Organizational and Institutional Approaches: Social Movement Studies Perspectives on Political Violence

Political violence by non-state actors, whether in the form of clandestine groups, riots, violent insurgencies, or civil wars, often emerges in the context of social movements, can shift back to non-violent methods of contentious collective action, and in many cases does not mark a new and separate phase of contention but proceeds in parallel with street protests, marches, boycotts, and strikes. At the same time, different forms of political violence are interlinked and are part of a continuum of repertoires of action—rather than representing discrete and mutually exclusive types—and often occur successively or simultaneously during processes of conflict escalation (when violence increases in scale, type, and scope), or de-escalation (when violence overall decreases).