Collective Violence in Southeast Asia
Research Project Description
This research began under the auspices of a United Nations University/International Peace Academy project concerning Political Violence in South and Southeast Asia. For that Project, Vince Boudreau wrote a paper entitled Recruitment and Attack in Southeast Asian Collective Violence. This paper serves as a framework setting paper for the Collective Violence in Transitional Settings research program at the Center.
This research draws on theories of social movement and insurgent organizations, which have been under-utilized in studies of collective violence. These different analytic approaches look at collective violence as a pattern of struggle that reflects the influence of myriad pressures on movement organizations. Specifically, patterns of collective violence should be closely influenced by trade-offs between efforts to recruit supporters and to strike at adversaries. The work examines the premise that the more separate or separable targets of movement violence are from communities the movement targets ed for recruitment, the less calibrated or discriminate that violence will be. Conversely, when movement activists attempt to recruit among populations that live in close proximity to potential movement targets, activists will be more likely to calibrate, moderate, and explain violence. Efforts to strike a balance between these partially conflicting objectives can appear as different modes of violence, different targeting strategies, or combinations of the two.
The research incorporates this set of concerns into a program of data collection that begins with five Southeast Asian cases of collective violence: Islamic insurgency in the Southern Philippines, The Philippine Communist insurgency, the contemporary insurgency in Southern Thailand, Aceh in Indonesia and inter-communal violence in Central Sulawesi in Indonesia. Using newswire searches that target keywords describing specific modes of violence, the work seeks to identify patterns of violence, and shifts in those patterns, in the cases. Following the Southeast Asian phase of this research, the data collection effort will expand to take in different cases of collective violence and political struggle.
Like many research programs at the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies, the research on collective violence draws heavily on our student scholars. Students assist in most of the data collection and coding, in the design of the research instruments, and in the verification of events data. Beyond the initial framework setting document, the project is expected to produce several central pieces of research, but also several partly, or entirely student-authored pieces.
Further information is available in the research data codebook.
Research Project Description
This research began under the auspices of a United Nations University/International Peace Academy project concerning Political Violence in South and Southeast Asia. For that Project, Vince Boudreau wrote a paper entitled Recruitment and Attack in Southeast Asian Collective Violence. This paper serves as a framework setting paper for the Collective Violence in Transitional Settings research program at the Center.
This research draws on theories of social movement and insurgent organizations, which have been under-utilized in studies of collective violence. These different analytic approaches look at collective violence as a pattern of struggle that reflects the influence of myriad pressures on movement organizations. Specifically, patterns of collective violence should be closely influenced by trade-offs between efforts to recruit supporters and to strike at adversaries. The work examines the premise that the more separate or separable targets of movement violence are from communities the movement targets ed for recruitment, the less calibrated or discriminate that violence will be. Conversely, when movement activists attempt to recruit among populations that live in close proximity to potential movement targets, activists will be more likely to calibrate, moderate, and explain violence. Efforts to strike a balance between these partially conflicting objectives can appear as different modes of violence, different targeting strategies, or combinations of the two.
The research incorporates this set of concerns into a program of data collection that begins with five Southeast Asian cases of collective violence: Islamic insurgency in the Southern Philippines, The Philippine Communist insurgency, the contemporary insurgency in Southern Thailand, Aceh in Indonesia and inter-communal violence in Central Sulawesi in Indonesia. Using newswire searches that target keywords describing specific modes of violence, the work seeks to identify patterns of violence, and shifts in those patterns, in the cases. Following the Southeast Asian phase of this research, the data collection effort will expand to take in different cases of collective violence and political struggle.
Like many research programs at the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies, the research on collective violence draws heavily on our student scholars. Students assist in most of the data collection and coding, in the design of the research instruments, and in the verification of events data. Beyond the initial framework setting document, the project is expected to produce several central pieces of research, but also several partly, or entirely student-authored pieces.
Further information is available in the research data codebook.
