Civil religion

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_religion 

Civil religion, also referred to as a civic religion, is the implicit religious values of a nation, as expressed through public rituals, symbols (such as the national flag), and ceremonies on sacred days and at sacred places (such as monuments, battlefields, or national cemeteries). It is distinct from churches, although church officials and ceremonies are sometimes incorporated into the practice of civil religion. Countries described as having a civil religion include France, South Korea, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. As a concept, it originated in French political thought and became a major topic for U.S. sociologists since its use by Robert Bellah in 1960.

Origin of term

Jean-Jacques Rousseau coined the term in chapter 8, book 4 of The Social Contract (1762), to describe what he regarded as the moral and spiritual foundation essential for any modern society. For Rousseau, civil religion was intended simply as a form of social cement, helping to unify the state by providing it with sacred authority. In his book, Rousseau outlines the simple dogmas of the civil religion:

1. deity
2. afterlife
3. the reward of virtue and the punishment of vice
4. the exclusion of religious intolerance

The Italian historian Emilio Gentile has studied the roots and development of the concept and proposed a division of two types of religions of politics: a civil religion and a political religion.

Sociology of religion

The Washington National Cathedral in Washington, DC, is often used for state funerals for political leaders.

In the sociology of religion, civil religion is the folk religion of a nation or a political culture.

Civil religion stands somewhat above folk religion in its social and political status, since by definition it suffuses an entire society, or at least a segment of a society; and is often practiced by leaders within that society. On the other hand, it is somewhat less than an establishment of religion, since established churches have official clergy and a relatively fixed and formal relationship with the government that establishes them. Civil religion is usually practiced by political leaders who are laypeople and whose leadership is not specifically spiritual.

Examples

Such civil religion encompasses such things as:

• the invocation of God in political speeches and public monuments;
• the quotation of religious texts on public occasions by political leaders;
• the veneration of past political leaders;
• the use of the lives of these leaders to teach moral ideals;
• the veneration of veterans and casualties of a nation's wars;
• religious gatherings called by political leaders;
• the use of religious symbols on public buildings;
• the use of public buildings for worship;
• founding myths and other national myths

and similar religious or quasi-religious practices.

Practical political philosophy

The Arc de Triomphe in Paris commemorates those who died in France's wars.

Professional commentators on political and social matters writing in newspapers and magazines sometimes use the term civil religion or civic religion to refer to ritual expressions of patriotism of a sort practiced in all countries, not always including religion in the conventional sense of the word.

Among such practices are the following:

• crowds singing the national anthem at certain public gatherings;
• parades or display of the national flag on certain patriotic holidays;
• reciting oaths of allegiance (like the pledges of allegiance found in countries such as the Bahamas, the Philippines, and South Korea);
• ceremonies concomitant to the inauguration of a president or the coronation of a monarch;
• retelling exaggerated, one-sided, and simplified mythologized tales of national founders and other great leaders or great events (e.g., battles, mass migrations) in the past (in this connection, see also romantic nationalism);
• monuments commemorating great leaders of the past or historic events;
• monuments to dead soldiers or annual ceremonies to remember them;
• expressions of reverence for the state, the predominant national racial/ethnic group, the national constitution, or the monarch;
• expressions of solidarity with people perceived as being national kindred but residing in a foreign country or a foreign country perceived as being similar enough to the nation to warrant admiration and/or loyalty;
• expressions of hatred towards another country or foreign ethnic group perceived as either currently being an enemy of the state and/or as having wronged and slighted the nation in the past;
• public display of the coffin of a recently deceased political leader.

Relation between the two conceptions

These two conceptions (sociological and political) of civil religion substantially overlap. In Britain, where church and state are constitutionally joined, the monarch's coronation is an elaborate religious rite celebrated by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In France, secular ceremonies are separated from religious observances to a greater degree than in most countries. In the United States, a president being inaugurated is told by the Constitution to choose between saying "I do solemnly swear..." (customarily followed by "so help me God", although those words are not Constitutionally required) and saying "I do solemnly affirm..." (in which latter case no mention of God would be expected).

History

Prehistory and classical antiquity

The emperor Marcus Aurelius, his head ritually covered, conducts a public sacrifice at the Temple of Jupiter

Practically all the ancient and prehistoric reigns suffused politics with religion. Often the leaders, such as the Pharaoh or the Chinese Emperor were considered manifestations of a Divinity. Tribal world-view was often Pantheistic, the tribe being an extension of its surrounding nature and the leaders having roles and symbols derived from the animal hierarchy and significant natural phenomena (such as storm).

The religion of the Athenian polis was a secular polytheism focused on the Olympian Gods and was celebrated in the civic festivals. Religion was a matter of state and the Athenian Ecclesia deliberated on matters of religion. Atheism and the introduction of foreign gods were forbidden in Athens and punishable by death. For example, the Athenian ecclesia charged that Socrates worshiped gods other than those sanctioned by the polis and condemned him to death.

Rome also had a civil religion, whose first Emperor Augustus officially attempted to revive the dutiful practice of classical paganism. Greek and Roman religion were essentially local in character; the Roman Empire attempted to unite its disparate territories by inculcating an ideal of Roman piety, and by a syncretistic identifying of the gods of conquered territories with the Greek and Roman pantheon. In this campaign, Augustus erected monuments such as the Ara Pacis, the Altar of Peace, showing the Emperor and his family worshiping the gods. He also encouraged the publication of works such as Virgil's Æneid, which depicted "pious Æneas", the legendary ancestor of Rome, as a role model for Roman religiosity. Roman historians such as Livy told tales of early Romans as morally improving stories of military prowess and civic virtue. The Roman civil religion later became centered on the person of the Emperor through the Imperial cult, the worship of the genius of the Emperor.

Rousseau and Durkheim

The phrase civil religion was first discussed extensively by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1762 treatise The Social Contract. Rousseau defined civil religion as a group of religious beliefs he believed to be universal, and which he believed governments had a right to uphold and maintain: belief in a deity; belief in an afterlife in which virtue is rewarded and vice punished; and belief in religious tolerance. He said the dogmas of civil religion should be simple, few in number, and stated in precise words without interpretations or commentaries. Beyond that, Rousseau affirmed that individuals' religious opinions should be beyond the reach of governments. For Rousseau civil religion was to be constructed and imposed from the top down as an artificial source of civic virtue.

Wallace studies Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), the French sociologist who analysed civil religion, especially in comparative terms, and stressed that the public schools are critical in implementing civil religion. Although he never used the term he laid great stress on the concept.

Examples

Australia

Writing in 1965 on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1915 Landing at Anzac Cove, Australian historian Geoffrey Serle noted: "Two generations of Australians have had it drummed in from rostrum and pulpit that we became a nation on 25 April 1915 or at least during the First World War." This date is now commemorated as Anzac Day.

Michael Gladwin has argued that for Australians Anzac Day "functions as a kind of alternative religion, or 'civil religion', with its own sense of the mystical, transcendent and divine", while Carolyn Holbrook has observed that after 1990 Anzac Day commemoration was "repackaged" as a protean "story of national genesis" that could flexibly accommodate a wide spectrum of Australians. According to Gladwin, "The emphasis of Anzac Day is no longer on military skills but rather values of unpretentious courage, endurance, sacrifice in the midst of suffering, and mateship. Anzac Day provides universally recognised symbols and rituals to enshrine transcendent elements of Australia's historical experience, making it a quasi-religion, or at least a 'civil religion'."

France

Secular states in Europe by the late 19th century were building civil religion based on their recent histories. In France's case, Baylac argues, the French government

encouraged a veritable state religion, worshiping the flag and multiplying the national holidays and commemorative monuments. ... July 14 became a national holiday in 1882; the centennial of the French Revolution was celebrated in 1889. In Italy, the secular state multiplied the celebrations: State holidays, King and Queen's birthdays, pilgrimage of 1884 to the tomb of Victor-Emmanuel II. A patriotic ideology was created.

South Korea

In contemporary South Korea, the predominating civil religion has been described as consisting of anti-Japanese sentiment coupled with a pan-Korean racial nationalism. This has been criticized by some scholars as being detrimental to South Korean national security as it encourages North Korean provocations against the country in the guise that South Koreans will not adequately defend their country's security as they feel a certain racial and ethnic solidarity with North Korea. One scholar argued that South Korea should retire this sort of racialized civil religion for one more rooted in civic principles, like was found in West Germany during the 20th century.

Soviet Union

Statue of Lenin at Dubna, Russia, built in 1937; it is 25 metres tall

The Soviet Union made Marxism–Leninism into a civil religion, with sacred texts and many statues of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. Stalin personally supervised the cult of Lenin and his own cult, which took advantage of the historic semi-religious adulation Russian peasants had shown toward the tsars. The Lenin icons were put into storage when communism fell in 1991. The Stalin statues had been removed in the 1950s and mention of him was erased from encyclopedias and history books. However under Vladimir Putin in the 21st century the memory of Stalin has been partly rehabilitated in search of a strong leader who made the nation powerful. For example, school textbooks were rewritten to portray "the mass terror of the Stalin years as essential to the country's rapid modernization in the face of growing German and Japanese military threats, and amid the inaction or duplicity of the Western democracies."

United States

Civil religion is an important component of public life in America, especially at the national level for its celebration of nationalism. Sociologists report that its "feast days" are Thanksgiving, Veterans Day, and Memorial Day. Its rituals include salutes to the flag and singing "God Bless America". Soldiers and veterans play a central role of standing ready to sacrifice their lives to preserve the nation. Bellah noted the veneration of veterans. The historian Conrad Cherry called the Memorial Day ceremonies "a modern cult of the dead" and says that it "affirms the civil religious tenets".

American Revolution

The American Revolution was the main source of the civil religion that has shaped patriotism ever since. According to the sociologist Robert Bellah:

Behind the civil religion at every point lie biblical archetypes: Exodus, Chosen People, Promised Land, New Jerusalem, and Sacrificial Death and Rebirth. But it is also genuinely American and genuinely new. It has its own prophets and its own martyrs, its own sacred events and sacred places, its own solemn rituals and symbols. It is concerned that America be a society as perfectly in accord with the will of God as men can make it, and a light to all nations.

Albanese argues that the American Revolution was the main source of the non-denominational American civil religion that has shaped patriotism and the memory and meaning of the nation's birth ever since. Battles are not central (as they are for the Civil War) but rather certain events and people have been celebrated as icons of certain virtues (or vices). As historians have noted, the Revolution produced a Moses-like leader (George Washington), prophets (Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine) and martyrs (Boston Massacre, Nathan Hale), as well as devils (Benedict Arnold), sacred places (Valley Forge, Bunker Hill), rituals (Boston Tea Party), emblems (the new flag), sacred holidays (July 4) and a holy scripture whose every sentence is carefully studied and applied in current law cases (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights).

Although God is not mentioned in the Constitution of the United States of America, mention is specifically made of "Nature's God" in the opening sentence of the Declaration of Independence.

Historiography

The Christian flag displayed alongside the flag of the United States next to the pulpit in a church in California. Note the eagle and cross finials on the flag poles.

In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars such as Robert N. Bellah and Martin E. Marty studied civil religion as a cultural phenomenon, attempting to identify the actual tenets of civil religion in the United States, or to study civil religion as a phenomenon of cultural anthropology. Within this American context, Marty wrote that Americans approved of "religion in general" without being particularly concerned about the content of that faith, and attempted to distinguish "priestly" and "prophetic" roles within the practice of American civil religion, which he preferred to call the public theology. In the 1967 essay "Civil Religion in America", Bellah wrote that civil religion in its priestly sense is "an institutionalized collection of sacred beliefs about the American nation". Bellah describes the prophetic role of civil religion as challenging "national self-worship" and calling for "the subordination of the nation to ethical principles that transcend it in terms of which it should be judged". Bellah identified the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Civil Rights Movement as three decisive historical events that impacted the content and imagery of civil religion in the United States.

The application of the concept of civil religion to the United States was in large part the work of sociologist Robert Bellah. He identified an elaborate system of practices and beliefs arising from America's unique historic experience and religiosity. Civil religion in the US was originally Protestant but brought in Catholics and Jews after World War II. Having no association with any religious sect, civil religion was used in the 1960s to justify civil rights legislation. Americans ever since the colonial era talk of their obligation both collective and individual to carry out God's will on earth. George Washington was a sort of high priest, and the documents of the Founding Fathers have been treated as almost sacred texts. With the Civil War, says Bellah, came a new theme of death, sacrifice and rebirth, as expressed through Memorial Day rituals. Unlike France, the American civil religion was never anticlerical or militantly secular.

Current issues

This assertive civil religion of the United States is an occasional cause of political friction between the US and Europe, where the literally religious form of civil religion has largely faded away in recent decades. In the United States, civil religion is often invoked under the name of "Judeo-Christian ethics", a phrase originally intended to be maximally inclusive of the several religions practiced in the United States, assuming that these faiths all share the same values. Alvin J. Schmidt argues that since the 1700s, expressions of civil religion in the United States have shifted from a deistic to a polytheistic stance.

Some scholars have argued that the American flag can be seen as a main totem of a national cult, while others have argued that modern punishment is a form of civil religion. Arguing against mob violence and lynching, Abraham Lincoln declared in his 1838 Lyceum speech that the Constitution and the laws of the United States ought to become the "political religion" of each American.

American Humanist Association

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Humanist_Association 

 

 

American Humanist Association

Abbreviation	AHA
Formation	1941; 80 years ago
Type	Non-profit
Purpose	Advocate for equality for humanists, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers.
Location	Washington, D.C., United States
Membership	34,000
Key people	Sunil Panikkath (President) Roy Speckhardt (Executive Director)
Website	www.americanhumanist.org

The American Humanist Association (AHA) is a non-profit organization in the United States that advances secular humanism, a philosophy of life that, without theism or other supernatural beliefs, affirms the ability and responsibility of human beings to lead personal lives of ethical fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.

The American Humanist Association was founded in 1941 and currently provides legal assistance to defend the constitutional rights of secular and religious minorities, lobbies Congress on church-state separation and other issues, and maintains a grassroots network of 250 local affiliates and chapters that engage in social activism, philosophical discussion and community-building events. The AHA has several publications, including the bimonthly magazine The Humanist, quarterly newsletter Free Mind, peer-reviewed semi-annual scholastic journal Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism, and daily online news site TheHumanist.com. The organisation states that it has over 34,000 members.

Background

In 1927 an organization called the "Humanist Fellowship" began at a gathering in Chicago. In 1928 the Fellowship started publishing the New Humanist magazine with H.G. Creel as first editor. The New Humanist was published from 1928 to 1936. By 1935 the Humanist Fellowship had become the "Humanist Press Association", the first national association of humanism in the United States.

The first Humanist Manifesto was issued by a conference held at the University of Chicago in 1933. Signatories included the philosopher John Dewey, but the majority were ministers (chiefly Unitarian) and theologians. They identified humanism as an ideology that espouses reason, ethics, and social and economic justice.

In July 1939 a group of Quakers, inspired by the 1933 Humanist Manifesto, incorporated under the state laws of California the Humanist Society of Friends as a religious, educational, charitable nonprofit organization authorized to issue charters anywhere in the world and to train and ordain its own ministry. Upon ordination these ministers were then accorded the same rights and privileges granted by law to priests, ministers, and rabbis of traditional theistic religions.

History

Curtis Reese was a leader in the 1941 reorganization and incorporation of the "Humanist Press Association" as the American Humanist Association. Along with its reorganization, the AHA began printing The Humanist magazine. The AHA was originally headquartered in Yellow Springs, Ohio, then San Francisco, California, and in 1978 Amherst, New York. Subsequently, the AHA moved to Washington, D.C..

In 1952 the AHA became a founding member of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

The AHA was the first national membership organization to support abortion rights. Around the same time, the AHA joined hands with the American Ethical Union (AEU) to help establish the rights of nontheistic conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War. This time also saw Humanists involved in the creation of the first nationwide memorial societies, giving people broader access to cheaper alternatives than the traditional burial. In the late 1960s the AHA also secured a religious tax exemption in support of its celebrant program, allowing Humanist celebrants to legally officiate at weddings, perform chaplaincy functions, and in other ways enjoy the same rights as traditional clergy.

In 1991 the AHA took control of the Humanist Society, a religious Humanist organization that now runs the celebrant program. Since 1991 the organization has worked as an adjunct to the American Humanist Association to certify qualified members to serve in this special capacity as ministers. The Humanist Society's ministry prepares Humanist Celebrants to lead ceremonial observances  After this transfer, the AHA commenced the process of jettisoning its religious tax exemption and resumed its exclusively educational status. Today the AHA is recognized by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service as a nonprofit, tax exempt, 501(c)(3), publicly supported educational organization.

Membership numbers are disputed, but Djupe and Olson place it as "definitely fewer than 50,000." The AHA has over 575,000 followers on Facebook and over 42,000 followers on Twitter.

Adjuncts and affiliates

The AHA is the supervising organization for various Humanist affiliates and adjunct organizations.

Black Humanist Alliance

The Black Humanist Alliance of the American Humanist Association was founded in 2016 as a pillar of its new "Initiatives for Social Justice." Like the Feminist Humanist Alliance and the LGBT Humanist Alliance, the Black Humanist Alliance uses an intersectional approach to addressing issues facing the Black community. As its mission states, the BHA "concern ourselves with confronting expressions of religious hegemony in public policy," but is "also devoted to confronting social, economic, and political deprivations that disproportionately impact Black America due to centuries of culturally ingrained prejudices."

Feminist Humanist Alliance

The Feminist Humanist Alliance (formerly the Feminist Caucus) of the American Humanist Association was established in 1977 as a coalition of women and men within the AHA to work toward the advancement of women's rights and equality between the sexes in all aspects of society. Originally called the Women's Caucus, the new name was adopted in 1985 as more representative of all the members of the caucus and of the caucus' goals. Over the years, members of the Caucus have advocated for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and participated in various public demonstrations, including marches for women's and civil rights. In 1982, the Caucus established its annual Humanist Heroine Award, with the initial award being presented to Sonia Johnson. Others receiving the awards have included Tish Sommers, Christine Craft, and Fran Hosken. In 2012 the Caucus declared it would be organizing around two principal efforts: "Refocusing on passing the ERA" and "Promoting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

In 2016, the Feminist Caucus reorganized as the Feminist Humanist Alliance as a component of their larger "Initiatives for Social Justice." As stated on its website, the "refinement in vision" emphasized "FHA's more active partnership with outreach programs and social justice campaigns with distinctly inclusive feminist objectives." Its current goal is to provide a "movement powered by and for women, transpeople, and genderqueer people to fight for social justice. We are united to create inclusive and diverse spaces for activists and allies on the local and national level."

LGBTQ Humanist Alliance

The LGBTQ Humanist Alliance (formerly LGBT Humanist Council) of the American Humanist Association is committed to advancing equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people and their families. The alliance "seeks to cultivate safe and affirming communities, promote humanist values, and achieve full equality and social liberation of LGBTQ persons."

Paralleling the Black Humanist Alliance and the Feminist Humanist Alliance, the Council reformed in 2016 as the LGBTQ Humanist Alliance as a larger part of the AHA's "Initiatives for Social Justice".

Disaster Recovery

In 2014, the American Humanist Association (AHA) and Foundation Beyond Belief (FBB) merged their respective charitable programs Humanist Charities (established in 2005) and Humanist Crisis Response (established in 2011). AHA's Executive Director Roy Speckhardt commented that, “This merger is a positive move that will grow the relief efforts of the humanist community. The end result will be more money directed to charitable activities, dispelling the false claim that nonbelievers don’t give to charity.”

Now Foundation Beyond Belief's Disaster Recovery program, this effort serves as a focal point for the humanist response to major natural disasters and complex humanitarian crises all over the world. The program coordinates financial support as well as trained humanist volunteers to help impacted communities. The Disaster Recovery program is sustained through the ongoing partnership between FBB and AHA, and ensures that our community's efforts are centralized and efficient.

Between 2014–2018, Humanist Disaster Recovery has raised over $250,000 for victims of the Syrian Refugee Crisis, Refugee Children of the U.S. Border, Tropical Cyclone Sam, and the Nepal and Ecuadoran Earthquakes, Hurricane Matthew in Haiti, and Hurricanes Irma and Maria. In addition to grants for recovery efforts, volunteers have also helped to rebuild homes and schools in the following locations: Columbia, South Carolina after the effects of Hurricane Joaquin, in Denham Springs, Louisiana; and in Houston, Texas after the flooding from Hurricane Harvey.

Appignani Humanist Legal Center

Official logo of the AHLC

The Association launched the Appignani Humanist Legal Center (AHLC) in 2006 to ensure that humanists' constitutional rights are represented in court. Through amicus activity, litigation, and legal advocacy, a team of cooperating lawyers, including Jim McCollum, Wendy Kaminer, and Michael Newdow, provide legal assistance by challenging perceived violations of the Establishment Clause.

• The AHLC's first independent litigation was filed on November 29, 2006, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida. Attorney James Hurley, the AHLC lawyer serving as lead counsel, filed suit against the Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections on behalf of Plaintiff Jerry Rabinowitz, whose polling place was a church in Delray Beach, Florida. The church featured numerous religious symbols, including signs exhorting people to “Make a Difference with God” and anti-abortion posters, which the AHLC claimed demonstrated a violation of the Establishment Clause. In the voting area itself, "Rabinowitz observed many religious symbols in plain view, both surrounding the election judges and in direct line above the voting machines. He took photographs that will be entered in evidence." U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks ruled that Jerry Rabinowitz did not have standing to challenge the placement of polling sites in churches, and dismissed the case.
• In February 2014, AHA brought suit to force the removal of the Bladensburg Peace Cross, a war memorial honoring 49 residents of Prince George's County, Maryland, who died in World War I. AHA represented the plaintiffs, Mr. Lowe, who drives by the memorial "about once a month" and Fred Edwords, former AHA Executive director. AHA argued that the presence of a Christian religious symbol on public property violates the First Amendment clause prohibiting government from establishing a religion. Town officials feel the monument to have historic and patriotic significant to local residents. A member of the local American Legion Post said, "I mean, to me, it's like they're slapping the veterans in the face. I mean, that's a tribute to the veterans, and for some reason, I have no idea what they have against veterans. I mean, if it wasn't for us veterans they wouldn't have the right to do what they're trying to do."
• In March 2014, a Southern California woman reluctantly removed a roadside memorial from near a freeway ramp where her 19-year-old son was killed after the AHA contacted the city council calling the cross on city-owned property a "serious constitutional violation".
• AHLC represented an atheist family who claimed that the equal rights amendment of the Massachusetts constitution prohibits mandatory daily recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance because the anthem contains the phrase “under God”. In November 2012 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court permitted a direct appeal with oral arguments set for early 20 but in May 2014, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in a unanimous decision that the daily recitation of the phrase “under god” in the US Pledge of Allegiance does not violate the plaintiffs' equal protection rights under the Massachusetts Constitution.
• In February 2015 New Jersey Superior Court Judge David F. Bauman dismissed a lawsuit challenging the Pledge of Allegiance, ruling that "...the Pledge of Allegiance does not violate the rights of those who don't believe in God and does not have to be removed from the patriotic message." In a twenty-one page decision, Bauman wrote, "Under (the association members') reasoning, the very constitution under which (the members) seek redress for perceived atheistic marginalization could itself be deem unconstitutional, an absurd proposition which (association members) do not and cannot advance here."

Advertising campaigns

2008 Bus Campaign

The American Humanist Association has received media attention for its various advertising campaigns; in 2010, the AHA's campaign was said to be the more expensive than similar ad campaigns from the American Atheists and Freedom From Religion Foundation.

In 2008 it ran ads on buses in Washington, D.C., that proclaimed "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness' sake", and since 2009 the organization has paid for billboard advertisements nationwide. One such billboard, which stated "No God...No Problem" was repeatedly vandalized.

In 2010 it launched another ad campaign promoting Humanism, which The New York Times said was the "first (atheist campaign) to include spots on television and cable" and was described by CNN as the "largest, most extensive advertising campaign ever by a godless organization". The campaign featured violent or sexist quotes from holy books, contrasted with quotes from humanist thinkers, including physicist Albert Einstein, biologist Richard Dawkins, and was largely underwritten by Todd Stiefel, a retired pharmaceutical company executive.

In late 2011 it launched a holiday billboard campaign, placing advertisements in 7 different cities: Kearny, New Jersey; Washington, D.C.; Cranston, Rhode Island; Bastrop, Louisiana; Oregon City, Oregon; College Station, Texas and Rochester Hills, Michigan", cities where AHA stated "atheists have experienced discrimination due to their lack of belief in a traditional god". The organization spent more than $200,000 on their campaign which included a billboard reading "Yes, Virginia, there is no god."

In November 2012, the AHA launched a national ad campaign to promote a new website, KidsWithoutGod.com, with ads using the slogans "I'm getting a bit old for imaginary friends" and "You're Not The Only One". The campaign included bus advertising in Washington, DC, a billboard in Moscow, Idaho, and online ads on the family of websites run by Cheezburger and Pandora Radio, as well as Facebook, Reddit, Google, and YouTube. Ads were turned down because of their content by Disney, Time for Kids and National Geographic Kids.

National Day of Reason

The National Day of Reason was created by the American Humanist Association and the Washington Area Secular Humanists in 2003. In addition to serving as a holiday for secularists, the National Day of Reason was created in response to the unconstitutionality of the National Day of Prayer. According to the organizers of the event, the National Day of Prayer "violates the First Amendment of the United States Constitution because it asks federal, state, and local government entities to set aside tax dollar supported time and space to engage in religious ceremonies". Several organizations associated with the National Day of Reason have organized food drives and blood donations, while other groups have called for an end to prayer invocations at city meetings. Other organizations, such as the Oklahoma Atheists and the Minnesota Atheists, have organized local secular celebrations as alternatives to the National Day of Prayer. Additionally, many individuals affiliated with these atheistic groups choose to protest the official National Day of Prayer.

Reason Rally

In 2012, the American Humanist Association co-sponsored the Reason Rally, a national gathering of "humanists, atheists, freethinkers and nonbelievers from across the United States and abroad" in Washington, D.C. The rally, held on the National Mall, had speakers such as Richard Dawkins, James Randi, Adam Savage, and student activist Jessica Ahlqvist. According to the Huffington Post, the event's attendance was between 8,000–10,000 while the Atlantic reported nearly 20,000. The AHA also co-sponsored the 2016 Reason Rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

Famous awardees

The American Humanist Association has named a "Humanist of the Year" annually since 1953. It has also granted other honors to numerous leading figures, including Salman Rushdie (Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism 2007), Oliver Stone (Humanist Arts Award, 1996), Katharine Hepburn (Humanist Arts Award 1985), John Dewey (Humanist Pioneer Award, 1954), Jack Kevorkian (Humanist Hero Award, 1996) and Vashti McCollum (Distinguished Service Award, 1991).

 

Rebellion

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebellion 

Revolution

Rebellion, uprising, or insurrection is a refusal of obedience or order. It refers to the open resistance against the orders of an established authority.

A rebellion originates from a sentiment of indignation and disapproval of a situation and then manifests itself by the refusal to submit or to obey the authority responsible for this situation.Rebellion can be individual or collective, peaceful (civil disobedience, civil resistance, and nonviolent resistance) or violent (terrorism, sabotage and guerrilla warfare.)

In political terms, rebellion and revolt are often distinguished by their different aims. If rebellion generally seeks to evade and/or gain concessions from an oppressive power, a revolt seeks to overthrow and destroy that power, as well as its accompanying laws. The goal of rebellion is resistance while a revolt seeks a revolution. As power shifts relative to the external adversary, or power shifts within a mixed coalition, or positions harden or soften on either side, an insurrection may seesaw between the two forms.

Classification

 

An armed but limited rebellion is an insurrection, and if the established government does not recognize the rebels as belligerents then they are insurgents and the revolt is an insurgency. In a larger conflict the rebels may be recognized as belligerents without their government being recognized by the established government, in which case the conflict becomes a civil war.

Civil resistance movements have often aimed at, and brought about, the fall of a government or head of state, and in these cases could be considered a form of rebellion. In many of these cases, the opposition movement saw itself not only as nonviolent but also as upholding their country's constitutional system against a government that was unlawful, for example, if it had refused to acknowledge its defeat in an election. Thus the term "rebel" does not always capture the element in some of these movements of acting as a defender of legality and constitutionalism.

There are a number of terms that are associated with rebel and rebellion. They range from those with positive connotations to those with pejorative connotations. Examples include:

• Boycott, similar to civil disobedience, but it simply means a separation, primarily financial, from the system that is being rebelled against. This entails refusing to participate in the monetary system, limiting consumption, or ignoring notions of property rights (AKA squatting, simple living).
• Civil resistance, civil disobedience, and nonviolent resistance which do not include violence or paramilitary force.
• Coup, an illegal overthrow of a leader, usually carried out by the military or other politicians.
• Mutiny, which is carried out by military or security forces against their commanders
• Armed resistance movement, which is carried out by freedom fighters, often against an occupying foreign power
• Revolt, a term that is sometimes used for more localized rebellions rather than a general uprising
• Revolution, which is mostly carried out by radicals and frustrated citizens, usually meant to overthrow the current government
• Riot, a form of civil disorder involving violent public disturbance
• Subversion, which are covert attempts at sabotaging a government, carried out by spies or other subversives
• Terrorism, which is carried out by different kinds of political, economic or religious militant individuals or groups

Causes

Macro approach

The following theories broadly build on the Marxist interpretation of rebellion. Rebellion is studied, in Theda Skocpol's words, by analyzing "objective relationships and conflicts among variously situated groups and nations, rather than the interests, outlooks, or ideologies of particular actors in revolutions".

Marxist view

Karl Marx's analysis of revolutions sees such expression of political violence not as anomic, episodic outbursts of discontents but rather the symptomatic expression of a particular set of objective but fundamentally contradicting class-based relations of power. The central tenet of Marxist philosophy, as expressed in Das Kapital, is the analysis of society's mode of production (technology and labor) concomitant with the ownership of productive institutions and the division of profit. Marx writes about "the hidden structure of society" that must be elucidated through an examination of "the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers". The mismatch, between one mode of production, between the social forces and the social ownership of the production, is at the origin of the revolution. The inner imbalance within these modes of production is derived from the conflicting modes of organization, such as capitalism within feudalism, or more appropriately socialism within capitalism. The dynamics engineered by these class frictions help class consciousness root itself in the collective imaginary. For example, the development of the bourgeoisie class went from an oppressed merchant class to urban independence, eventually gaining enough power to represent the state as a whole. Social movements, thus, are determined by an exogenous set of circumstances. The proletariat must also, according to Marx, go through the same process of self-determination which can only be achieved by friction against the bourgeoisie. In Marx's theory revolutions are the "locomotives of history", it is because rebellion has for the ultimate goal to overthrow the ruling class and its antiquated mode of production. Later, rebellion attempts to replace it with a new system of political economy, one that is better suited to the new ruling class, thus enabling societal progress. The cycle of rebellion, thus, replaces one mode of production with another through the constant class friction.

Ted Gurr: Roots of political violence

In his book Why Men Rebel, Ted Gurr looks at the roots of political violence itself applied to a rebellion framework. He defines political violence as: "all collective attacks within a political community against the political regime, its actors [...] or its policies. The concept represents a set of events, a common property of which is the actual or threatened use of violence". Gurr sees in violence a voice of anger that manifests itself against the established order. More precisely, individuals become angry when they feel what Gurr labels as relative deprivation, meaning the feeling of getting less than one is entitled to. He labels it formally as the "perceived discrepancy between value expectations and value capabilities". Gurr differentiates between three types of relative deprivation:

1. Decremental deprivation: one's capacities decrease when expectations remain high. One example of this is the proliferation and thus depreciation of the value of higher education.
2. Aspirational Deprivation: one's capacities stay the same when expectations rise. An example would be a first-generation college student lacking the contacts and network to obtain a higher paying job while watching her better-prepared colleagues bypass her.
3. Progressive deprivation: expectation and capabilities increase but the former cannot keep up. A good example would be an automotive worker being increasingly marginalized by the automatization of the assembly line.

Anger is thus comparative. One of his key insights is that "The potential for collective violence varies strongly with the intensity and scope of relative deprivation among members of a collectivity". This means that different individuals within society will have different propensities to rebel based on the particular internalization of their situation. As such, Gurr differentiates between three types of political violence:

1. Turmoil when only the mass population encounters relative deprivation;
2. Conspiracy when the population but especially the elite encounters relative deprivation;
3. Internal War, which includes revolution. In this case, the degree of organization is much higher than turmoil, and the revolution is intrinsically spread to all sections of society, unlike the conspiracy.

Charles Tilly: Centrality of collective action

In From Mobilization to Revolution, Charles Tilly argues that political violence is a normal and endogenous reaction to competition for power between different groups within society. "Collective violence", Tilly writes, "is the product of just normal processes of competition among groups in order to obtain the power and implicitly to fulfill their desires”. He proposes two models to analyze political violence:

1. The polity model takes into account government and groups jockeying for control over power. Thus, both the organizations holding power and the ones challenging them are included. Tilly labels those two groups "members" and "challengers".
2. The mobilization model aims to describe the behavior of one single party to the political struggle for power. Tilly further divides the model into two sub-categories, one that deals with the internal dynamics of the group, and the other that is concerned with the "external relations" of the entity with other organizations and/or the government. According to Tilly, the cohesiveness of a group mainly relies on the strength of common interests and the degree of organization. Thus, to answer Gurr, anger alone does not automatically create political violence. Political action is contingent on the capacity to organize and unite. It is far from irrational and spontaneous.

Revolutions are included in this theory, although they remain for Tilly particularly extreme since the challenger(s) aim for nothing less than full control over power. The "revolutionary moment occurs when the population needs to choose to obey either the government or an alternative body who is engaged with the government in a zero-sum game. This is what Tilly calls "multiple sovereignty". The success of a revolutionary movement hinges on "the formation of coalitions between members of the polity and the contenders advancing exclusive alternative claims to control over Government.".

Chalmers Johnson and societal values

For Chalmers Johnson, rebellions are not so much the product of political violence or collective action but in "the analysis of viable, functioning societies". In a quasi-biological manner, Johnson sees revolutions as symptoms of pathologies within the societal fabric. A healthy society, meaning a "value-coordinated social system" does not experience political violence. Johnson's equilibrium is at the intersection between the need for society to adapt to changes but at the same time firmly grounded in selective fundamental values. The legitimacy of political order, he posits, relies exclusively on its compliance with these societal values and in its capacity to integrate and adapt to any change. Rigidity is, in other words, inadmissible. Johnson writes "to make a revolution is to accept violence for the purpose of causing the system to change; more exactly, it is the purposive implementation of a strategy of violence in order to effect a change in social structure". The aim of a revolution is to re-align a political order on new societal values introduced by an externality that the system itself has not been able to process. Rebellions automatically must face a certain amount of coercion because by becoming "de-synchronized", the now illegitimate political order will have to use coercion to maintain its position. A simplified example would be the French Revolution when the Parisian Bourgeoisie did not recognize the core values and outlook of the King as synchronized with its own orientations. More than the King itself, what really sparked the violence was the uncompromising intransigence of the ruling class. Johnson emphasizes "the necessity of investigating a system's value structure and its problems in order to conceptualize the revolutionary situation in any meaningful way".

Theda Skocpol and the autonomy of the state

Skocpol introduces the concept of the social revolution, to be contrasted with a political revolution. While the latter aims to change the polity, the former is "rapid, basic transformations of a society's state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below". Social revolutions are a grassroots movement by nature because they do more than change the modalities of power, they aim to transform the fundamental social structure of society. As a corollary, this means that some "revolutions" may cosmetically change the organization of the monopoly over power without engineering any true change in the social fabric of society. Her analysis is limited to studying the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Skocpol identifies three stages of the revolution in these cases (which she believes can be extrapolated and generalized), each accordingly accompanied by specific structural factors which in turn influence the social results of the political action.

1. The Collapse of the Old-Regime State: this is an automatic consequence of certain structural conditions. She highlights the importance of international military and economic competition as well as the pressure of the misfunctioning of domestic affairs. More precisely, she sees the breakdown of the governing structures of society influenced by two theoretical actors, the "landed upper class" and the "imperial state". Both could be considered as "partners in exploitation" but in reality competed for resources: the state (monarchs) seek to build up military and economic power to ascertain their geopolitical influence. The upper class works in a logic of profit maximization, meaning preventing as much as possible the state to extract resources. All three revolutions occurred, Skocpol argues, because states failed to be able to "mobilize extraordinary resources from the society and implement in the process reforms requiring structural transformations". The apparently contradicting policies were mandated by a unique set of geopolitical competition and modernization. "Revolutionary political crises occurred because of the unsuccessful attempts of the Bourbon, Romanov, and Manchu regimes to cope with foreign pressures." Skocpol further concludes "the upshot was the disintegration of centralized administrative and military machinery that had theretofore provided the solely unified bulwark of social and political order".
2. Peasant Uprisings: more than simply a challenge by the landed upper class in a difficult context, the state needs to be challenged by mass peasant uprisings in order to fall. These uprisings must be aimed not at the political structures per se but at the upper class itself so that the political revolution becomes a social one as well. Skocpol quotes Barrington Moore who famously wrote: "peasants [...] provided the dynamite to bring down the old building". Peasant uprisings are more effective depending on two given structural socioeconomic conditions: the level of autonomy (from both an economic and political point of view) peasant communities enjoy, and the degree of direct control the upper class on local politics. In other words, peasants must be able to have some degree of agency in order to be able to rebel. If the coercive structures of the state and/or the landowners keep a very close check on peasant activity, then there is no space to foment dissent.
3. Societal Transformation: this is the third and decisive step after the state organization has been seriously weakened and peasant revolts become widespread against landlords. The paradox of the three revolutions Skocpol studies is that stronger centralized and bureaucratic states emerge after the revolts. The exact parameters depend, again, on structural factors as opposed to voluntarist factors: in Russia, the new state found most support in the industrial base, rooting itself in cities. In China, most of the support for the revolt had been in the countryside, thus the new polity was grounded in rural areas. In France, the peasantry was not organized enough, and the urban centers not potent enough so that the new state was not firmly grounded in anything, partially explaining its artificiality.

Here is a summary of the causes and consequences of social revolutions in these three countries, according to Skocpol:

Conditions for political crises (A)
	Power structure	State of agrarian economy	International pressures
France	Landed-commercial upper class has moderate influence on the absolutist monarchy via bureaucracy	Moderate growth	Moderate, pressure from England
Russia	Landed nobility has no influence in absolutist state	Extensive growth, geographically unbalanced	Extreme, string of defeats culminating with World War I
China	Landed-commercial upper class has moderate influence on absolutist state via bureaucracy	Slow growth	Strong, imperialist intrusions
Conditions for peasant insurrections (B)
	Organization of agrarian communities		Autonomy of agrarian communities
France	Peasants own 30–40% of the land own and must pay tribute to the feudal landlord		Relatively autonomous, distant control from royal officials
Russia	Peasants own 60% of the land, pay rent to landowners that are part of the community		Sovereign, supervised by the bureaucracy
China	Peasants own 50% of the land and pay rent to the landowners, work exclusively on small plots, no real peasant community		Landlords dominate local politics under the supervision of Imperial officials
	Societal transformations (A + B)
France	Breakdown of absolutist state, important peasant revolts against feudal system
Russia	Failure of top-down bureaucratic reforms, eventual dissolution of the state and widespread peasant revolts against all privately owned land
China	Breakdown of absolutist state, disorganized peasant upheavals but no autonomous revolts against landowners

Microfoundational evidence on causes

The following theories are all based on Mancur Olson's work in The Logic of Collective Action, a 1965 book that conceptualizes the inherent problem with an activity that has concentrated costs and diffuse benefits. In this case, the benefits of rebellion are seen as a public good, meaning one that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Indeed, the political benefits are generally shared by all in society if a rebellion is successful, not just the individuals that have partaken in the rebellion itself. Olson thus challenges the assumption that simple interests in common are all that is necessary for collective action. In fact, he argues the "free rider" possibility, a term that means to reap the benefits without paying the price, will deter rational individuals from collective action. That is, unless there is a clear benefit, a rebellion will not happen en masse. Thus, Olson shows that "selective incentives", only made accessible to individuals participating in the collective effort, can solve the free rider problem.

The Rational Peasant

Samuel L. Popkin builds on Olson's argument in The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam. His theory is based on the figure of a hyper rational peasant that bases his decision to join (or not) a rebellion uniquely on a cost-benefit analysis. This formalist view of the collective action problem stresses the importance of individual economic rationality and self-interest: a peasant, according to Popkin, will disregard the ideological dimension of a social movement and focus instead on whether or not it will bring any practical benefit to him. According to Popkin, peasant society is based on a precarious structure of economic instability. Social norms, he writes, are "malleable, renegotiated, and shifting in accord with considerations of power and strategic interaction among individuals" Indeed, the constant insecurity and inherent risk to the peasant condition, due to the peculiar nature of the patron-client relationship that binds the peasant to his landowner, forces the peasant to look inwards when he has a choice to make. Popkin argues that peasants rely on their "private, family investment for their long run security and that they will be interested in short term gain vis-à-vis the village. They will attempt to improve their long-run security by moving to a position with higher income and less variance". Popkin stresses this "investor logic" that one may not expect in agrarian societies, usually seen as pre-capitalist communities where traditional social and power structures prevent the accumulation of capital. Yet, the selfish determinants of collective action are, according to Popkin, a direct product of the inherent instability of peasant life. The goal of a laborer, for example, will be to move to a tenant position, then smallholder, then landlord; where there is less variance and more income. Voluntarism is thus non-existent in such communities.

Popkin singles out four variables that impact individual participation:

1. Contribution to the expenditure of resources: collective action has a cost in terms of contribution, and especially if it fails (an important consideration with regards to rebellion)
2. Rewards : the direct (more income) and indirect (less oppressive central state) rewards for collective action
3. Marginal impact of the peasant's contribution to the success of collective action
4. Leadership "viability and trust" : to what extent the resources pooled will be effectively used.

Without any moral commitment to the community, this situation will engineer free riders. Popkin argues that selective incentives are necessary to overcome this problem.

Opportunity cost of rebellion

Political Scientist Christopher Blattman and World Bank economist Laura Alston identify rebellious activity as an "occupational choice". They draw a parallel between criminal activity and rebellion, arguing that the risks and potential payoffs an individual must calculate when making the decision to join such a movement remains similar between the two activities. In both cases, only a selected few reap important benefits, while most of the members of the group do not receive similar payoffs. The choice to rebel is inherently linked with its opportunity cost, namely what an individual is ready to give up in order to rebel. Thus, the available options beside rebellious or criminal activity matter just as much as the rebellion itself when the individual makes the decision. Blattman and Alston, however, recognize that "a poor person's best strategy" might be both rebellion illicit and legitimate activities at the same time. Individuals, they argue, can often have a varied "portofolio" of activities, suggesting that they all operate on a rational, profit maximizing logic. The authors conclude that the best way to fight rebellion is to increase its opportunity cost, both by more enforcement but also by minimizing the potential material gains of a rebellion.

Selective incentives based on group membership

The decision to join a rebellion can be based on the prestige and social status associated with membership in the rebellious group. More than material incentives for the individual, rebellions offer their members club goods, public goods that are reserved only for the members inside that group. Economist Eli Berman and Political Scientist David D. Laitin's study of radical religious groups show that the appeal of club goods can help explain individual membership. Berman and Laitin discuss suicide operations, meaning acts that have the highest cost for an individual. They find that in such a framework, the real danger to an organization is not volunteering but preventing defection. Furthermore, the decision to enroll in such high stakes organization can be rationalized. Berman and Laitin show that religious organizations supplant the state when it fails to provide an acceptable quality of public goods such a public safety, basic infrastructure, access to utilities, or schooling. Suicide operations "can be explained as a costly signal of “commitment” to the community". They further note "Groups less adept at extracting signals of commitment (sacrifices) may not be able to consistently enforce incentive compatibility." Thus, rebellious groups can organize themselves to ask of members proof of commitment to the cause. Club goods serve not so much to coax individuals into joining but to prevent defection.

Greed vs grievance model

World Bank economists Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler compare two dimensions of incentives:

1. Greed rebellion: "motivated by predation of the rents from primary commodity exports, subject to an economic calculus of costs and a military survival constraint".
2. Grievance rebellion: "motivated by hatreds which might be intrinsic to ethnic and religious differences, or reflected objective resentments such as domination by an ethnic majority, political repression, or economic inequality". The two main sources of grievance are political exclusion and inequality.

Vollier and Hoeffler find that the model based on grievance variables systematically fails to predict past conflicts, while the model based on greed performs well. The authors posit that the high cost of risk to society is not taken into account seriously by the grievance model: individuals are fundamentally risk-averse. However, they allow that conflicts create grievances, which in turn can become risk factors. Contrary to established beliefs, they also find that a multiplicity of ethnic communities make society safer, since individuals will be automatically more cautious, at the opposite of the grievance model predictions. Finally, the authors also note that the grievances expressed by members of the diaspora of a community in turmoil has an important on the continuation of violence. Both greed and grievance thus need to be included in the reflection.

The Moral Economy of the Peasant

Spearheaded by political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott in his book The Moral Economy of the Peasant, the moral economy school considers moral variables such as social norms, moral values, interpretation of justice, and conception of duty to the community as the prime influencers of the decision to rebel. This perspective still adheres to Olson's framework, but it considers different variables to enter the cost/benefit analysis: the individual is still believed to be rational, albeit not on material but moral grounds.

Early conceptualization: E. P. Thompson and bread riots in England

Before being fully conceptualized by Scott, British historian E.P. Thompson was the first to use the term "moral economy" in Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century. In this work, he discussed English bread riots, regular, localized form of rebellion by English peasants all through the 18th century. Such events, Thompson argues, have been routinely dismissed as "riotous", with the connotation of being disorganized, spontaneous, undirected, and undisciplined. In other words, anecdotal. The reality, he suggests, was otherwise: such riots involved a coordinated peasant action, from the pillaging of food convoys to the seizure of grain shops. Here, while a scholar such as Popkin would have argued that the peasants were trying to gain material benefits (crudely: more food), Thompson sees a legitimization factor, meaning "a belief that [the peasants] were defending traditional rights and customs". Thompson goes on to write: "[the riots were] legitimized by the assumptions of an older moral economy, which taught the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions by profiteering upon the necessities of the people". Later, reflecting on this work, Thompson would also write: "My object of analysis was the mentalité, or, as I would prefer, the political culture, the expectations, traditions, and indeed, superstitions of the working population most frequently involved in actions in the market". The opposition between a traditional, paternalist, and the communitarian set of values clashing with the inverse liberal, capitalist, and market-derived ethics is central to explain rebellion.

James C. Scott and the formalization of the moral economy argument

In The Moral Economy of Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, James C. Scott looks at the impact of exogenous economic and political shocks on peasant communities in Southeast Asia. Scott finds that peasants are mostly in the business of surviving and producing enough to subsist. Therefore, any extractive regime needs to respect this careful equilibrium. He labels this phenomenon the "subsistence ethic". A landowner operating in such communities is seen to have the moral duty to prioritize the peasant's subsistence over his constant benefit. According to Scott, the powerful colonial state accompanied by market capitalism did not respect this fundamental hidden law in peasant societies. Rebellious movements occurred as the reaction to an emotional grief, a moral outrage.

Other non-material incentives

Blattman and Ralston recognize the importance of immaterial selective incentives, such as anger, outrage, and injustice ("grievance") in the roots of rebellions. These variables, they argue, are far from being irrational, as they are sometimes presented. They identify three main types of grievance arguments:

1. Intrinsic incentives holds that "injustice or perceived transgression generates an intrinsic willingness to punish or seek retribution". More than material rewards, individuals are naturally and automatically prompted to fight for justice if they feel they have been wronged. The ultimatum game is an excellent illustration: player one receives $10 and must split it with another player who doesn't get the chance to determine how much he receives, but only if the deal is made or not (if he refuses, everyone loses their money). Rationally, player 2 should take whatever the deal is because it is better in absolute term ($1 more remains $1 more). However, player 2 is most likely unwilling to accept less than 2 or 2 dollars, meaning that they are willing to pay a-$2 for justice to be respected. This game, according to Blattman and Ralston, represents "the expressive pleasure people gain from punishing an injustice".
2. Loss aversion holds that "people tend to evaluate their satisfaction relative to a reference point, and that they are 'loss adverse". Individuals prefer not losing over the risky strategy of making gains. There is a substantial subjective part to this, however, as some may realize alone and decide that they are comparatively less well off than a neighbor, for example. To "fix" this gap, individuals will in turn be ready to take great risks so as to not enshrine a loss.
3. Frustration-aggression: this model holds that the immediate emotional reactions to highly stressful environments do not obey to any "direct utility benefit but rather a more impulsive and emotional response to a threat". There are limits to this theory: violent action is to a large extent a product of goals by an individual which are in turn determined by a set of preferences. Yet, this approach shows that contextual elements like economic precarity have a non-negligible impact on the conditions of the decisions to rebel at minimum.

Recruitment

Stathis N. Kalyvas, a political science professor at Yale University, argues that political violence is heavily influenced by hyperlocal socio-economic factors, from the mundane traditional family rivalries to repressed grudges. Rebellion, or any sort of political violence, are not binary conflicts but must be understood as interactions between public and private identities and actions. The "convergence of local motives and supralocal imperatives" make studying and theorizing rebellion a very complex affair, at the intersection between the political and the private, the collective and the individual. Kalyvas argues that we often try to group political conflicts according to two structural paradigms:

1. The idea that political violence, and more specifically rebellion, is characterized by a complete breakdown of authority and an anarchic state. This is inspired by Thomas Hobbes' views. The approach sees rebellion as being motivated by greed and loot, using violence to break down the power structures of society.
2. The idea that all political violence is inherently motivated by an abstract group of loyalties and beliefs, "whereby the political enemy becomes a private adversary only by virtue of prior collective and impersonal enmity". Violence is thus not a "man to man" affair as much as a "state to state" struggle, if not an "idea vs idea" conflict.

Kalyvas' key insight is that the central vs periphery dynamic is fundamental in political conflicts. Any individual actor, Kalyvas posits, enters into a calculated alliance with the collective. Rebellions thus cannot be analyzed in molar categories, nor should we assume that individuals are automatically in line with the rest of the actors simply by virtue of ideological, religious, ethnic, or class cleavage. The agency is located both within the collective and in the individual, in the universal and the local. Kalyvas writes: "Alliance entails a transaction between supralocal and local actors, whereby the former supply the later with external muscle, thus allowing them to win decisive local advantage, in exchange the former rely on local conflicts to recruit and motivate supporters and obtain local control, resources, and information- even when their ideological agenda is opposed to localism". Individuals will thus aim to use the rebellion in order to gain some sort of local advantage, while the collective actors will aim to gain power. Violence is a mean as opposed to a goal, according to Kalyvas.

The greater takeaway from this central/local analytical lens is that violence is not an anarchic tactic or a manipulation by an ideology, but a conversation between the two. Rebellions are "concatenations of multiple and often disparate local cleavages, more or less loosely arranged around the master cleavage". Any pre-conceived explanation or theory of a conflict must not be placated on a situation, lest one will construct a reality that adapts itself to his pre-conceived idea. Kalyvas thus argues that political conflict is not always political in the sense that they cannot be reduced to a certain discourse, decisions, or ideologies from the "center" of collective action. Instead, the focus must be on "local cleavages and intracommunity dynamics". Furthermore, rebellion is not "a mere mechanism that opens up the floodgates to random and anarchical private violence". Rather, it is the result of a careful and precarious alliance between local motivations and collective vectors to help the individual cause.