User:Mfekade1366/sandbox

Trends in Political Violence
http://www.pcr.uu.se/research/ucdp/datasets/ucdp_one-sided_violence_dataset/

Goals for Political Violence Page

 * 1) Bring in a social science perspective to explain political violence
 * 2) Find a way to organize the social science theories
 * 3) Link this page to other relevant pages
 * 4) Add case studies to types of political violence [show how theories of political violence explains the type of violence. ex. rational choice theory explaining the Holocaust]
 * 5) Fix Introduction (do this after, you finish working on the rest of the page)
 * 6) Keep these guidelines in mind: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Good_article_criteria
 * 7) Add critiques to theories and generally, critique the notion that you can link violence to political reasons

Theories of Political Violence: Why does Political Violence occur?
Summary of Plan: Summarize theories and also provide critiques to those theories.

Colonial Legacies
Irrelevant national borders, imported institutions, and a history of extraction
 * Mahmood Mamdani's Citizen and Subject

Rational Choice
Overview Of Theory: Actors engage in political violence have an outcome desired and try to achieve that outcome the most efficient way.

Readings:
 * James D. Fearon, “Rationalist Explanations for War,” International Organization 49(3) 1995, 379-414. (not 100% sure if this should fall into this section)
 * Cross-National Variation in Political Violence: A Rational Action Approach Edward N. Muller

Grievance vs. Incentives
Readings:
 * Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” Oxford Economics Papers 56, no. 4 (2004): 563-95.
 * Stathis N. Kalyvas and Matthew Adam Kocher, “How ‘Free’ Is Free Riding in Civil Wars? Violence, Insurgency, and the Collective Action Problem,” World Politics 59 (January 2007): 177-216.
 * Macartan Humphreys and Jeremy M. Weinstein, “Who Fights? The Determinants of Participation in Civil War,” American Journal of Political Science 52, no. 2 (April 2008): 436-55.

Inequality
inequalities, deprivation, and a sense of injustice cause people to turn to violence. Relative deprivation Theory.

Readings:
 * Income Inequality, Regime Repressiveness, and Political Violence Edward N. Muller


 * Inequality and political violence: A review of the literature by Gudrun Østby
 * Ted Robert Gurr, Why Men Rebel, Princeton University Press, 1970, ISBN 0-691-07528-X

Readings that are important, but I'm not sure where to put them

 * Kalyvas, S. N. (2006). The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
 * The Politics of Collective Violence by Charles Tilly
 * The Ontology of “Political Violence”: Action and Identity in Civil Wars by Stathis N. Kalyvas
 * Fearon and Laitin: Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War

Structuralism vs. Individualism
In Theories of Conflict: An Introduction, Jolle Demmers argues that you can organize conflicts into two groups: ontological and epistemological stances. Within the two groups, you can further divide the theories into explaining (positivist) and understanding (interpretative). In the book, Demmers presents a chart to visualize his argument. I reproduced the chart below:

Structuralism/Explaining:
"Social structures are systems (like clocks, planets, bodies, beehives) external and prior to actions and determining them fully."

Examples:
 * Primordialism

Structuralism/Understanding:
"Social structures are a sets of meaning rules ('games') telling people how 'to do' social life (language, religion, economy). Actors are role/rule followers."

Examples:
 * Ethno-symbolism
 * Culturalsm
 * Structure-based approaches (Political Economy)

Individualism/Explaining:
"Actors are self-contained units and the source of action (act upon the individual laws of utility maximization, natural preferences, psychological laws). "

Examples:
 * Rational Choice Theory
 * Social Identity Approaches
 * Human needs approach

Individualism/Understanding
"Actors are embedded in society but have agency, they can act, initiate change, they have room for reflexive self-direction."

Examples:
 * Elite Theory

Types of Political Violence
Plan: List the types of political violence. Explain the type of violence and provide case studies. Find a way to organize types into broad categories.

Terrorism

 * What's the difference between a terrorist and an insurgent?

Solutions (word choice?) to Political Violence
Alternative Title: How do you end political violence?
 * Peacekeeping


 * Peacemaking