The Politics of Collective Violence (review)

Tilly has been studying collective violence for many decades. He notes ruefully that his books from three decades ago (Strikes in France and The Rebellious Century, for example) argued wrongly that most forms of collective violence lacked a "causally coherent domain" (xi). Now he sees the field differently, believing that collective violence "emerges from the ebb and flow of collective claim making and struggles for power" (238). Violence weaves in and out of politics and cannot be separated from it. There are no grand theories in Tilly's conceptual world, but he does argue that key principles connect political life and collective violence along "relational lines."

Following a detailed discussion of his model, an analysis of the general trends in collective violence, and an excellent chapter on violent rituals, Tilly uses numerous examples from varied historical moments and cultures to illustrate this thesis. He is particularly interested in what he calls coordinated destruction, opportunism, brawls, scattered attacks, and broken negotiations, each of which merits a separate chapter. A central thesis in the book is that collective violence arises with almost inevitable certainty in tyrannies that find particularly fertile soil in "low-capacity undemocratic regimes," such as, for example, in Sierra Leone and Sri Lanka, whereas Peru, on the threshold of democracy, has proportionally less collective violence. Genuinely advanced democracies such as the United States seldom experience those kinds of collective violence. Tilly is unbending and persuasive in his view that undemocratic regimes directly foster collective violence, even though he tends toward a pessimistic view that any politics generates some form of violence.

But two questions come to mind concerning Tilly's model. At one end of his continuum, he carefully distinguishes crime and illegal activity from violence, which allows him to construct a useful typology of collective violence and politics. But he explicitly excludes terrorism from his consideration of collective violence on the grounds that it is loosely defined in contemporary discourse and generally only employed to stigmatize someone else's collective experience. Such a perspective, however, leads Tilly to ignore or minimize many interesting and important forms of violence taking shape in places such as Sri Lanka, especially suicide terrorism (much of it since the mid-1980s by women), which has created a landscape of terror that has left 60,000 dead at the hands of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Tilly also steers a wide berth around apocalyptic violence; it fits nowhere in his thesis. It is too messy, too connected with religion, and often a tool of groups with a contradictory relation to politics. But apocalyptic violence just happens to be of enormous significance in the world today. In the last analysis, what good is a model of collective violence that can beautifully explain the links between the Shining Path and Peruvian tyranny, or the LTTE and Sri Lankan politics of exclusion, but make no sense of Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda?