From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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:
- Turmoil when only the mass population encounters relative deprivation;
- Conspiracy when the population but especially the elite encounters relative deprivation;
- 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:
- 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".
- 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.
- 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".
- 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.
- 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:
- 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)
- Rewards : the direct (more income) and indirect (less oppressive central state) rewards for collective action
- Marginal impact of the peasant's contribution to the success of collective action
- 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:
- Greed
rebellion: "motivated by predation of the rents from primary commodity
exports, subject to an economic calculus of costs and a military
survival constraint".
- 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:
- 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".
- 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.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
