Peaceful Protest vs. Political Violence: Why Some American Social Movements Want to Watch the World Burn

Abstract

This project explains the conditions under which American social movements that begin their mobilization through peaceful, lawful acts of protest become politically violent. To do so, I propose and develop a new, unifying framework called the state legitimacy framework. The state legitimacy framework contends that protest strategy escalation from peaceful, lawful protests to civil disobedience occurs once a movement/ movement faction begins to lose faith in the state’s absolute lawmaking capacity. Furthermore, if and when a movement or movement faction loses faith in the state as a system of governance, it is highly likely to engage in a politically violent protest strategy. There are three factors that shape a movement’s perception of the state’s legitimacy or lack thereof: 1) types of rights claims embedded in the movement’s demands, 2) the movement’s perception of the state’s response to the movement’s demands and its activists, and 3) the movement’s religious and/or ideological commitments. The three cases examined here, the Abolitionist Movement, the Prohibitionist Movement, and the Civil Rights Movement, demonstrate how the state legitimacy framework is both generalizable across American social movements and critical in developing movement-specific causal theories of protest strategy escalation.