peace in Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American Revolution (Oklahoma: June 2018).

Grassroots Peace: Postconflict Reconstruction in Rural Colombia

Casey Ehrlich, Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Dissertation Fellowship, 2014

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This project focuses on grassroots peacebuilding efforts across 182 rural villages in Eastern Antioquia, Colombia. For nearly a decade, these villages were caught on the frontlines of the civil conflict between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN), paramilitary groups, and Colombian state forces. Despite their proximity, villages experienced different types of armed occupation and levels of violence wielded against civilians. Since the conflict subsided in this region, villages have also revealed variation in their community reconstruction patterns. In some villages, residents worked together to demine public spaces, rebuild basic infrastructure, and exhume the bodies of the disappeared. Meanwhile, other neighboring villages did not organize their communities to rebuild infrastructure and guarantee common security. This juxtaposition sparks an important research question that has not been examined by peacebuilding scholars or social scientists: What accounts for variation in grassroots peacebuilding efforts in the postconflict landscape? This dissertation examines this question by tracing the relationship between local conflict dynamics and subsequent village-level peacebuilding efforts.

Numerous international peacebuilding missions have failed to establish sustainable peace precisely because they have ignored local dynamics, both in transitions from war and in postwar environments.

Despite a rich body of academic literature on civil wars, social scientific studies have seldom focused on postconflict settings. Existing research on postconflict settings has focused on top-down peace programming and failed to consider the theoretical link between conflict dynamics and postconflict outcomes. By studying local reconstruction activities across villages in Colombia, and implementing a comparative, theoretically driven study of the relationship between these outcomes and local conflict dynamics, this dissertations argues for a more explicit link between a conflict setting and its postconflict landscape. Further, this dissertation delineates how conflict dynamics affect reconstruction efforts through the trust, informal institutions and social networks of villages.

Finally, I offer a conceptualization of grassroots peacebuilding and a theoretical framework to help scholars, policymakers, and practitioners understand and identify informal or small-scale reconstruction processes led by ordinary people. Numerous international peacebuilding missions have failed to establish sustainable peace precisely because they have ignored local dynamics, both in transitions from war and in postwar environments. Although international policy circles have advocated for greater attention to micro-level causes of conflict and bottom-up reconstruction processes, systematic research has yet to be conducted on this topic and scholars continue to focus on elite-led peace operations. My dissertation fills these gaps, while providing generalizable insights relevant to the international community and countries transitioning from war to peace.

Collective Crimes in Times of War: Explaining Local Violence Against Civilians in Croatia

Mila Dragojevic, Department of Politics, The University of the South

Research Grant, 2014

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As a recipient of the Harry Frank Guggenheim research grant, I was able to conduct my fieldwork in Croatia. My research project sought to explain under what conditions mass violence against civilians occurred by examining the sources of the local variation in the level and type of violence in the war in Croatia that lasted from 1991 to 1995. This research addressed the following questions: 1) Why did targeted violence against civilians occur to a greater extent in some communities than in others? 2) Why did such violence occur in some periods more extensively than in others? 3) How could we account for violence even in the same families or among people who used to be neighbors, friends, and colleagues?

The research entailed a subnational comparison of communities with varied levels of violence against civilians including 131 in-depth interviews with residents in selected communities. I complemented this material with documents and additional interviews from NGOs, archives, and libraries across Croatia. Over the course of the fieldwork, I realized that my findings and insights would be more valuable if placed in a cross-national comparative context. That is why I decided to pursue further research in Guatemala and Uganda, two countries with different historical trajectories than Croatia, but with similar patterns of violence against civilians.

Thus, even before mass violence begins, certain communities are transformed into amoral communities, where the definition of crime becomes altered and violence is justified as a form of self-defense by the perpetrators.

Based on the analysis of the interviews and the documents from Croatia, Uganda, and Guatemala, I argue that civilians are targeted in some communities during the war when political ethnicities, defined as new identities linking a political goal and a cultural identity, form on the local level through two complementary processes — the exclusion of moderates and the production of borders. The exclusion of moderates is carried out through violence, in-group policing, and/or social ostracism. The process of the production of borders occurs through barricades, checkpoints, and wartime dividing lines. These complementary forces limit individuals’ freedom of expressing divergent political views, work to prevent the possible defection of the members of an in-group, and facilitate identification of individuals who are represented as a threat. Thus, even before mass violence begins, certain communities are transformed into amoral communities, or communities that I conceptualize as places where the definition of crime becomes altered and violence is justified as a form of self-defense by the perpetrators. This research complements the literature on genocide and civil wars by showing how violence is used as a political strategy, as well as how state-level and micro-level cleavages become linked in local communities through the complementary mechanisms of the exclusion of moderates and the production of borders.

Bibliography

1. Mila Dragojevic . “Violence and the Production of Borders in Western Slavonia,” Slavic Review, Vol. 75, No. 2: 422-455, Summer 2016.

Political Economy of Memory: The Making, Unmaking and Remaking of the Nigeria-Biafra War

Godwin Onuoha, Democracy, Governance and Service Delivery (DGSD) Programme, Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa

Research Grant, 2014

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This research examines the memories of wars, conflicts, and violence in postcolonial Africa. Its point of departure is the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–1970). Referred to by multiple names, like “Nigeria-Biafra War,” “Biafran War,” “Nigerian Civil War,” “War of National Unity,” “War against Infidels,” the Nigeria-Biafra War was a global event, generally regarded as a defining moment in the postcolonial global order because it foreshadowed the array of devastating conflicts that would eventually threaten the survival of most postcolonial African states. The war was the first major conflict in postcolonial Africa, and in many ways, it represented the end of the “old wars” and the first of the “new wars.” Certainly, it was the first to approximate what we now call “black-on-black” genocide in postcolonial Africa; the first televised African war; the only conflict in postcolonial Africa that had both major super powers of the Cold War on the same side; and the war that launched the modern humanitarian-aid industry as we know it today.

Official memories conceal and disenfranchise other memories, but also perform the ideological task of projecting the state as the sole owner of war memories in post–civil war Nigeria.

Almost fifty years after the war, the individual and collective memories of the Nigeria-Biafra War still dominate national discourse in a manner that elicits passion, discord, and contestation in contemporary Nigeria. Drawing on a political economy approach, this research focused on the following. First, it offered new insights into memory studies by examining how memories are constructed, contested, resisted, appropriated, and structured in a postwar Nigerian context. Second, it explored how memories of wars, conflicts, and violence can underlie a group’s identity and sustain that identity and, ultimately, translate into a basis for future violence. Third, it explores the politics of “dominant” and “subordinate” memories of war and violence in a contested political space. The research was mainly qualitative and most of the fieldwork was done in the five southeastern states of Nigeria. Fieldwork comprised visiting key locations and cities in this region as landscapes of memory and where the activities of neo-Biafran movements took place.

The research provides a historical and contemporaneous analysis of memories of the Nigeria-Biafra War. It demonstrates the nuances in the making of Nigeria-Biafra War memories and why these memories continue to stymie and stunt Nigeria’s post–civil war nation-building project from becoming a more just and inclusive one. It unveiled the making of “official” memories by the state and the interrogation and contestation of these memories by opposing forces. Official memories conceal and disenfranchise other memories, but also perform the ideological task of projecting the state as the sole owner of war memories in post–civil war Nigeria. The research complicates this official narrative by exploring memory production in the Nigerian state as a continuously contested and conflicting project. This involves interrogating the ownership, production, and consumption of extant official war memories, understanding the different forces at play in inscribing and entrenching or subverting and challenging these memories, and the manifold ways in which diverse identities, classes, regions, and intellectual traditions simultaneously project memories of the war in post–civil war Nigeria.

Bibliography

1. 2016: "Shared Histories, Divided Memories: Mediating and Navigating the Tensions in Nigeria-Biafra War Discourses,"Africa Today, Vol. 63, No. 1: 2-21.

2. 2017: "Bringing 'Biafra' Back In: Narrative, Identity and the Politics of Non-Reconciliation in Nigeria,"National Identities, (Forthcoming DOI link: https://doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2017.1279133).

3. (Forthcoming): Memory, Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in Post-Civil War South- eastern Nigeria, APN Working Papers Series, African Peacebuilding Network (APN), Social Science Research Council, New York.

Stress Reactivity to Provocation and Aggression in Early Adulthood: Do Early Victimization and Regulation Processes Matter?

Isabelle Ouellet-Morin, Criminology, Université de Montreal

Research Grant, 2013

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There is a relative consensus about the detrimental impact of childhood maltreatment on mental health and behavioral problems later in life, including aggression behavior. Prior research suggests that this association may, in part, be explained by neurophysiological stress mechanisms designed to support adaptation to changing environments. Moreover, very little is known on the reasons why individuals from the general population aggress others in comparison to those who do not (e.g., dating violence, bullying, public shootings, road rage, and violent encounters with strangers). To this end, we invited 160 participants to come to our laboratory, of which 60 had reported having been maltreated as children, whereas the remaining participants did not. A wide range of neurophysiological measures was measured in the context of a laboratory-based stress paradigm and in response to provocation, including the stress hormone cortisol, cardiac measures, testosterone and DNA methylation (i.e., modifications in the chemistry of the DNA that have the potential to alter genetic expression without changing the DNA sequence).

In a paper recently accepted in Development and Psychopathology, we reported that maltreated participants had higher cortisol responses to stress in comparison to controls, but this association was more complex than previously thought. Indeed, a shift from lower-to-higher cortisol responses was noted as the severity of maltreatment experiences increased, providing further empirical support for the idea that persistent dysregulation of the cortisol response to stress may arise in the context of past exposure to maltreatment.

These findings invite practitioners to consider coping strategies and stress regulation as potential targets for preventing or reducing mental health and behavioral difficulties.

Our research team has also brought light on findings suggesting a synergic effect between maltreatment and cortisol response to stress, whereby these early adverse experiences were associated with more depressive symptoms, aggression, and anger rumination in adulthood among participants with moderate-to-higher cortisol response to stress.

Conversely, childhood maltreatment was not associated with these negative outcomes for those who exhibited a lower pattern of reactivity. Also, being interested to generate knowledge that could be mobilized to support the well-being of individuals who were maltreated during childhood, we offered preliminary evidence suggesting that maltreatment was associated with a more frequent use of emotion-oriented coping strategies (e.g., become very frustrated when faced with difficult situations), although the opposite was found for task-oriented coping strategies (e.g., trying to change their behavior to solve the problem). Importantly, these strategies have generally been hypothesized to signal more and less mental health and behavioral difficulties, respectively. Altogether, these findings invite practitioners to consider coping strategies and stress regulation as potential targets for preventing or reducing mental health and behavioral difficulties, including aggression, among young male adults with a history of childhood maltreatment.

Bibliography

1. Ouellet-Morin I, Robitaille MP, Langevin S, Cantave C, Brendgen M, & Lupien S. (accepted). Enduring effect of childhood maltreatment on cortisol and heart rate responses to stress: The moderating role of severity of experiences. Development and Psychopathology.

“None of Us Dared Say Anything”: Mass Killing in a Bosnian Community During World War II and the Postwar Culture of Silence

Max Bergholz, Concordia University

Research Grant, 2013, 2014

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The seeds of this research project first crystalized in September 2006 while I was sifting through un-catalogued documents in the basement of the Archive of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo. One day I discovered a handful of blue folders, which stopped me in my tracks. The papers inside—a confidential communist government investigation of “Sites of Mass Executions” during 1941-1945—mentioned repeatedly a largely unknown community: Kulen Vakuf, a small town and its environs in northwest Bosnia. There, during two days and nights in September 1941, the documents indicated that approximately 2,000 people—men, women, and children “of the Muslim population”—were killed by their neighbors, described as “insurgents” and “Serbs.” The folders offered only a glimpse of this multi-ethnic community’s sudden descent into intercommunal violence. But this snapshot provided a compelling micro lens through which to embark on a search for macro answers to questions of global significance: What causes intercommunal violence among neighbors in multi-ethnic communities? How does such violence then affect their identities and relations? My research project was part of the search for answers to these questions. 

During my fieldwork, I sought to reconstruct the history of this multi-ethnic community’s collapse into intercommunal killing during the summer of 1941 and the resulting transformation of its residents’ lives. Contrary to a widely held view that sees nationalism leading to violence, I discovered that the upheavals wrought by local killing created dramatically new perceptions of “ethnicity”—of oneself, supposed “brothers,” and those perceived as “others.” As a consequence, the violence forged new communities, new forms and configurations of power, and new practices of nationalism. The history of this community was marked by an unexpected burst of locally executed violence by the few, which functioned as a generative force in transforming the identities, relations, and lives of the many. As such, telling the story of this largely unknown Balkan community in 1941 provides a powerful means through which to rethink fundamental assumptions about the interrelationships among ethnicity, nationalism, and violence, both during World War II and more broadly.

Local-level analysis revealed how violence created new, under-researched dynamics of nationalism in which daily incidents triggered traumatic memories of violence that led to momentary eruptions of "sudden nationhood."

In my research, I devoted sizable attention to analyzing the period of April-September 1941, during which time, unprecedented levels of locally executed violence occurred in my region of study. I sought to explain why some neighbors, who previously lived together in peace for long periods of time, engaged in violence on an ethnic axis and why this violence occurred in certain locations and at certain times, but not others. Yet, during my research, I uncovered archival documents and unpublished manuscripts that allowed me to push beyond solely analyzing causes of and variations in violence. They enabled me to illuminate how intercommunal violence can telescope multiple, simultaneous transformations in the meaning of ethnic categories and boundaries and, in so doing, can create new forms of local communities, particularly those whose members seek to escalate killing and, counter-intuitively, those who seek to restrain killing.

Triangulating among archival documents, memoirs, and oral history interviews, I followed the history of this local community into the decades after the cataclysmic events of 1941, to when communism was built, during which time, identities and social relations continued to be deeply influenced by the experience and memory of local violence. Here, local-level analysis revealed how violence created new, under-researched dynamics of nationalism, in which daily incidents triggered traumatic memories of violence that led to momentary eruptions of “sudden nationhood.” Taken together, my project suggests an overarching argument: Local, intercommunal violence is not merely destructive in a host of ways; rather, it can be an immensely generative force in the creation of social identities and configurations of power.

Bibliography

1. Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2016).

2. "Sudden Nationhood: The Microdynamics of Intercommunal Relations in Bosnia-Herzegovina after World War II." American Historical Review 118, no. 3 (June 2013): 679-707.

3. "As if nothing ever happened: Massacres, Missing Corpses, and Silence in a Bosnia Community." In Élisabett Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus, eds., Destruction and Human Remains. Disposal and Concealment in Genocide and Mass Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 15-45.

Nation-Empire: Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea 1895–1945

Sayaka Chatani, History, Columbia University

Dissertation Fellowship, 2013

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By the turn of the twentieth century, “rural youth” came to symbolize the spirit of hard work, masculinity, and patriotism. The village youth associations, the seinendan, carried that ideal and spread it all over the Japanese empire. This dissertation examines how the movement to create “rural youth” unfolded in different parts of the empire and how young farmers responded to this mobilization. By examining three rural areas in Miyagi (northern Japan), Xinzhu (Taiwan), and South Ch’ungch’Òng (Korea), I argue that the social tensions and local dynamics, such as the divisions between urban and rural, the educated and the uneducated, and the young and the old, determined the motivations and emotional drives behind youth participation in the mobilization.

To invert the analytical viewpoint from the state to youth themselves, I use the term “Rural Youth Industry.” This indicates the social sphere in which agrarian youth transformed themselves from perpetual farmers to success-oriented modern youth, shared an identity as “rural youth” by incorporating imperial and global youth activism, and developed a sense of moral superiority over the urban, the educated, and the old. The social dynamics of the “Rural Youth Industry” explain why many of these youth so internalized the ideology of Japanese nationalism that they volunteered for military service and fought for the empire.

The spread of the Rural Youth Industry most clearly exemplifies a central characteristic of the Japanese empire, which is summarized as its drive to pursue nation-building across its imperial domains, forming a "nation-empire."

This dissertation offers a new perspective to the study of modern empires in several respects. It provides a new way to dissect the colonial empire, challenging the methodological trap of emphasizing the present-day national boundaries of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. It highlights rural modernity, often neglected in the urban-centric historiography of colonial modernity. It also brings together global, regional, and local histories. The seinendan were part of the global waves of imperialism, nation-state building, agrarianism, and the rise of youth. I argue that the spread of the “Rural Youth Industry” most clearly exemplifies a central characteristic of the Japanese empire, which is summarized as its drive to pursue nation-building across its imperial domains, forming a “nation-empire.” This dissertation examines the operations of the “nation-empire” at the grassroots level by comparing the social environments of mobilized agrarian youth. Situating the practices of the Japanese empire in these broader contexts as well as the specific local conditions of village societies, it illuminates the nature of mass mobilization and the shifting relationship between the state and society in the first half of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

1. "Between ‘Rural Youth’ and Empire: Social and Emotional Dynamics of Youth Mobilization in the Countryside of Colonial Taiwan under Japan’s Total War,” The American Historical Review 122, no.2 (April 2017): 371-398.

When Comrades Go to War: Post-Liberation Movements, Elite Politics and the Internal Dynamics of Africa’s Great War

Harry Verhoeven, Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford

Philip Roessler, Government, College of William & Mary

Research Grant, 2013

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Funding by the HFG enabled vital fieldwork in six African countries (Angola, Congo, Eritrea, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda), which helped detail the day-by-day, week-by-week chronicle of Africa’s Great War, a conflict that had its roots in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 and erupted in two phases (1996 and 1998), claiming the lives of more than four million Africans. These findings were written up in a monograph, Why Comrades Go To War. Liberation Politics and the Outbreak of Africa’s Deadliest Conflict.

We found in our research and argue in the book that Africa’s Great War was not a conflict between old enemies or distant strangers but rather between ideological fellow travelers and revolutionaries who had long waged the same struggle for a new, leftist Africa. Ironically, but not coincidentally, it was this very intimacy that would be the undoing of what initially seemed like a triumph (the ouster of Mobutu, arch-symbol of authoritarianism and decadence in Africa) but quickly turned into a fratricidal nightmare between leftist liberation movements from across the continent.

The initial revolutionary euphoria of liberating Africa's third-biggest country rapidly gave way to distrust between the comrades, now turned ministers and generals.

The seeds of Africa’s Great War were sown in the revolutionary struggle against Mobutu—the way the revolution came together, the way it was organized, and, paradoxically, the very way it succeeded. The overthrow of the ancien regime proved a Pyrrhic victory because the protagonists ignored the philosophy of Julius Nyerere, the godfather of Africa’s liberation movements: they put the gun before the unglamorous but essential task of building the domestic and regional political institutions and organizational structures necessary to consolidate peace after revolution. Thus, the initial revolutionary euphoria of liberating Africa’s third-biggest country rapidly gave way to distrust between the comrades, now turned ministers and generals.

In the absence of robust institutions to settle disputes, divide the spoils of victory, and balance competing visions for the revolution, political disagreements and misperceptions became sources of great tension and later catastrophic physical violence. A mere 15 months after what should have been a “second independence,” the outcome was Africa’s Great War.

Desistance from Right-Wing Extremism

Pete G. Simi, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Nebraska

Research Grant, 2012

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The research grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation provided the funds to conduct intensive life history interviews with an initial sample of thirty-five former North America–based far-right extremists. Interviews for this project were completed between 2012 and 2014, although additional subjects have since been interviewed and the sample is now 102 former far-right extremists. The HFG project focused on examining the disengagement process from far-right extremism, although the design of the life history protocol also meant that unique data regarding childhood and adolescent experiences, the entry process into extremism, and different facets of the person’s involvement were also collected.

While far-right extremism has a long history in the United States and across the globe, the recent resurgence of far-right movements has spurred renewed interest in the topic. The attention directed toward the “alt-right,” the electoral success of populist candidates, and a surge of far-right violence underscore the need to understand the factors that help explain involvement as well as the factors that lead people to leave these movements and what can be done to help facilitate disengagement. The results from the life history interviews shed light on several of these issues and are now being used in partnership with Life After Hate to provide intervention services to assist individuals in the disengagement process.

First, the interview findings helped generate a multidimensional risk factor model for how individuals become involved in far-right extremism (Simi, Sporer, and Bubolz 2016). In short, we found that individuals reported experiencing a number of untreated trauma during childhood, such as physical and sexual abuse, parental abandonment, and family substance abuse. In line with decades of research, individuals also reported experiencing heightened levels of negative emotions such as depression and anger as a consequence of the trauma. In turn, individuals engaged in various forms of misconduct as part of a downward spiral. As such, involvement in extremism provided a mechanism for individuals to address these problems by offering generic solutions such as a surrogate family, protection, and shelter.

Our findings suggest that hate may have addictive qualities and, in some cases, result in potentially permanent consequences that make leaving more complicated than previously thought.

The interview data also produced important findings about the disengagement process suggesting the following: a lack of organizational trust and dissatisfaction with leadership (Windisch, Ligon, and Simi 2017); the importance of anger in the disengagement process (Simi, Windisch, Harris, and Ligon 2018), and the development of positive relationships with individuals from different racial and religious backgrounds (Bubolz and Simi 2015). We also found violence was an important factor in terms of promoting disengagement. In some cases, individuals involved in high levels of violence reported experiencing “burnout,” while other individuals reported experiencing moral apprehension from either direct involvement or vicarious involvement (e.g., watching the television coverage of the casualties from the Oklahoma City bombing).

To examine the long-term consequences of extremism, we discussed the overlap between identity residual and addiction processes in a recent article in the American Sociological Review (Simi, Blee, DeMichele, and Windisch 2017). Our findings suggest that hate may have addictive qualities and, in some cases, result in potentially permanent consequences that make leaving more complicated than previously thought.

Bibliography

1. Simi, Pete, Kathy Blee, Matthew DeMichele, and Steven Windisch. 2017. “Addicted to Hate?: Identity Residual among Former White Supremacists.” American Sociological Review 82, 6: 1167-87.

2. Simi, Pete, Karyn Sporer and Bryan Bubolz. 2016. “Narratives of Childhood Adversities and Adolescent Misconduct as Precursors to Violent Extremism: A Life-Course Criminological Approach.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 53, 4: 536-63.