Peace to Violence: Explaining the Violent Escalation of Nonviolent Demonstrations Public Deposited
- Last Modified
- March 21, 2019
- Creator
-
Gustafson, Daniel
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Political Science
- Abstract
- Under what conditions do nonviolent demonstrations escalate to violence? I answer this question using a novel theory of individual preference formation in protests that begin peacefully. Rather than considering protest groups as unitary actors, I present a theory of collective action in which a group's decision is the product of a probabilistic aggregation of individual preferences. I argue that individuals involved in a nonviolent demonstration use the immediacy of their needs and the sustainability of collective action to decide whether or not to initiate violence against the state. Specifically, I hypothesize that the likelihood of violent escalation will increase when the relative food price is high, a demonstration is rural, and the event is spontaneous. An analysis of nonviolent demonstrations in Africa and Latin America largely supports my expectations.
- Date of publication
- August 2016
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Rights statement
- In Copyright
- Advisor
- Gent, Stephen
- Crescenzi, Mark J. C.
- Bapat, Navin
- Degree
- Master of Arts
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
- Graduation year
- 2016
- Language
- Parents:
This work has no parents.
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