Rethinking Violence: States and Non-State Actors in Conflict

8. A Composite-Actor Approach to Conflict Behavior

The author would like to thank the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Palestinian-American Research Center for their support for the research on which this chapter is based. Chapter 8 A Composite-Actor Approach to Conflict Behavior Wendy Pearlman What brings an insurgent, protest, or self-determination movement to use violence as opposed to other strategies? This question is an important starting point for research on civil and asymmetric conflicts, increasingly dominant forms of conflict since the latter half of the twentieth century. With the aim of crafting generalizable theories of the circumstances under which political violence is likely or intense, scholars and analysts often treat movements as if they were unitary. There is thus a propensity to refer to the Tamils, Chechens, Tibetans, and other groups as coherent entities, and to explain their behavior as the outcome of that entity’s pursuit of specific goals. The assumption that movements are unitary actors is attractive because it simplifies the complex empirical world into identifiable decisionmakers whose practices can be elegantly modeled. It invites scholars and commentators to equate the rational decision-making of a movement with that of a person, and thereby assert that the norm is for movements to act in ways that reasonably advance their objectives. This assumption, however , obscures dynamics internal to movements. This is a serious problem because some of the causes of civil violence stem from these dynamics; ignoring them can lead to mistaken explanations of conflict outcomes and misguided prescriptions for conflict resolution. Specifically, inattention to intra-movement processes can lead scholars and policymakers to exaggerate the degree to which movements carry out violence because they believe it to be strategically effective. It is difficult to account for suboptimal violence when one takes the agent of violence to be a coherent entity acting on the basis of coherent preferences. In this chapter, I craft an approach that aims to produce better explanations of suboptimal violence and other puzzling conflict outcomes. To this end, I contrast understandings derived from the assumption that nonstate movements can be treated as unitary actors with what I call a “composite-actor” approach. The composite-actor approach departs from 198 | rethinking violence theories that implicitly view social, political, and nationalist movements as single entities by explicitly bringing their amalgam and multifaceted character to the forefront of an analysis of their conflict behavior. Rather than directly asking why a movement chooses violent or non-violent methods, this approach asks precisely who within that movement does the choosing and how their choices influence those of others within their own community. My objective is to encourage investigation into the kinds of actors that make up movements and how their interactions affect the use of violence as opposed to other strategies. My analytical contention is that when we fail to take account of the interaction of those who constitute a movement, we are liable to misunderstand why and how violence takes place. The composite-actor approach entails disaggregating political collectives into categories of individuals with similar kinds of objectives and resources. In this chapter, I operationalize this approach by identifying three general clusters of actors who shape politics in many movements: elites, aspirants, and masses. Other clusters of actors might also be speci- fied, and future research can explore how different categorizations are relevant depending upon the political setting. I demonstrate this approach through analysis of the Palestinian national movement during the British Mandate (1920–1948), and specifically the Arab Rebellion (1936–1939). Some might argue that Palestinians’ particularly acute divisions render them unique among self-determination struggles, and that the Arab Rebellion is hence an unrepresentative case with which to challenge unitary actor–based theories. Yet empirical evidence of fragmentation in nonstate groups is more widespread than mainstream theories of violence suggest. Comparative research shows that ethnic groups typically contain heterogeneous factions.1 Recent works on insurgencies and civil wars similarly demonstrate the multiplicity of interests and identities within any given party to conflict.2 Yet, while these and other studies cast doubt on the unitary view of a nonstate group, they have yet to provide an alternative conceptualization of the group’s composite character. That is, they suggest that a movement is not a single actor, but do not necessarily tell us how to think about the multiple actors that it encompasses. In order to achieve the...