The dilemma of violence: political conflict, popular mobilization, and foreign interventions

Why and when do political actors use violence? This project answers these questions by exploring the dynamics of the interactions between state authorities and political dissidents. Both the state and the dissidents face the dilemma of using violence to achieve their political goals. While structural factors influence state violence and dissident violence, I contend that we need to examine how the dynamics of the state-dissident interactions shape these actors’ political behavior. This project first asks if nonviolent methods of resistance are effective--and perhaps even more successful than violent methods--why do opposition movements ever resort to violence? I argue that the efficacy of nonviolent resistance changes over time. When the likelihood of demobilization increases, dissident movements doubt the effectiveness of nonviolent resistance and weigh violence as an alternative tactic. The first chapter of this dissertation shows that the failure in expanding the size of a movement over several periods provides increases the risk of demobilization, and so dissident violence. I also argue while the expansion of the movement decreases the risk of dissident violence, a sudden and large expansion in the size of the movement overburdens its monitoring and sanctioning capacities, which raises the risk of dissident violence. These arguments are supported empirically using two different datasets. In the second theoretical part of this project, I examine the effects of foreign interventions on the dynamics of state repression and dissident violence. I find that the diplomatic statements and efforts such as disapproving state behavior, asking for political reform, and threatening to impose economic sanctions and to deploy military forces either did not have a significant effect, or increased state repression and decreased state concession during the Arab Spring. Finally, the last part of this project contributes to the literature on the formal modeling of dissent-repression by developing a recursive model of political violence dynamics. In addition to addressing several drawbacks in the literature, this model endogenizes the mobilization and demobilization of the movement and explains how these changes affect dissident violence. Due to the complexity of the developed mathematical model, I use a computational model to find the optimal outcomes. This computational model also can be used for simulating the state’s and the dissidents’ behavior under different scenarios.