Class 6: Politically Violent Activity

Leadership

Dr. Michael C. Zeller

Opening notes

Open Stickerfrom Open Stickers

Presentation groups

Presentations line-up
Date Presenters Method
4 Dec: Shahadaan, Kristine, Daichi ethnography
11 Dec: Bérénice, Zorka, Victoria, Katharina TBD
18 Dec: Shoam, Aidan, Tara, Sebastian QCA

Leadership

  • theories of leadership
    • Weber
    • Nepstad and Bob (2006)
    • Earl (2007)
  • an example from far-right movements
Danny Zuko Grease GIFfrom Danny Zuko GIFs

Theories of leadership

  • Max Weber (1922): three ideal types: legal, traditional, charismatic
    • shifting denotation of ‘charisma’ (away from divinity)
      • McDonnell (2016): ‘unique qualities, the unconditional acceptance of authority, and strong emotional attachment to leadership.’
    • examples from this framework?

Theories of leadership

  • Max Weber (1922): three ideal types: legal, traditional, charismatic
    • shifting denotation of ‘charisma’ (away from divinity)
      • McDonnell (2016): ‘unique qualities, the unconditional acceptance of authority, and strong emotional attachment to leadership.’
    • examples from this framework?
  • Nepstad and Bob (2006): ‘leadership capital’ (from Bourdieu, e.g., 1986)
    • social (building up trust and interpersonal networks),
    • cultural (applying relevant knowledge and skills), and
    • symbolic (amassing prestige, honor, and social recognition) components
    • leaders in politically violent groups that have such ‘capital’?

Theories of leadership

  • Earl (2007): ‘leading tasks’ (in movements):
    1. articulating vision and ideology,
    2. engaging the political environment,
    3. framing the movement and its issues,
    4. managing relations with non-movement actors,
    5. making strategic and tactical decisions,
    6. organizing specific actions,
    7. managing the internal life of the movement,
    8. innovating and entrepreneurial activity, and
    9. providing social capital

Far-right movement leadership (Zeller and Virchow 2024)

  • RQs: (1) How can we characterise recent and contemporary far-right movement leadership? (2) Has leadership changed significantly with the advent of social media?
  • Theory: modern far-right leadership studies (Virchow 2013; Busher, Harris, and Macklin 2018; Cleland 2020; Macklin 2020)
  • Methods: comparative case study in adjacent eras of FR activism
    • quantitative text analysis on web-scraped (rvest) texts
    • follow-up qualitative analysis: themes and campaign examples
Author Source Years Total.texts Total.words
Worch Rundbriefe 2005–2012 260 209041
Sellner Sezession 2015–2022 100 354255
Sellner Compact 2016–2021 54 34926

FR leadership - Worch topics

FR leadership - Sellner topics

FR leadership tasks

FR leadership tasks by year

FR leadership - conclusions

  • Shared belief in street politics

    • social media are new tools—but both Worch and Sellner believe in change through mobilisation
    • mirroring left-wing tactics (imitation): IB as ‘right-wing clone’ of leftist movement organisations (at least according to Sellner); Worch’s autonome Nationalisten

  • But Sellner is broader in his scope of activism, transnational if not global outlook

  • Sellner more ideological: articulating vision and framing the movmement, `metapolitik’ (e.g., ‘Defend Europa’ cruise)

  • Worch more practical: strategy and tactics and executing actions, emphasis on demonstrations and courts—punishing cities (e.g., Leipzig)

FYI: intro lecture on QTA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvqur70ZmyM

Poll: leadership

A QR code for the survey.

Take the survey at https://forms.gle/QxENrdB3qNpT1jSa8

  • militants more shaped by leaders than ‘ideologies’?
  • charismatic leaders more likely to lead to violence?
  • more horizontally organised groups less likely to be violent?
  • leaders responsible/liable for violence of their followers?
  • incitement through rhetoric similar to explicit orders?
  • leaders’ ability to control ongoing violence overstated?

Militant movements are more shaped by their leaders than by their ideologies.

Poll results

Charismatic leadership more likely to lead to political violence

Groups that reject hierarchical leadership are less likely to become violent

Poll results

Leaders should be held criminally responsible for the violent acts committed by their followers

Leaders who rhetorically incite violence should be prosecuted like those who give orders

Poll results

Once violence has begun, a leader’s ability to control it is often overstated.

Research closer look

  • Choi (2022) - Leader Nationalism, Ethnic Identity, and Terrorist Violence
    • key concept - terrorism
    • research design
    • results and findings
  • Metodieva (2021) - The Radical Milieu and Radical Influencers of Bosnian Foreign Fighters
    • concepts, research design
    • results and findings
Closer Look GIFfrom Closer GIFs

Key concept (Choi 2022)

Terrorism - ‘the threatened or actual use of illegal force, directed against civilian targets, by nonstate actors, in order to attain a political goal, through fear, coercion or intimidation’ (LaFree and Ackerman 2009, 348).

Research design (Choi 2022, 1153)

Ooof! – what do we take from this?

Since the dependent variable is the count of terrorist incidents carried out by related ethnic groups per country-year, I consider a Poisson regression model as the estimation technique. But I find the Pearson goodness-of-fit \(x^2\) test to be statistically significant (\(x^2\) = 1,842,103, p< 0.001). This suggests that a Poisson regression estimation fails to fit the data correctly. I instead use multilevel mixed-effects negative binomial regression as an alternative estimation method. Because negative binomial regression adds a dispersion parameter to model the unobserved heterogeneity among observations, it can control for the overdispersion found in a Poisson regression model (Hilbe 2007). In addition, given the clustered nature of the data, with ethnic groups nested within year nested within country, I employ a multilevel mixed-effects negative binomial regression in which the ethnic groups comprise the first level, the years comprise the second level, and the countries comprise the third. In doing so, I assume that observations in the same cluster are correlated because they share common-level random effects.

Research design (Choi 2022, 1153)

Since the dependent variable is the count [initial technique selection criterion] of terrorist incidents carried out by related ethnic groups per country-year, I consider a Poisson regression model as the estimation technique. But I find the Pearson goodness-of-fit \(x^2\) test to be statistically significant (\(x^2\) = 1,842,103, p< 0.001) [technique diagnostic tool]. This suggests that a Poisson regression estimation fails to fit the data correctly [technique reselection]. I instead use multilevel mixed-effects negative binomial regression as an alternative estimation method. Because negative binomial regression adds a dispersion parameter to model the unobserved heterogeneity among observations, it can control for the overdispersion found in a Poisson regression model [technical adjustment] (Hilbe 2007). In addition, given the clustered nature of the data, with ethnic groups nested within year nested within country, I employ a multilevel mixed-effects negative binomial regression in which the ethnic groups comprise the first level, the years comprise the second level, and the countries comprise the third. In doing so, I assume that observations in the same cluster are correlated because they share common-level random effects.

Research design (Choi 2022, 1153)

  • sample of 766 ethnic groups from 163 countries during the period from 1970 to 2009
  • sample data structured by ethnic group and year-country
    • unit of analysis is group-year-country
  • terrorist attacks executed by ethnic groups in response to nationalist leaders
    • DV: Ethnic Terrorism - the total number of terrorist attacks carried out by related ethnic groups per year
  • multilevel mixed-effects negative binomial regression analysis
    • multilevel: hierarchic data structure
    • mixed-effects: typically, fixed and random effects
      • fixed: estimation of regression coefficients of the covariates
      • random: used to estimate the effect of individual-specific characteristics that are typically unmeasurable
    • negative binomial regression: usually for over-dispersed count outcome variables

Reading a regression table

Remember: regression is a tool for understanding a phenomenon as a linear function (generally) → (y = mx + b)

  1. Numbers not in parentheses next to a variable: regression coefficient: expected change in DV for a one-unit increase in IV. NB: ositive or negative relationship?

  2. Numbers inside parentheses next to a variable: standard error: estimate of the standard deviation of the coefficient

  3. Asterisks/‘stars’: statistical significance: probability of results as extreme as observed result, under the assumption that the null hypothesis is correct. Smaller p-value means such an observation would be less likely under null hypothesis; hence, significance. Statistical significance suggests more precise estimates—NOT necessarily that one IV is more important than another.

Regression results (Choi 2022, 1153)

Plotting average marginal effects (AME) (Choi 2022, 1153)

AME: average change in the predicted counts when predictor increases by one unit. E.g., a one-unit increase in nationalism is predicted to prompt 1.5 terrorist attacks, all else equal.

Sri Lanka: Sinhalese-LTTE case (Choi 2022, 1153)

  • 1948: Dudley Senanayake approves Ceylon Citizenship Act, denies citizenship to ‘migrant workers’ (incl. Tamils)
  • 1956: Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike, Sinhalese nationalist and elevation of Buddhist myths and rituals
    • Sinhala Only Act, recognizing Sinhala as only official language of government
    • discrimination against, torture, murder of Tamils
  • LTTE forms in 1976, major mobilisation in 1983
    • terrorist attacks, including assassinations, e.g., President Ranasinghe Premadasa in 1993.
    • case is consistent with large-N finding: leader nationalism precipitates ethnic terrorism

Findings (Choi 2022, 1153)

  • hardline nationalist leaders \(\rightarrow\) more likely to provoke violence from disfavoured ethnic groups
  • Political environment matters (remember concept from last class: opportunity structure). Democracy allows “disfavored ethnic groups to exploit the opportunities of political institutions such as freedom of association and freedom of the press to garner support for terrorist activity.” (cf. Jenne 2007)

Concepts (Metodieva 2021)

  • radical milieu - conducive environments for radicalisation, recruitment, and eventual engagement in violent extremism (Vidra and Zeller 2022) (a family resemblance concept, many different types and manifestations)

  • parajamaats - illegal praying congregations (‘parallel mosque’)

  • power centres - hotspots of radical activism, centred on influencers, who pushed followers to become foreign fighters

  • radical influencers - prominent, often charismatic individuals capable of attracting followers

    • various functions: e.g., ruqya (spiritual healing)
    • parallels to cases you know of?

  • foreign fighters - indiviuals who travel to a conflict zone from another territory (prima facie evidence of radicalism \(\rightarrow\) engagement in political violence; a ‘security failure’ by authority of origin state?)

Structures around radical influencers (Metodieva 2021)

Balkans particularly important for IS (Metodieva 2021)

three reasons:

  1. linked to large diaspora communities in western Europe
  2. societies with historical ties to Islam
  3. region is marked by recent wars, and thus also by frozen but unresolved political and ethnic disputes

Research design (Metodieva 2021)

  • aim: “in what way leadership networks and authority affect how recruitment is done at the local level”; two claims
    1. wartime fuelled the growth of the Salafist movement in BiH (creation and maintenance of radical milieu–context! structure!)
    2. radical influencers who emerged had an ideological and organizational impact on the foreign fighter recruitment (meso –> micro level recruitment processes—agency!)
  • case-based research: 11 radical influencers
    • purposive selection: advocated violence (17 nonviolent cases)
      • selecting on the DV (a no-no in inferential statistics—often desirable in case-based research where explaining outcomes [not ‘explaining variation’] is the objective)

Data

  • biographical data for 28 Salafi influencers
    • selected based on their (prominent) radical activism (videos, sermons, organising events)
    • 8 categorical variables: (1) influencer’s place of origin, (2) role in the radical milieu, (3) promotion/non-promotion of violence, (4) online and offline activism, (5) background in religious studies, (6) participation in the Bosnian War, (7) power center of influence, and (8) current status
  • issues here? omissions?

Data

  • biographical data for 28 Salafi influencers
    • selected based on their (prominent) radical activism (videos, sermons, organising events)
    • 8 categorical variables: (1) influencer’s place of origin, (2) role in the radical milieu, (3) promotion/non-promotion of violence, (4) online and offline activism, (5) background in religious studies, (6) participation in the Bosnian War, (7) power center of influence, and (8) current status
  • issues here? omissions?
    • good data collection practices (collect more than needed)
    • perhaps not ideal conceptualisation/measurement procedure
      1. background concept \(\rightarrow\) 2. systematised concept \(\rightarrow\) 3. indicators \(\rightarrow\) 4. scoring cases (Adcock and Collier 2001)

Power centres of fighter recruitment (Metodieva 2021)

Profiles of key influencers (Metodieva 2021, 13)

Conclusion (Metodieva 2021, 17)

Radical influencers may have different pathways and histories across cases of foreign fighter recruitment. They may vary in the resources they rely on. In the postwar context of BiH, radical influencers shape the recruitment of foreign fighters by managing preexisting “institutions” of the radical milieu. Influencers may fill a variety of power gaps and thus be able to access and target their followers. The reference to influencers instead of “recruiters” or “radical imams”, points to the finding that radical authority figures may have both ideological and (sometimes) operational functions in recruitment. Although they may lack strategic links to the centralized leadership of a terror organization, they have the power to influence the “bottom,” where prospective foreign fighters are situated.

Any questions, concerns, feedback for this class?

Anonymous feedback here: https://forms.gle/NfF1pCfYMbkAT3WP6

Alternatively, please send me an email: m.zeller@lmu.de

References

Jenne, E. K. (2007). Ethnic bargaining: The paradox of minority empowerment. Cornell University Press.

McDonnell, D. (2016.) “Populist Leaders and Coterie Charisma.” Political Studies 64(3): 719-733.

Weber, M. (1922). Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie. Tübingen: Mohr

Adcock, Robert, and David Collier. 2001. “Measurement Validity: A Shared Standard for Qualitative and Quantitative Research.” American Political Science Review 95 (3): 529–46. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055401003100.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “The Forms of Capital.” In Handbook of Theory and Research in Sociology of Education, edited by John G Richardson, 241–58. New York: Greenwald Press.
Busher, Joel, Gareth Harris, and Graham Macklin. 2018. “Chicken Suits and Other Aspects of Situated Credibility Contests: Explaining Local Trajectories of Anti-Minority Activism.” Social Movement Studies 18 (2): 193–214. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2018.1530978.
Choi, Seung-Whan. 2022. “Leader Nationalism, Ethnic Identity, and Terrorist Violence.” British Journal of Political Science 52 (3): 1151–67. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123421000144.
Cleland, Jamie. 2020. “Charismatic Leadership in a Far-Right Movement: An Analysis of an English Defence League Message Board Following the Resignation of Tommy Robinson.” Social Identities 26 (1): 48–60.
Earl, Jennifer. 2007. “Leaderless Movement The Case of Strategic Voting.” American Behavioral Scientist 50 (10): 1327–49.
Macklin, Graham. 2020. Failed Führers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right. Abingdon: Routledge.
Metodieva, Asya. 2021. “The Radical Milieu and Radical Influencers of Bosnian Foreign Fighters.” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 0 (0): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2020.1868097.
Nepstad, Sharon Erickson, and Clifford Bob. 2006. “When Do Leaders Matter? Hypotheses on Leadership Dynamics in Social Movements.” Mobilization 11 (1): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.17813/maiq.11.1.013313600164m727.
Vidra, Zsuzsanna, and Michael C Zeller. 2022. “Preventing Violent Extremism: A Delicate Balance.” Firenze: European University Institute: Robert Schuman Centre.
Virchow, Fabian. 2013. “Führer Und Schlüsselfiguren in Extrem Rechten Bewegungen.” Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen 26 (4): 52–58.
Zeller, Michael C, and Fabian Virchow. 2024. “Far-Right Leadership in Comparison: Shifts and Continuities in German-speaking Movements.” Social Movement Studies 0 (0): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2024.2430974.