political killings essay

The Causes and Impact of Political Assassinations

January 2015, volume 8, issue 1.

Arie Perliger

Categories:

• Terror Behavior
• Weapons & Tactics
• Individual Terrorist Actors

Political assassinations have been part of social reality since the emergence of communal social frameworks, as the leaders of tribes, villages, and other types of communities constantly needed to defend their privileged status. In the ancient world assassination featured prominently in the rise and fall of some of the greatest empires.

While many people are familiar with the military victories of Alexander the Great, few today recall that his ascendance to power was facilitated by the assassination of his father (an innovative and talented politician in his own right), who was struck down by a bodyguard as he was entering a theater to attend his daughter’s marriage celebrations. In a somewhat more famous incident, Gaius Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BCE by Roman senators who increasingly feared that Caesar would revoke their privileges.

In modern times, political assassinations continue to play an important role in political and social processes and, in some cases, have a dramatic effect. For example, many argue that the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin in 1995 was a major reason for the collapse of the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians.[1] It is also difficult to deny the impact of the assassinations of figures such as Martin Luther King or Benazir Bhutto on the success of their political movements/parties following their deaths.

Thus, it is not surprising that Appleton argues, “The impact of assassinations on America and the World is incalculable,”[2] and that Americans cite the assassination of John F. Kennedy as the crime that has had the greatest impact on American society in the last 100 years.[3] Nonetheless, despite the apparently significant influence of political assassinations on political and social realities, this particular manifestation of political action is understudied and, as a result, poorly understood.

This article is a summary of a broader study that will be published later by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) and aims to improve our understanding of the causes and implications of political assassinations. It makes use of an original and comprehensive worldwide data set of political assassinations between 1945 and 2013. The findings illustrate the trends that characterize the phenomenon and challenge some of the existing conventions about political assassinations and their impact.

Data and Rationale In order to investigate the causes and implications of political assassinations, the CTC constructed a data set that includes political assassinations worldwide from 1946 to early 2013. After defining political assassinations as “an action that directly or indirectly leads to the death of an intentionally targeted individual who is active in the political sphere, in order to promote or prevent specific policies, values, practices or norms pertaining to the collective,” the CTC consulted a variety of resources, including relevant academic books and articles, media sources (especially LexisNexis and The New York Times archive), and online resources, to identify 758 attacks by 920 perpetrators that resulted in the death of 954 individuals. (Some attacks led to the death of multiple political leaders; however, the death of “bystanders” is not included in this number.)

This study is guided by the rationale that the logic of political assassinations is different from that of other manifestations of political violence. Hence, it is important to understand the unique factors that may encourage or discourage violent groups or individuals from engaging in political assassinations. Moreover, it seems reasonable to assume that these factors vary among different types of assassinations because in most cases the characteristics of the targeted individual shape the nature and objectives of the assassination. Indeed, this study establishes that different processes trigger different types of assassinations and that different types of assassinations generate distinct effects on the political and social arenas.

General Observations Although the first two decades after World War II were characterized by a limited number of political assassinations, the number of such attacks has risen dramatically since the early 1970s. This is reflective of the emergence of a new wave of terrorist groups, radical and universal ideologies operating on a global scale, and a growing willingness by oppressive regimes to use assassinations as a tool in their treatment of political opposition. Indeed, while most assassinations of government officials were perpetrated by sub-state violent groups, most assassinations of opposition leaders were initiated by ruling political elites or their proxies. This important observation supports the notion that a growing number of terrorist groups see assassinations as a legitimate and effective tool, and that one of the major obstacles for democratization is the vulnerability of political opposition.

Additionally, our data indicates that assassinations are not limited to specific regions or specific time frames. In fact, the opposite is true. Both regions that are considered politically stable and economically prosperous, such as Western Europe, as well as regions that are considered politically unstable, more prone to political violence, and economically weak, such as sub-Saharan Africa, have experienced similar levels of political assassinations.

In some regions, however, political assassinations have become dominant only in the last couple of decades. In South Asia, for example, 76 percent of the assassinations have been perpetrated since the mid-1980s, possibly a consequence of the growing instability in the region during and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. And more than 85 percent of assassinations in Eastern Europe were perpetrated after 1995 with the start of the transition to democracy in most Eastern European countries, a process that in many cases was accompanied by growing ethnic tensions and political instability. In terms of targets, the data indicates that most assassinations target heads of state (17 percent), opposition leaders (who are not part of the executive or legislative branch) (18 percent), and members of parliament (21 percent). In rarer instances the targets are ministers (14 percent), diplomats (10 percent), local politicians such as governors or mayors (5 percent), and vice head of states (3 percent).

Causes of Assassinations The research findings indicate that, in general, political assassinations are more probable in countries that suffer from a combination of restrictions on political competition and strong polarization and fragmentation.

More specifically, states that lack consensual political ethos and homogeneous populations (in terms of the national and ethnic landscape) and include politically deprived groups will face a decline in the legitimacy of the political leadership and the political system and an increase in the likelihood of direct attacks against political leaders. One of the most glaring examples of such a dynamic may be found in Sri Lanka, where the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, a group that represents the deprived Tamil minority, organized a bloody campaign of political assassinations against the political leadership of the state and the Sinhalese majority from the early 1980s until approximately 2009. And since these issues tend to be present mainly in times of electoral processes or of actual violent strife, one should not be surprised that our findings indicate that election periods or periods characterized by a general increase in domestic violence are moments when a country is more susceptible to political assassinations.

Another interesting finding is that the territorial fragmentation of a country is correlated with an increase in the number of assassinations. When a government loses control over some parts of a country to opposition groups, both sides are more willing to use assassinations to enhance their influence and to consolidate their status as the sole legitimate rulers of the polity.

When looking specifically at the facilitators of assassinations of heads of state, we can identify some unique trends. To begin with, the polities most susceptible to assassinations against the head of state are authoritarian polities that lack clear succession rules and in which the leader enjoys significant political power. This is true even more so in polities that also include oppressed minorities and high levels of political polarization. Therefore, non-democratic political environments that feature leaders who are able to garner significant power and in which the state lacks efficient mechanisms for leadership change following an assassination, provide more prospects for success in advancing political changes via political assassination. This stands in contrast to democratic systems, in which it is clear that the elimination of the head of state will have only a limited, long-term impact on the socio-political order.

Although heads of state represent what could be considered the crown jewel of political assassinations, lower-ranking political figures also face this threat. In this study, we specifically examined attacks against legislators and vice heads of state. Attacks against the latter are fairly rare and are usually intended to promote highly specific policy changes (related to areas under the responsibility of the vice head of state) or to prevent the vice head of state from inheriting the head of state position. Legislators, on the other hand, are most often victims of civil wars or similar violent domestic clashes in developing countries; in democracies they are almost never targeted.

To illustrate, no less than 34 Iranian legislators were assassinated in 1981, when the new revolutionary regime was consolidating its control over the country. Hence, assassinations of legislators are almost always a result of national-level conflicts rather than local ones, contrary to what some may suspect. Lastly, legislators’ assassinations are rarely perpetrated to promote specific policies or to gain access to the political process. In other words, the assassination of legislators should be considered more as acts of protest against an existing political order than political actions that are intended to promote specific political goals.

One of the unique features of this study, among others, is its focus on assassinations of political figures who are not part of governing platforms. Unlike other types of assassinations, the state is typically a major actor in the assassination in these cases. Consequently, it should not surprise us that opposition leaders are more likely to be targeted in authoritarian systems or in weak democracies, as the political environment in these types of regimes provides a space for the emergence of an opposition while also providing the ruling elites tools and legitimacy for oppressive measures against a “successful” opposition (e.g. Pakistan as well as many Latin American countries). It is also clear that opposition leaders are more vulnerable during violent domestic conflicts, when the number of opportunities, and maybe also the legitimacy, to act against them are on the rise.

Impact of Political Assassinations The study provides several important insights regarding the impact of political assassinations. In general, political assassinations seem to intensify prospects of a state’s fragmentation and undermine its democratic nature. The latter is usually manifested in a decline in political participation and a disproportionate increase in the strength of the executive branch.

When we looked specifically at different types of assassinations, we were able to find significant variations among them. For example, assassinations of heads of state tend to generate a decline in the democratic nature of a polity and an increase in domestic violence and instability as well as economic prosperity. The latter may sound counterintuitive but could reflect the rise of a more open economic system after the elimination of authoritarian ruler. The assassination of opposition leaders has a limited impact on the nature of a political system, but has the potential to lead to an increase in overall unrest and domestic violence. And assassinations of legislators are often followed by public unrest (illustrated by growing anti-government demonstrations) and by a decline in the legitimacy of the government.

Policy Implications This study illustrates that most polities experienced political assassinations at some point in their history. Thus, our ability to improve our understanding of political processes must also include a deeper understanding of the causes and consequences of political assassinations. But how can the findings presented in this study help us to understand the potential role of policymakers in the occurrence or prevention of political assassinations?

To begin with, it is evident that governments can promote political and social conditions that may decrease the prospects of political assassinations. For example, while governments in polarized societies sometimes have the tendency to restrict political participation in order to prevent further escalation in intrastate communal relations, our findings indicate that this action will actually increase the probability of political assassinations.

Moreover, in order for electoral processes to become a viable tool for promoting a productive and peaceful political environment, it is clear that they are more effective after ensuring the most intense political grievances have been addressed. Otherwise, electoral competition has the potential to instigate further violence, including the assassinations of political figures. The shaping of stable and regulated succession mechanisms is also highly important, especially in countries that are struggling to construct stable democratic institutions. Interestingly, it seems that while theories of democratization have for a long time prescribed the creation of institutions as a first step to ensure wide representation, followed by stable routines and protocols, the opposite order may be more effective for the promotion of stability and eventually a liberal-democratic environment.

The findings also indicate that more attention needs to be given to the safety of the political leaders during instances of violent domestic clashes or transitions to democracy. Opposition leaders are most vulnerable in the early stages of democratization, so the effort to facilitate a democratic environment must also include the creation of mechanisms to ensure the safety of opposition leaders. This in turn will enhance the legitimacy of political participation, reduce polarization, and enhance political stability.

Moreover, although civilian victims naturally attract most of the public attention during a civil war, this study highlights the need to evaluate how harm to political figures may be prevented, as this has significant potential to lead to further escalation of a conflict, especially when the assassinated figures are heads of state or opposition leaders.

Lastly, the findings also provide several practical insights for law enforcement. More than half of the assassins (51.3 percent) had been involved in criminal activities prior to the assassination. This may indicate that a group usually prefers one of its veteran members to perform an assassination, probably because of the high stakes involved in these kinds of operations and the relatively high level of operational knowledge necessary to conduct them.

In one extreme example, the leader of the Bangladeshi branch of Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HuJI), Mufti Abdul Hannan, was revealed to have participated actively in the attempted assassination of Sheikh Hasina, the leader of an opposition party in Bangladesh and the former Bangladesh prime minister, in August 2004. Also, because of the particular risks involved in these kinds of operations, groups may prefer to expose members who are already known to law enforcement agencies to conduct an assassination rather than exposing members who are still unknown to law enforcement bodies. (However, this may be problematic since the veteran members are often at higher risk of being under surveillance).

Conclusion The dearth of research on political assassination represents a crucial oversight, especially considering the frequency of the phenomenon and its implications. Our study highlights the major theoretical and policy implications of assassinations and identifies some promising directions for further research, with the hope that this unique type of political violence will be better understood in the future.

Dr. Arie Perliger is the Class of 1977 Director of Terrorism Studies at the Combating Terrorism Center and Associate Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the U.S. Military Academy, West Point.

The views expressed here are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.

[1] President Bill Clinton, the main sponsor of the Oslo peace process, speculated that if Rabin had not been assassinated, peace would have been achieved in three years. See Atilla Shumfalbi, “Bill Clinton: If Rabin Would Have Not Been Assassinated There Would Be Peace Today,” YNET News, September 14, 2009: www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3805013,00.html [Hebrew] [2] Sheldon Appleton, “Trends: Assassinations,” Public Opinion Quarterly 64:4 (Winter 2000): pp. 495–522. [3] Zaryab Iqbal and Christopher Zorn, “The Political Consequences of Assassination,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 52:3 (June 2008): pp. 385–400.

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The Rise of Political Violence in the United States

• Rachel Kleinfeld

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Recent alterations to violent groups in the United States and to the composition of the two main political parties have created a latent force for violence that can be 1) triggered by a variety of social events that touch on a number of interrelated identities; or 2) purposefully ignited for partisan political purposes. This essay describes the history of such forces in the U.S., shares the risk factors for election violence globally and how they are trending in the U.S., and concludes with some potential paths to mitigate the problem.

O ne week after the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Eric Coomer, an executive at Dominion Voting Systems, was forced into hiding. Angry supporters of then-president Donald Trump, believing false accusations that Dominion had switched votes in favor of Joe Biden, published Coomer’s home address and phone number and put a million-dollar bounty on his head. Coomer was one of many people in the crosshairs. An unprecedented number of elections administrators received threats in 2020—so much so that a third of poll workers surveyed by the Brennan Center for Justice in April 2021 said that they felt unsafe and 79 percent wanted government-provided security. In July, the Department of Justice set up a special task force specifically to combat threats against election administrators. 1

From death threats against previously anonymous bureaucrats and public-health officials to a plot to kidnap Michigan’s governor and the 6 January 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, acts of political violence in the United States have skyrocketed in the last five years. 2  The nature of political violence has also changed. The media’s focus on groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and Boogaloo Bois has obscured a deeper trend: the “ungrouping” of political violence as people self-radicalize via online engagement. According to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), which maintains the Global Terrorism Database, most political violence in the United States is committed by people who do not belong to any formal organization.

About the Author

Rachel Kleinfeld is senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She was the founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project and serves on the National Task Force on Election Crises.

View all work by Rachel Kleinfeld

Instead, ideas that were once confined to fringe groups now appear in the mainstream media. White-supremacist ideas, militia fashion, and conspiracy theories spread via gaming websites, YouTube channels, and blogs, while a slippery language of memes, slang, and jokes blurs the line between posturing and provoking violence, normalizing radical ideologies and activities.

These shifts have created a   new reality: millions   of Americans willing to undertake, support, or excuse political violence, defined here (following the violence-prevention organization Over Zero) as physical harm or intimidation that affects who benefits from or can participate fully in political, economic, or sociocultural life. Violence may be catalyzed by predictable social events such as Black Lives Matter protests or mask mandates that trigger a sense of threat to a common shared identity. Violence can also be intentionally wielded as a partisan tool to affect elections and democracy itself. This organizational pattern makes stopping political violence more difficult, and also more crucial, than ever before.

Political Violence in the United States Historically

Political violence has a long history in the United States. Since the late 1960s, it was carried out by   intensely ideological groups that pulled adherents out of the mainstream into clandestine cells, such as the anti-imperialist Weather Underground Organization or the anti-abortion Operation Rescue. In the late 1960s and 1970s, these violent fringes were mostly on the far left. They committed extensive violence, largely against property (with notable exceptions), in the name of social, environmental, and animal-rights causes. Starting in the late 1970s, political violence shifted rightward with the rise of white supremacist, anti-abortion, and militia groups. The number of violent events declined, but targets shifted from property to people—minorities, abortion providers, and federal agents.

What is occurring today does not resemble this recent past. Although incidents from the left are on the rise, political violence still comes overwhelmingly from the right, whether one looks at the Global Terrorism Database, FBI statistics, or other government or independent counts. 3  Yet people committing far-right violence—particularly planned violence rather than spontaneous hate crimes—are older and more established than typical terrorists and violent criminals. They often hold jobs, are married, and have children. Those who attend church or belong to community groups are  more  likely to hold violent, conspiratorial beliefs. 4  These are not isolated “lone wolves”; they are part of a broad community that echoes their ideas.

Two subgroups appear most prone to violence. The January 2021 American Perspectives Survey found that white Christian evangelical Republicans were outsized supporters of both political violence and the Q-Anon conspiracy, which claims that Democratic politicians and Hollywood elites are pedophiles who (aided by mask mandates that hinder identification) traffic children and harvest their blood; separate polls by evangelical political scientists found that in October 2020 approximately 47 percent of white evangelical Christians believed in the tenets of Q-Anon, as did 59 percent of Republicans. 5  Many evangelical pastors are working to turn their flocks away from this heresy. The details appear outlandish, but stripped to its core, the broad appeal becomes clearer: Democrats and cultural elites are often portrayed as Satanic forces arrayed against Christianity and seeking to harm Christian children.

The other subgroup prone to violence comprises those who feel threatened by either women or minorities. The polling on them is not clear. Separate surveys conducted by the American Enterprise Institute and academics in 2020 and 2021 found a majority of Republicans agreeing that “the traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast” that they “may have to use force to save it.” Respondents who believed that whites faced greater discrimination than minorities were more likely to agree. 6  Scholars Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason found that white Republicans with higher levels of minority resentment were more likely to see Democrats as evil or subhuman (beliefs thought to reduce inhibitions to violence). However, despite these feelings, the racially resentful did not stand out for endorsing violence against Democrats. Instead, the people most likely to support political violence were both Democrats and Republicans who espoused hostility toward women. 7  A sense of racial threat may be priming more conservatives to express greater resentment in ways that normalize violence and create a more permissive atmosphere, while men in both parties who feel particularly aggrieved toward women may be most willing to act on those feelings.

The bedrock idea uniting right-wing communities who condone violence is that white Christian men in the United States are under cultural and demographic threat and require defending—and that it is the Republican Party and Donald Trump, in particular, who will safeguard their way of life. 8  This pattern is similar to that of political violence in the nineteenth-century United States, where partisan identity was conflated with race, ethnicity, religion, and immigration status; many U.S.-born citizens felt they were losing cultural power and status to other social groups; and the violence was committed not by a few deviant outliers, but by many otherwise ordinary citizens engaged in normal civic life.

Changing social dynamics were the obvious spur for this violence, but it often yielded political outcomes. The ambiguity incentivized and enabled politicians to play with fire, deliberately provoking violence while claiming plausible deniability. In the 1840s and 1850s, from Maine and Maryland to Kentucky and Louisiana, the Know-Nothing party incited white Protestants to riot against mostly Catholic Irish and Italian immigrants (seen as both nonwhite and Democratic Party voters). When the Know-Nothings collapsed in 1855 in the North and 1860 in the South, anti-Catholic violence suddenly plummeted, despite continued bigotry. In the South, white supremacist violence was blamed on racism, but the timing was linked to elections. After the Supreme Court ruled in 1883 that the federal government lacked jurisdiction over racist terror, overturning the 1875 Civil Rights Act, violence became an open campaign strategy for the Democratic Party in multiple states. Lynchings were used in a similar manner. While proximate causes were social and economic, their time and place were primed by politics: Lynchings increased prior to elections in competitive counties. 9  Democratic Party politicians used racial rhetoric to amplify anger, then allowed violence to occur, to convince poor whites that they shared more in common with wealthy whites than with poor blacks, preventing the Populist and Progressive Parties from uniting poor whites and blacks into a single voting base. As Jim Crow laws enshrined Democratic one-party control, lynchings were not needed by politicians. Their numbers fell swiftly; they were no longer linked to elections. 10

Risk Factors for Election Violence

Globally, four factors elevate the risk of election-related violence, whether carried out directly by a political party through state security or armed party youth wings, outsourced to militias and gangs, or perpetrated by ordinary citizens: 1) a highly competitive election that could shift the balance of power; 2) partisan division based on identity; 3) electoral rules that enable winning by exploiting identity cleavages; and 4) weak institutional constraints on violence, particularly security-sector bias toward one group, leading perpetrators to believe they will not be held accountable for violence. 11

The rise of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) illustrates this dynamic. In 2002, a train fire killed Hindu pilgrims returning to Gujarat, India, from a contested site   in Ayodhya. An anti-Muslim pogrom erupted. India’s current prime minister, the BJP’s Narendra Modi, was then chief minister of Gujarat. During three days of violence directed almost entirely against Muslims, he allowed the police to stand by and afterward refused to prosecute the rioters. The party won state legislative elections later that year by exploiting Hindu-Muslim tensions to pry Hindu voters from the Congress Party. The party has since stoked ethnic riots to win in contested areas across the country, and Modi reprised the strategy as prime minister. 12

In India’s winner-take-all electoral system, mob violence can potentially swing elections. Though fueled by social grievance, mob violence is susceptible to political manipulation. This is the form of electoral violence most like what the United States is experiencing, and it is particularly dangerous. Social movements have goals of their own. Though they may also serve partisan purposes, they can move in unintended directions and are hard to control.

Today, the risk factors for electoral violence are elevated in the United States, putting greater pressure on institutional constraints.

Highly competitive elections that could shift the balance of power:  Heightened political competition is strongly associated with electoral violence. Only when outcomes are uncertain but close is there a reason to resort to violence. For much of U.S. history, one party held legislative power for decades. Yet since 1980, a shift in control of at least one house of Congress was possible—and since 2010, elections have seen a level of competition not seen since Reconstruction (1865–77). 13

Partisan division based on identity:  Up to the 1990s, many Americans belonged to multiple identity groups—for example, a union member might have been a conservative, religious, Southern man who nevertheless voted Democratic. Today, Americans have sorted themselves into two broad identity groups: Democrats tend to live in cities, are more likely to be minorities, women, and religiously unaffiliated, and are trending liberal.   Republicans generally live in rural areas or exurbs and are more likely to be white, male, Christian, and conservative. 14  Those who hold a cross-cutting identity (such as black Christians or female Republicans) generally cleave to the other identities that align with their partisan “tribe.”

As political psychologist Lilliana Mason has shown, greater homogeneity within groups with fewer cross-cutting ties allows people to form clearer in- and out-groups, priming them for conflict. When many identities align, belittling any one of them can trigger humiliation and anger. Such feelings are heightened by policy differences but are not about policy; they are personal, and thus are more powerful. These real cultural and belief differences are at the heart of the cultural conflicts in the United States.

U.S. party and electoral institutions are intensifying rather than reducing these identity cleavages. The alignment of racial and religious identity with political party is not random. Sorting began after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1965 as whites who disagreed with racial equality fled the Democratic Party. A second wave—the so-called Reagan Democrats, who had varied ideological motivations, followed in 1980 and 1984. A third wave, pushed away from the Democratic Party by the election of Barack Obama and attracted by Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, drew previous swing voters who were particularly likely to define “Americanness” as white and Christian into the Republican Party. 15

A 2016 Pew Research Center poll found that 32 percent of U.S. citizens believed that to be a “real American,” one must be a U.S.-born Christian. But among Trump’s primary voters, according to a 2017 Voter Study Group analysis, 86 percent thought it was “very important” to have been born in the United States; 77 percent believed that one must be Christian; and 47 percent thought one must also be “of European descent.” 16  According to Democracy Fund voter surveys, during the 2016 primaries, many economic conservatives, libertarians, and other traditional Republican groups did not share these views on citizenship. By 2020, however, white identity voters made up an even larger share of the Republican base. Moreover, their influence is greater than their numbers because in the current U.S. context—where identities are so fixed and political polarization is so intense—swing voters are rare, so it is more cost-effective for campaigns to focus on turning out reliable voters. The easiest way to do this is with emotional appeals to shared identities rather than to policies on which groups may disagree. 17  This is true for both Republicans and Democrats.

The Democratic Party’s base, however, is extremely heterogeneous. The party must therefore balance competing demands—for example, those of less reliable young “woke” voters with those of highly reliable African American churchgoers, or those of more-conservative Mexican American men with those of progressive activists. In contrast, the Republican Party is increasingly homogenous, which allows campaigns to target appeals to white, Christian, male identities and the traditional social hierarchy.

The emergence of large numbers of Americans who can be prompted to commit political violence by a variety of social events is thus partially an accidental byproduct of normal politics in highly politically sorted, psychologically abnormal times. Even in normal times, people more readily rally to their group’s defense when it is under attack, which is why “ they  are out to take  your  x” is such a time-honored fundraising and get-out-the-vote message. Usually, such tactics merely heighten polarization. But when individuals and societies are highly sorted and stressed, the effects can be much worse. Inequality and loneliness, which were endemic in the United States even before the covid-19 pandemic and have only gotten worse since, are factors highly correlated with violence and aggression. Contagious disease, meanwhile, has led to xenophobic violence historically.

The confluence of these factors with sudden social-distancing requirements, closures of businesses and public spaces, and unusually intrusive pandemic-related government measures during an election year may have pushed the more psychologically fragile over the edge. Psychologists have found that when more homogenous groups with significant overlap in their identities face a sense of group threat, they respond with deep anger. Acting on that anger can restore a sense of agency and self-esteem and, in an environment in which violence is justified and normalized, perhaps even win social approval. 18

The sorts of racially coded political messages that have been in use for decades will be received differently in a political party whose composition has altered to include a greater percentage of white identity voters. Those who feel that their dominant status in the social hierarchy is under attack may respond violently to perceived racial or other threats to their status at the top. But those lower on the social ladder may also resort to violence to assert dominance over (and thus psychological separation from) those at the bottom—for example, minority men over women or other minorities, one religious minority over another, or white women over minority women. Antisemitism is growing among the young, and exists on the left, but is far stronger on the right, and is particularly salient among racial minorities who lean right. 19  On the far-left, violent feelings are emerging from the same sense of group threat and defense, but in mirror-image: Those most willing to dehumanize the right are people who see themselves as defending racial minorities.

Republicans and Democrats have been espousing similar views on the acceptability of violence since 2017, when Kalmoe and Mason began collecting monthly data.

Between 2017 and 2020, Democrats and Republicans were extremely close in justifying violence, with Democrats slightly more prone to condone violence—except in November 2019, the month before Trump’s first impeachment, when Republican support for violence spiked. Both sides also expressed similarly high levels of dehumanizing thought: 39 percent of Democrats and 41 percent of Republicans saw the other side as “downright evil,” and 16 percent of Democrats and 20 percent of Republicans said that their opponents were “like animals.” Such feelings can point to psychological readiness for violence. Separate polling found lower but still comparable levels: 4 percent of Democrats and 3 percent of Republicans believed in October 2020 that attacks on their political opponents would be justified if their party leader alleged the election was stolen; 6 percent of Democrats and 4 percent of Republicans believed property damage to be acceptable in such a case. 20

The parallel attitudes suggest that partisan sorting and social pressures were working equally on all Americans, although Republicans may have greater tolerance for online threats and harassment of opponents and opposition leaders. 21  Yet actual incidents of political violence, while rising on both sides, have been vastly more prevalent on the right. Why has the right been more willing to act on violent feelings?

The clue lies in the sudden shift in attitudes in October 2020, when after maintaining similarity for years, Republicans’ endorsements of violence suddenly leapt across every one of Kalmoe and Mason’s questions regarding the acceptability of violence; findings that were repeated in other polling. 22  In January 2020, 41 percent of Republicans agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands”; a year later, after the January 6 insurrection, 56 percent of Republicans agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect America, the people must do it themselves even if it requires taking violent action.” 23  Moral disengagement also spiked: By February 2021, more than two-thirds of Republicans (and half of Democrats) saw the other party as “downright evil,”; while 12 percent more Republicans believed Democrats were less than human than the other way around. 24

The false narrative of a stolen 2020 election clearly increased support for political violence. Those who believed the election was fraudulent were far more likely to endorse coups and armed citizen rebellion; by February 2021, a quarter of Republicans felt that it was at least “a little” justified to take over state government buildings with violence to advance their political goals. 25  This politically driven false narrative points to the role of politicians since 2016 in fueling the difference in violence between right and left. As has been found in Israel and Germany, domestic terrorists are emboldened by the belief that politicians encourage violence or that authorities will tolerate it. 26

It is not uncommon for politicians to incite communal violence to affect electoral outcomes. In northern Kenya, voters call this “war by remote control.” Incumbent leaders who fear losing are particularly prone to using electoral violence to intimidate potential opponents, build their base, affect voting behavior and election-day vote counts, and, failing all that, to keep themselves relevant or at least out of jail. 27  Communal violence can clear opposition voters from contested areas, altering the demographics of electoral districts, as happened in Kenya’s Rift Valley in 2007 and the U.S. South during Reconstruction. Violent intimidation   can keep voters away from the polls, as has occurred since the 1990s in Bangladesh; from the 1990s through 2013 in Pakistan; and in the U.S. South in the 1960s.

Communal violence often flares in contested districts where it is politically expedient, as in Kenya and India. Likewise, political violence in the United States has been greatest in suburbs where Asian American and Hispanic American immigration has been growing fastest, particularly in heavily Democratic metropoles surrounded by Republican-dominated rural areas. These areas, where white flight from the 1960s is meeting demographic change, are areas of social contestation. They are also politically contested swing districts. Most of the arrested January 6 insurrectionists hailed from these areas rather than from Trump strongholds. 28  Postelection violence can also be useful to politicians. They can manipulate angry voters who believe their votes were stolen into using violence to influence or block final counts or gain leverage in power-sharing negotiations, as occurred in Kenya in 2007 and Afghanistan in 2019.

Not all political violence directly serves an electoral purpose. Using violence to defend a group bonds members to the group. Thus violence is a particularly effective way to build voter “intensity.” In 1932, young black-clad militants of the British Union of Fascists roamed England’s streets, picking fights and harassing Jews. The leadership of the nascent party realized that its profile grew whenever the “blackshirts” got into violent confrontations. Two years later, the party held a rally of nearly fifteen-thousand people that became a brutal melee between blackshirts and antifascist protestors. After the clash (which was not fully spontaneous), people queued to join the party for the next two days and nights and membership soared. 29  As every organizer knows, effective mobilization requires keeping supporters engaged. Given the role of gun rights to Republican identity, armed rallies can mobilize supporters and expand fundraising. Yet even peaceful rallies of crowds carrying automatic weapons can intimidate people who hold opposing views.

Finally, politicians may personally benefit from violent mobilization that is not election-related. In South Africa, former president Jacob Zuma spent years cultivating ties with violent criminal groups in his home state of Kwa-Zulu Natal. 30  When he was out of office and on trial for corruption and facing jail time for contempt of court, he activated those connections to spur a round of violence and looting on a scale not seen in South Africa since apartheid. Vast inequality, unemployment, and other social causes allowed for plausible deniability—many looters with no political ties were just joining in the fracas. Zuma has, as of this writing, avoided imprisonment due to undisclosed “medical reasons.”

Electoral rules enable winning by exploiting identity cleavages:   The fissures in divided societies such as the United States can be either mitigated or enhanced by electoral systems. The U.S. electoral system comprises features that are correlated with greater violence globally. Winner-take-all elections are particularly prone to violence, possibly because small numbers of voters can shift outcomes. Two-party systems are also more correlated with violence than are multiparty systems, perhaps because they create us-them dynamics that deepen polarization. 31  Although multiparty systems allow more-extreme parties to gain representation, such as Alternative for Germany or Golden Dawn in Greece, they also enable other parties to work together against a common threat. The U.S. system is more brittle. A two-party system can prevent the representation of fringe views, as occurred for years in the United States—for example, American Independent Party candidate George Wallace won 14 percent of the popular vote in 1968 but no representation. Yet because party primaries tend to be low-turnout contests with highly partisan voters, small factions can gain outsized influence over a mainstream party. If that happens, extreme politicians can gain control over half of the political spectrum—leaving that party’s voters nowhere to turn.

Weak institutional constraints on violence:   The United States suffers from three particularly concerning institutional weaknesses today—the challenge of adjudicating disputes between the executive and legislative branches inherent in presidential majoritarian systems, recent legal decisions enhancing the electoral power of state legislatures, and the politicization of law enforcement and the courts.

Juan Linz famously noted that apart from the United States, few presidential majoritarian systems had survived as continuous democracies. One key reason was the problem of resolving disputes between the executive and legislative branches. Because both are popularly elected, when they are held by different parties stalemates between the two invite resolution through violence. Such a dynamic drove state-level electoral violence throughout the nineteenth century, not only in the Reconstruction South, but also in Pennsylvania, Maine, Rhode Island, and Colorado. It is thus particularly concerning that in the last year, nine states have passed laws to give greater power to partisan bodies, particularly state legislatures. 32  The U.S. Supreme Court has also made several recent decisions vesting greater power over elections in state legislatures. These trends are weakening institutional guardrails against future political violence.

When law and justice institutions are believed to lean toward one party or side of an identity cleavage, political violence becomes more likely. International cases reveal that groups that believe they can use violence without consequences are more likely to do so. The U.S. justice system, police, and military are far more professional and less politicized than those of most developing democracies that face widespread electoral violence. Longstanding perceptions that police favor one side are supported by Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) data showing that police used far greater force at left-wing protests than at right-wing protests throughout 2020. Despite this conservative ideological tilt, party affiliation and feelings were more complicated: Law enforcement was also a target of right-wing militias, and partisan affiliation (based on donations) had previously been mixed due to union membership and other cross-cutting identities that connected police to the Democratic Party. In 2020, however, donations from individual law enforcement officers to political parties increased, and they tilted far toward the Republican Party, suggesting that the polarizing events of 2020 have led them to sort themselves to the right and deepen their partisanship. 33

How to Counter the Trends

Interventions in five key areas could help defuse the threat of political violence in the United States: 1) election credibility, 2) electoral rules, 3) policing, 4) prevention and redirection, and 5) political speech. The steps best taken depend on who is in power and who is committing the violence. Technical measures to enhance election credibility and train police can reduce inadvertent violence from the state. But such technical solutions will fail if the party in power is inciting violence, as happens more often than not. In that case, behind-the-scenes efforts to help parties and leaders strike deals or mediate grievances can sometimes keep violence at bay. In Kenya, for instance, two opposing politicians accused of leading election violence in 2007 joined forces to run as president and vice-president; their alliance enabled a peaceful election in 2013. Ironically, strong institutions, low levels of corruption, and reductions in institutionalized methods of elite deal-making (such as Congressional earmarks) make such bargains more difficult in the United States. However, the United States is helped by its unusually high level of federalism in terms of elections and law enforcement, because if one part of “the state” is acting against reform, it may still be possible at another level.

More credible elections:   While there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 U.S. elections, international election experts agree that the U.S. electoral system is antiquated and prone to failure. The proposed Freedom to Vote Act, which enhances cybersecurity, protects election officers, provides a paper trail for ballots, and provides proper training and funding for election administration, among other measures, could offer the sort of bipartisan compromise that favors neither side and would shore up a problematic system. But if it is turned into a political cudgel, as is likely, it will fail to reassure voters, despite its excellent provisions.

Changing the electoral rules:  Whether politicians use violence as a campaign strategy is shaped by the nature of the electoral system. A seminal study on India by Steven Wilkinson suggests that where politicians need minority votes to win, they protect minorities; where they do not, they are more likely to incite violence. 34  By this logic, Section 2 of the U.S. Voting Rights Act of 1965, which allows for gerrymandering majority-minority districts to ensure African American representation in Congress, may inadvertently incentivize violence by making minority votes unnecessary for Republican wins in the remaining districts .  While minority representation is its own valuable democratic goal, creating districts where Republicans need minority votes to win—and where Democrats need white votes to win—might reduce the likelihood of violence.

Whether extremists get elected and whether voters feel represented or become disillusioned with the peaceful process of democracy can also be affected by electoral-system design. Thus postconflict countries often redesign electoral institutions. For example, a major plank of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended the Troubles in Northern Ireland involved introducing a type of ranked-choice voting with multimember districts to increase a sense of representation. There are organizations in the United States today that are advocating various reform measures—for example, eliminating primaries and introducing forms of ranked-choice voting or requiring lawmakers to win a majority of votes to be elected (currently the case in only a handful of states)—that could result in fewer extremists gaining power while increasing voter satisfaction and representation.

Fairer policing and accountability:  Even in contexts of high polarization, external deterrence and societal norms generally keep people from resorting to political violence. Partisans who are tempted to act violently should know that they will be held accountable, even if their party is in power. Minority communities, meanwhile, need assurance that the state will defend them.

A number of police-reform measures could help. Police training in de-escalation techniques and nonviolent protest and crowd control, support for officers under psychological strain, improved intelligence collection and sharing regarding domestic threats, and more-representative police forces would all help deter both political violence and police brutality. Publicizing such efforts would demonstrate to society that the government will not tolerate political violence.

Meanwhile, swift justice for violence, incitement, and credible threats against officials—speedy jail sentences, for instance, even if short—is also crucial for its signaling and deterrent value. So are laws that criminalize harassment, intimidation, and political violence.

Prevention and redirection:  Lab experiments have found that internal norms can be reinforced by “inoculating” individuals with warnings that people may one day try to indoctrinate them to extremist beliefs or recruit them to participate in acts of political violence. Because no one likes to be manipulated, the forewarned organize their mental defenses against it. The technique seems promising for preventing younger people from radicalization, though it requires more testing among older partisans whose beliefs are strongly set. 35

A significant portion of those engaged in far-right violence are also under mental distress. People searching online for far-right violent extremist content are 115 percent more likely to click on mental-health ads; those undertaking planned hate crimes show greater signs of mental illness than does the general offender population. 36  Groups such as Moonshot CVE are experimenting with targeted ads that can redirect people searching for extremist content toward hotlines for depression and loneliness and help for leaving violent groups.

Political speech:   When political leaders denounce violence from their own side, partisans listen. Experiments using quotes from Biden and Trump show that leaders’ rhetoric has the power to de-escalate and deter violence—if they are willing to speak against their own side. 37

Long-term trends in social and political-party organization, isolation, distrust, and inequality, capped by a pandemic, have placed individual psychological health and social cohesion under immense strain. Kalmoe and Mason’s surveys found that in February 2021, a fifth of Republicans and 13 percent of Democrats—or more than 65 million people—believed immediate violence was justified. Even if only a tiny portion are serious, such large numbers put a country at risk of stochastic terrorism—that is, it becomes statistically near certain that someone (though it is impossible to predict who) somewhere will act if a public figure incites violence.

Thus while social factors may have created the conditions, politicians have the match to light the tinder. In recent years, some candidates on the right have been particularly willing to use violent speech and engage with groups that spread hate. Yet Democrats are not immune to these trends. Far-left violence is far lower than on the right, but rising. The firearm industry’s trade association found that, in 2020, 40 percent of all legal gun sales were to first-time buyers, and 58 percent of those five-million new owners were women and African Americans. 38  Kalmoe and Mason’s February 2020 polling found that 11 percent of Democrats and 12 percent of Republicans agreed that it was at least “a little” justified to kill opposing political leaders to advance their own political goals. With both the left and the right increasingly armed, viewing the other side as evil or subhuman, and believing political violence to be justified, the possibility grows of tit-for-tat street warfare, like the clashes between antifascist protesters and Proud Boys in Portland, Oregon, from 2020 through this writing. If Democrats have been less likely to act on these beliefs, it is likely because Democratic politicians have largely and vocally spoken out against violence.

Although political violence in the United States is on the rise, it is still lower than in many other countries. Once violence begins, however, it fuels itself. Far from making people turn away in horror, political violence in the present is the greatest factor normalizing it for the future. Preventing a downward spiral is therefore imperative.

1. “Election Officials Under Attack: How to Protect Administrators and Safeguard Democracy,” Brennan Center for Justice, 16 June 2021,  www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/BCJ-129%20ElectionOfficials_v7.pdf ; “Documenting and Addressing Harassment of Election Officials,” California Voter Foundation, June 2021,  www.calvoter.org/sites/default/files/cvf_addressing_harassment_of_election_officials_report.pdf ; Zach Montellaro, “‘Center of the Maelstrom’: Election Officials Grapple with 2020’s Long Shadow,” Politico,  18 August 2021.

2. See the Global Terrorism Database maintained by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland, the dataset of extremist far-right violent incidents maintained by Arie Perliger at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and FBI data on hate crimes.

3. Robert O’Harrow, Jr., Andrew Ba Tran, and Derek Hawkins, “The Rise of Domestic Extremism in America,”  Washington Post,  12 April 2021.

4. Robert Pape and the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, “Understanding American Domestic Terrorism: Mobilization Potential and Risk Factors of a New Threat Trajectory” (presentation, University of Chicago, 6 April 2021),  https://d3qi0qp55mx5f5.cloudfront.net/cpost/i/docs/americas_insurrectionists_online_2021_04_06.pdf?mtime=1617807009.

5. Daniel A. Cox, “Social Isolation and Community Disconnection Are Not Spurring Conspiracy Theories,” Survey Center on American Life, 4 March 2021,  www.americansurveycenter.org/research/social-isolation-and-community-disconnection-are-not-spurring-conspiracy-theories ; Paul A. Djupe and Ryan P. Burge, “A Conspiracy at the Heart of It: Religion and Q,” Religion in Public blog, 6 November 2020,  https://religioninpublic.blog/2020/11/06/a-conspiracy-at-the-heart-of-it-religion-and-q .

6. Daniel A. Cox, “After the Ballots Are Counted: Conspiracies, Political Violence, and American Exceptionalism,” Survey Center on American Life, 11 February 2021,  www.americansurveycenter.org/research/after-the-ballots-are-counted-conspiracies-political-violence-and-american-exceptionalism ; Larry M. Bartels, “Ethnic Antagonism Erodes Republicans’ Commitment to Democracy,”  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences  117 (September 2020): 22752–59.

7. Nathan P. Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason,  Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and the Consequences for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming [2022]), 105, 109.

8. Daniel A. Cox, “Support for Political Violence Among Americans Is on the Rise. It’s a Grim Warning About America’s Political Future,” American Enterprise Institute, 26 March 2021,  www.aei.org/op-eds/support-for-political-violence-among-americans-is-on-the-rise-its-a-grim-warning-about-americas-political-future ; Bartels, “Ethnic Antagonism Erodes Republicans’ Commitment to Democracy”; Sonia Roccas and Marilynn B. Brewer, “Social Identity Complexity,”  Personality and Social Psychology Review 6 (May 2002): 86–102.

9. Susan Olzak, “The Political Context of Competition: Lynching and Urban Racial Violence, 1882–1914,”  Social Forces 69 (December 2020): 395–421; Ryan Hagen, Kinga Makovi, and Peter Bearman, “The Influence of Political Dynamics on Southern Lynch Mob Formation and Lethality,”  Social Forces 92 (December 2013): 757-87.

10. Brad Epperly, Christopher Witko, Ryan Strickler, and Paul White, “Rule by Violence, Rule by Law: Lynching, Jim Crow, and the Continuing Evolution of Voter Suppression in the U.S.,”  Perspectives on Politics 18 (September 2020): 756-69.

11. Sarah Birch, Ursula Daxecker, and Kristine Hӧglund, “Electoral Violence: An Introduction,”  Journal of Peace Research 57 (January 2020): 3–14.

12. Steven I. Wilkinson,  Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

13. Frances E. Lee,  Insecure Majorities :  Congress and the Perpetual Campaign (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

14. Lilliana Mason,  Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Became Our Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018).

15. Tyler T. Reny, Loren Collingwood, and Ali A. Valenzuela, “Vote Switching in the 2016 Election: How Racial and Immigration Attitudes, Not Economics, Explain Shifts in White Voting,”  Public Opinion Quarterly  83 (Spring 2019): 91–113; John Sides, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck,  Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

16. Bruce Stokes, “What It Takes to Truly Be ‘One of Us,’” Pew Research Center, 1 February 2017,  www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/02/01/what-it-takes-to-truly-be-one-of-us ; Emily Ekins, “The Five Types of Trump Voters: Who They Are and What They Believe,” Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, June 2017,  www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/the-five-types-trump-voters .

17. Costas Panagopoulos, “All About That Base: Changing Campaign Strategies in U.S. Presidential Elections,”  Party Politics  22 (March 2016): 179–90.

18. Pablo Fajnzylber, Daniel Lederman, and Norman Loayza, “Inequality and Violent Crime,” Journal of Law and Economics 45 (April 2002): 1–39; James V. P. Check, Daniel Perlman, and Neil M. Malamuth, “Loneliness and Aggressive Behavior,”  Journal of Social and Personal Relationships  2 (September 1985): 243–52; Mark Schaller and Justin H. Park, “The Behavioral Immune System (and Why It Matters),”  Current Directions in Psychological Science  20 (April 2011): 99–103.

19. Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden, “Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum,” 9 April 2021, unpubl ms., www.eitanhersh.com/uploads/7/9/7/5/7975685/hersh_royden_antisemitism_040921.pdf .

20. Kalmoe and Mason,  Radical American Partisanship ; Noelle Malvar et al., “Democracy for President: A Guide to How Americans Can Strengthen Democracy During a Divisive Election,” More in Common, October 2020,  https://democracyforpresident.com/topics/election-violence.

21. The Democracy Fund’s 2019 VOTER Survey shows 10-point gaps for each in December 2019; however, monthly Kalmoe and Mason polling shows no gap, and Bright Line Watch polling in 2020 shows splits of less than 6 and 3 percent for identically worded questions.

22. Kalmoe and Mason,  Radical American Partisanship,  83–90.

23. Bartels, “Ethnic Antagonism Erodes Republicans’ Commitment to Democracy”; Cox, “Support for Political Violence.”

24. Kalmoe and Mason,  Radical American Partisanship,  86.

25. Kalmoe and Mason,  Radical American Partisanship, 164, 90.

26. Arie Perliger, “Terror Isn’t Always a Weapon of the Weak—It Can Also Support the Powerful,”  The Conversation,  28 October 2018,  https://theconversation.com/terror-isnt-always-a-weapon-of-the-weak-it-can-also-support-the-powerful-82626 .

27. Ken Menkhaus,  Conflict Assessment: Northern Kenya and Somaliland  (Copenhagen: Danish Deming Group, 2015), 42; Thad Dunning, “Fighting and Voting: Violent Conflict and Electoral Politics,”  Journal of Conflict Resolution 55 (June 2011): 327–39.

28. Arie Perliger, “Why Do Hate Crimes Proliferate in Progressive Blue States?” Medium, 20 August 2020,  https://medium.com/3streams/why-hate-crimes-proliferate-in-progressive-blue-state-72483b2d72a7 ; Pape and Chicago Project, “Understanding American Domestic Terrorism.”

29. Martin Pugh, “The British Union of Fascists and the Olympia Debate,” Historical Journal 41 (June 1998): 529–42.

30. Gavin Evans, “Why Political Killings Have Taken Hold—Again—In South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal,”  The Conversation, 10 August 2020,  https://theconversation.com/why-political-killings-have-taken-hold-again-in-south-africas-kwazulu-natal-143908 .

31. G. Bingham Powell, Jr., “Party Systems and Political System Performance: Voting Participation, Government Stability and Mass Violence in Contemporary Democracies,”  American Political Science Review  75, no. 4 (1981): 861–79; Hanne Fjelde and Kristine Höglund, “Electoral Institutions and Electoral Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa,”  British Journal of Political Science 46 (April 2016): 297–320.

32. Quinn Scanlan, “10 New State Laws Shift Power Over Elections to Partisan Entities,” ABC News, 16 August 2021,  https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/dozen-state-laws-shift-power-elections-partisan-entities/story?id=79408455 ; “Democracy Crisis Report Update: New Data and Trends Show the Warning Signs Have Intensified in the Last Two Months,” States United Democracy Center, Protect Democracy, and Law Forward, 10 June 2021, https://statesuniteddemocracy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Democracy-Crisis-Part-II_June-10_Final_v7.pdf .

33. Phillip Bump, “Police Made a Lot More Contributions in 2020 Than Normal—Mostly to Republicans,”  Washington Post,  25 February 2021.

34. Wilkinson,  Votes and Violence.

35. Kurt Braddock, “Vaccinating Against Hate: Using Inoculation to Confer Resistance to Persuasion by Extremist Propaganda,”  Terrorism and Political Violence (2019), 1–23.

36. “Mental Health and Violent Extremism,” Moonshot CVE, 28 June 2018,  https://moonshotteam.com/mental-health-violent-extremism ; Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) dataset, Global Terrorism Database.

37. Kalmoe and Mason,  Radical American Partisanship,  180-87; Matthew A. Baum and Tim Groeling, “Shot by the Messenger: Partisan Cues and Public Opinion Regarding National Security and War,”  Political Behavior 31 (June 2009): 157–86; Susan Birch and David Muchlinski, “Electoral Violence Prevention: What Works?”  Democratization 25 (April 2018): 385–403.

38. “First-Time Gun Buyers Grow to Nearly 5 Million in 2020,” Fire Arms Industry Trade Association, 24 August 2020,  www.nssf.org/articles/first-time-gun-buyers-grow-to-nearly-5-million-in-2020 .

Copyright © 2021 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press

Image Credit: lev radin/Shutterstock.com.

Further Reading

Volume 19, Issue 2

Trends in Democracy Assistance: What Has the United States Been Doing?

• Mitchell A. Seligson
• Dinorah Azpuru
• Steven E. Finkel
• Aníbal Pérez-Liñán

Democracy assistance has been a growing priority for the United States since the end of the Cold War. The record shows that its focus goes well beyond elections and other…

Volume 33, Issue 2

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• +63 917 194 0482
• [email protected]

Uncategorized

Hot issue: political killings in the philippines.

The recent spate of assassinations of local government officials brings to mind a history of political violence that has marred Philippine politics since the last century.

Before Martial Law was declared in 1972, political kingpins ran the areas they represented like fiefdoms. Many employed private armies to assert their power and authority.

During martial rule, enforced disappearances and summary executions threatened activists and other so-called enemies of the state.

In a more recent example, the administration’s two-year War on Drugs has claimed more than 10,000 lives. In other areas, victims of political killings have included left-wing advocates, anti-mining activists, agricultural reform activists, journalists, the political opposition, and outspoken members of the clergy.

According to the human rights organization, Karapatan, there is a pattern to political killings in the Philippines – state security forces (i.e. the military and the police) use forced disappearances or summary executions during “legitimate” operations.

When it comes to political killings, there is no presumption of innocence, a right guaranteed under the 1987 Constitution. In fact, political killings upend the very idea of due process.

What is due process of law?

As outlined in Sec. 1, Art. III and Sec. 14(1), Art. III of the Constitution, due process protects citizens from the abuse of government action coming from any of the three branches of government: executive, legislative, or judicial.

There are two kinds of due process:

• Procedural due process US Senator Daniel Webster described procedural due process as “law which hears before it condemns.” The landmark case, “Banco Espanol vs.    Palanca (37 Phil. 921),” said that for due process to take place, the following must be present:
• An impartial court or tribunal with the power to hear and decide the matter before it
• An opportunity for the accused to be heard
• Judgment that is passed only after a lawful hearing
• Substantive due process This principle allows the court to protect constitutional rights from government interference. It states that the government needs sufficient justification to deprive a person of life, liberty, or property.

Thus, political killings contravene basic constitutional law as the State or its agents (military and police) have bypassed due process.

Legal basis against political killings

Thus, all political killings are extrajudicial killings (EJKs). In “ Secretary of National Defense v Manalo (GR No. 180906 ),” the Supreme Court defined political killings as violating procedural due process as they are committed without legal safeguards or judicial proceedings.

Furthermore, in the case, “Gen. Avelino I. Razon, Jr. Et Al. v Mary Jean Tagitis (GR No. 182498),” the Supreme Court said that political killings and enforced disappearances violate substantive due process as these crimes mean that State, its agents, and private parties violate constitutional rights of individuals to life, liberty, and security.

Republic .Act 10353 or the Anti-Enforced or Involuntary Disappearance Act of 2012 also defines enforced disappearances as a separate crime from kidnapping, torture or murder.

The law defines an enforced disappearance as:

• The victim is deprived of liberty
• The perpetrator is the State or agents of the State
• Information on the whereabouts of the victim is concealed or denied

Those who violate this law can be further prosecuted if they refuse to disclose the whereabouts of the victim. This is the first law of its kind in Asia.

Contact Duran & Duran-Schulze Law at (+632) 478 5826 or send an email to [email protected] for more information.

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Essay: POLITICS & ASSASSINATION

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THROUGHOUT the world, industrialization is spurring millions to want more—and to feel more thwarted when affluence and equality are too slowly achieved. In the highly industrialized U.S., the fever is intensified by racial and generational clashes. The result is impatience with the political process: a yen for direct action has created a charged emotional climate that inflames inherently violent minds.

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The killings in the Philippines grow more brazen

The recent murder of a well-known activist signals a turning point in the campaign to eliminate dissent.

• Philippines
• Human rights

Earlier this month, days after Manila went back into a hard lockdown due to a sharp rise in Covid-19 infections, unidentified assailants slipped past the Philippine capital’s strict quarantine measures and approached the home of Randall Echanis, a left-wing party leader and longtime activist. When they left on the morning of 10 August, Echanis and his flatmate were dead, marked with stab wounds and alleged signs of torture.

City and national police launched into a cycle of denial and contradiction all too familiar to the families of slain activists in Mindanao, Negros and the provinces far from the capital where environmental and land defenders have been killed at alarming rates since President Rodrigo Duterte took power in 2016.

Police initially refused to identify Echanis, then moved his body without his wife’s consent and held it for three days before releasing it to his family. They claimed Echanis’ flatmate, Louie Tagapia, may have been the target of the killing because an alleged tattoo indicating an affiliation with a criminal group. One police chief claimed there was “no forcible entry” in the case, despite a photo showing a broken doorknob on the apartment door .

When Duterte put Mindanao under martial law in 2017 and other areas, including Negros island, under a heightened “state of national emergency” the following year, critics warned that the regions were a “ laboratory ” for the rest of the country. As killings of activists continued to rise in rural areas – the Philippines was Asia’s deadliest country for environmental defenders last year, according to  Global Witness – Duterte’s critics in Manila wondered when the bloodshed would enter the capital city. The death of Echanis, at the height of a strict lockdown and in the wake of a controversial anti-terrorism law, has thus signaled a turning point in the wider campaign to eliminate dissent. Any pretense that the killings resulted from local conflicts over rural land struggles, out of sight and mind from Manila, is now gone.

Most people in Manila’s legal activist network have, at some point during Duterte’s rule, been red-tagged – falsely labeled as communist rebels.

Echanis’ party, Anakpawis, and other left-wing voices have alleged his killing was “state-sponsored”. There’s no hard evidence for this claim, just as there’s no ironclad proof of state involvement in the killings of the nine sugar workers killed in Negros in 2018 or their lawyer, Benjamin Ramos, who was shot dead by unidentified gunmen weeks later. Police responded to these cases by first naming activists as potential suspects before eventually letting the investigations run cold.

It’s a story familiar to the families of the 318 human rights workers and activists killed between July 2016 and 30 June 2020, according to the human rights group Karapatan, and bringing it to Manila indicates the Duterte administration has become even more brazen in its willingness to watch its political enemies be eliminated.

Last autumn, six activists were arrested in Manila as part of a series of raids carried out throughout the country. One rights worker in the capital, who had vacated his office after being tipped that it could be raided, told me the arrests and killings plaguing far-flung activists had always felt distant to him. The raids, he said, changed everything – it was as if state security forces no longer cared if their work was done in full view of the country’s population, in its diplomatic and media hub.

Manila has seen the majority of killings in Duterte’s deadly war on drugs, which the country’s rights commission estimates has taken over 27,000 lives, but unlike the police-led drug war, attacks on activists are more closely associated with a military counterinsurgency campaign ostensibly targeting the New People’s Army (NPA) communist guerilla group. Echanis, like many slain activists, had been named on a government terrorist list , although his name was later removed. Being named on a terrorist list or on one of the various bulletins and releases falsely labeling legal activists as communist rebels (a practice known as “red-tagging”) is often fatal – and most people in Manila’s legal activist network have, at some point during Duterte’s rule, been red-tagged.

Duterte, who has idolised the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and toyed with placing the Philippines under martial law , now oversees a country where armed police and military roam city streets enforcing lockdowns as Congress and the Supreme Court continue to eliminate legal space for dissent.

The UN human rights chief has called for a probe into drug war and political killings, while a bipartisan group of US legislators asked the Philippines to repeal its new anti-terrorism law . But the international community has been slow to condemn the Duterte administration as the Philippines slides into what hardened activists call a Marcos-like authoritarianism. China has invested heavily in infrastructure projects in the country, while the US retains a strong military alliance with the Philippines and recently approved two possible sales of attack helicopters , which critics warn could be used in operations targeting legal activists.

And outside of Manila, the killings have not stopped. This month, the activist Zara Alvarez, 39, was shot dead in Negros. Alvarez, who played a crucial role in chronicling the deaths of farmers on the island and raised human rights issues in Negros before the UN Human Rights Council, had been “red-tagged” herself.

The culprit behind her death: an unidentified gunman.

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Political Violence on Government Essay

Introduction, a case for political violence, a case against political violence, works cited.

Our great human civilization is built on the foundation of rule of law whereby violence is abhorred and peace exalted. This is because violence normally results in losses of both life and economic resources. Despite these realities, there have been numerous cases of political violence throughout history. In some instances, political violence has had popular support and led to positive change therefore begging the question as to whether acts of violence against one’s own government are justified.

Considering the enormous impact that political violence has on a nation and its people, it would be a worthwhile endeavor to review the justifiability of political violence. To this end, this paper shall set out to argue that political violence directed against one’s own government is at times justifiable and indeed preferable to the alternative peaceful acceptance of the status quo.

Political violence mostly involves internal armed conflict between various forces or parties with conflicting political ideologies in a nation. While the term violence has a negative connotation, historians and philosophers have argued that political violence may be justified depending on the circumstances in question. A particularly interesting case of political violence is the American Civil War. As a result of political violence, the American revolutionalists overthrew the British colonial ruler therefore leading to the formation of a strong United States of America. The chief author of the American constitution, Thomas Jefferson exalted periodic rebellion as “medicine necessary for the sound health of government” (911).

One of the chief responsibilities of any government is to ensure the provision of security for all its citizens. This is one of the mandates that the state through the use of its police force and military forces achieves. Kirwin and Wonbin theorize that the state should have a monopoly on the use of force and should use the same to “enforce laws for the mitigation of conflict” (6).

In some cases, the state may fail to provide this security to its citizens or even worse still, be responsible for the high level of violence experienced within its borders. In such instances, political violence may be permissible as the citizens seek alternative strategies to ensure their security which the government fails to provide. This is a position that is supported by Cohan who claims that political violence are generally legitimate and justifiable means through which hostile governments can be made to meet their demise (910).

The relationship between poverty, inequality, unemployment and armed conflict is very evident since citizens of poor nations feel resentful towards their government. Solimano reinforces this hypothesis by asserting that the risk of conflict and political violence diminishes as a country increases its level of economic development (19).

A case in point is the Latin Americas region where political violence has mostly been instigated by social movements and left-wing political parties which are motivated by strong active social agendas (Solimano 23). As a result of political violence, governments in Latin American have been forced to deal with issues such as underdevelopment, poverty and inequality. This being the case, political violence can be used as the tool through which positive change is brought about to the country.

While violence is inherently wrong, there arises a situation whereby it is morally justifiable. Ruby demonstrates that in the example of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, the political violence was seen as morally justifiable (12). This is because the insurgent forces were aiming to eliminate British dominance in Northern Ireland, a task that they viewed to be morally justifiable. Therefore, inasmuch as the violence resulted in the wanton destruction of property and the loss of lives of innocent civilians, the propagators of the political violence were still able to maintain a moral sanctity since their cause was morally just.

Sabecedo, Blanco and Corte assert that in the most extreme form, political violence involves physically eliminating one’s adversaries (550). While such a violent act in itself would simply be wrong, the consequences of the same might render the act morally right (O’Boyle 27). The typical example given is a situation whereby the killing of one person would result in the saving of many other lives. For example, if there had been political violence in Nazi Germany which resulted in the assassination of the Nazi leader Hitler, then it can be assumed that millions of lives would have been saved. Political violence would therefore have been morally justifiable since it would have resulted in the saving of millions of innocent citizens.

Political violence results in instability and jeopardizes democratic reforms as well as any prospects of economic development especially in developing nations. Kirwin and Wonbin authoritatively state that “political violence is typically the penultimate event that precedes full-scale civil war” (2). The authors go on to demonstrate that these civil wars which result from political violence may run for decades resulting in the death and suffering of hundreds of thousands. With such realities in mind, it can be argued that political violence justified or not, should be avoided by all means.

Without doubt, it would be preferable if violence was never used to settle any scores since violence results in the destruction of lives and physical assets therefore negating development. In the ideal situation, negotiations and consensus will result in peaceful resolution of conflicts and avoidance of political violence.

However, this ideal may not always be realizable and at times, it may be inevitable to resort to violence so as to safeguard the freedom, prosperity and eventually the peace of the citizens of a nation. Cohan notes that even the United Nations Charter concedes that the international community should ideally not be involved in matters of internal strive which pertain to domestic sovereignty (911). As such, it can be deduced that there are instances whereby political violence may be permissible even by international standards.

Political violence while undesirable may at times be the only means through desirable results are achieved. This paper has given a succinct but informative discussion to reinforce this assertion by highlighting instances whereby it is justifiable for one to adopt violence means against their government.

From the discussions presented herein, it is clear that there are circumstances whereby it is not only justifiable but also obligatory for citizens of a nation to resort to political violence for the good of the nations. In such instances, political violence may lead to institutional reforms, improved democracies or even the overthrow of oppressive regimes. However, the paper has also shown that violence invariably results in destruction and suffering for people. Therefore, despite being justifiable, political violence should only be employed in extremely rare situations and only as a last resort.

Cohan, Alan. Necessity, Political Violence and Terrorism . Stetson Law Review Vol. 35, 2006.

Kirwin, Matthew and Wonbin, Cho. Weak States and Political Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa. Afrobarometer publications, 2009.

Sabucedo, J Blanco, Amalio and Corte, Luis. Beliefs which Legitimize Political Violence against the Innocent. Psicothema 2003. Vol. 15, no 4, pp. 550-555

Solimano, A. Political Violence and Economic Development in Latin America: Issues and Evidence. United Nations Publication, 2004. Print.

O’Boyle, Garrett. Theories of Justification and Political Violence: Examples from Four Groups. Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 14, No 2, 2002, pp. 23-46.

Ruby, Charles. The Definition of Terrorism. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 2002, pp. 9–14.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, June 25). Political Violence on Government. https://ivypanda.com/essays/political-violence-on-government/

"Political Violence on Government." IvyPanda , 25 June 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/political-violence-on-government/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'Political Violence on Government'. 25 June.

IvyPanda . 2020. "Political Violence on Government." June 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/political-violence-on-government/.

1. IvyPanda . "Political Violence on Government." June 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/political-violence-on-government/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Political Violence on Government." June 25, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/political-violence-on-government/.

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Stop the killings!

UN Human Rights Council, investigate the human rights situation in the Philippines! During the 44th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UN HRC) in June 2020, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet reported the widespread and systematic human rights violations in the Philippines. The High Commissioner found that domestic mechanisms have failed to ensure accountability, and that there is persistent impunity for human rights violations. She also cited that authorities’ harmful rhetoric inciting hatred and violence against women, human rights defenders, political opposition, civil society, indigenous peoples, drug users and peddlers, and relief workers, which continued during the COVID-19 period, could amount to a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Weeks after the release of Bachelet’s comprehensive report, the human rights situation in the Philippines took a turn for the worse. In the first week of July, the President signed the Anti-Terror Act that is seen as a measure that will aggravate the attacks and vilification of human rights defenders and civil society. The exercise of fundamental freedoms and rights has been compromised, with numerous challenges to press freedom and activists and protesters arrested and detained on flimsy charges. In August, only days apart, peasant leader Randall Echanis and health activist Zara Alvarez were summarily executed in separate incidents, following the killings of relief worker Jory Porquia, peasant leader Nora Apique and urban poor leader Carlito Badion during the COVID-19 lockdown. The lawyer and paralegal volunteer assisting the family of Echanis are now facing police complaints for allegedly obstructing its investigation. Threats of violence, including death threats, against activists and human rights defenders have continued unabated. We must put a stop to these unrelenting attacks now. And this worsening situation would not end as long as those who perpetrate them run free and unscathed. These perpetrators must be brought to justice before any court, tribunal or body that will act independently, with impartiality, and effectively, having allegiance to human rights and justice instead of powers that be. We need true accountability and genuine transparency in the inquiry into these human rights violations, removing the possibility that investigations would only shield and even absolve the persons liable for the crimes. We cannot rely on the promise of a government that has shown great disdain and disrespect of human rights to exact accountability and operate with transparency. This government has shown nothing but contempt for individuals and experts, including those in the UN and the International Criminal Court, who independently and impartially seek investigation into the relentless human rights violations in the Philippines. The Philippine Justice Secretary, during the 44th UNHRC Session, denied the existence of impunity in the Philippines, promising the creation of an inter-agency panel to review the 5,655 killings during the police’s anti-illegal drug operations. He denied allegations of widespread and systematic killings as well as other human rights violations. He stressed that the Government has respected human rights and other fundamental freedoms, reiterating the existence of accountability measures, such as an inter-agency committee on extralegal killings, enforced disappearances, torture, and other grave violations of the right to life, liberty and security of persons. We have witnessed a long history of domestic inter-agency task forces and fact-finding commissions promising to act without fear or favor. But we repeatedly have been frustrated and even enraged by the fruitlessness and ineffectiveness of these so-called domestic accountability measures. Rather than help, these government bodies have even contributed to the infrastructure of impunity and miscarriage of justice against the victims of human rights violations. With the 45th session of the Human Rights Council beginning today, we call on the UN Human Rights Council to exercise its mandate and urgently create an independent and impartial investigative mechanism on the rampant extrajudicial killings and human rights violations in the Philippines. The Human Rights Council’s action may contribute significantly to deter further human rights violations in the Philippines. Likewise, we also support other initiatives in urging States all over the world to send the message that such level of impunity in the Philippines is unacceptable. This must happen now before we lose another Zara Alvarez, another Randall Echanis, another Jory Porquia, another Kian delos Santos, and another Filipino to these cruel, widespread and systematic violations.

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UN Human Rights Council, investigate the human rights situation in the Philippines! During the 44th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (UN HRC) in June 2020, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet reported the widespread and systematic human rights violations in the Philippines. The High Commissioner found that domestic mechanisms have failed to ensure accountability, and that there is persistent impunity for human rights violations. She also cited that authorities’ harmful rhetoric inciting hatred and violence against women, human rights defenders, political opposition, civil society, indigenous peoples, drug users and peddlers, and relief workers, which continued during the COVID-19 period, could amount to a violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Weeks after the release of Bachelet’s comprehensive report, the human rights situation in the Philippines took a turn for the worse. In the first week of July, the President signed the Anti-Terror Act that is seen as a measure that will aggravate the attacks and vilification of human rights defenders and civil society. The exercise of fundamental freedoms and rights has been compromised, with numerous challenges to press freedom and activists and protesters arrested and detained on flimsy charges. In August, only days apart, peasant leader Randall Echanis and health activist Zara Alvarez were summarily executed in separate incidents, following the killings of relief worker Jory Porquia, peasant leader Nora Apique and urban poor leader Carlito Badion during the COVID-19 lockdown. The lawyer and paralegal volunteer assisting the family of Echanis are now facing police complaints for allegedly obstructing its investigation. Threats of violence, including death threats, against activists and human rights defenders have continued unabated. We must put a stop to these unrelenting attacks now. And this worsening situation would not end as long as those who perpetrate them run free and unscathed. These perpetrators must be brought to justice before any court, tribunal or body that will act independently, with impartiality, and effectively, having allegiance to human rights and justice instead of powers that be. We need true accountability and genuine transparency in the inquiry into these human rights violations, removing the possibility that investigations would only shield and even absolve the persons liable for the crimes. We cannot rely on the promise of a government that has shown great disdain and disrespect of human rights to exact accountability and operate with transparency. This government has shown nothing but contempt for individuals and experts, including those in the UN and the International Criminal Court, who independently and impartially seek investigation into the relentless human rights violations in the Philippines. The Philippine Justice Secretary, during the 44th UNHRC Session, denied the existence of impunity in the Philippines, promising the creation of an inter-agency panel to review the 5,655 killings during the police’s anti-illegal drug operations. He denied allegations of widespread and systematic killings as well as other human rights violations. He stressed that the Government has respected human rights and other fundamental freedoms, reiterating the existence of accountability measures, such as an inter-agency committee on extralegal killings, enforced disappearances, torture, and other grave violations of the right to life, liberty and security of persons. We have witnessed a long history of domestic inter-agency task forces and fact-finding commissions promising to act without fear or favor. But we repeatedly have been frustrated and even enraged by the fruitlessness and ineffectiveness of these so-called domestic accountability measures. Rather than help, these government bodies have even contributed to the infrastructure of impunity and miscarriage of justice against the victims of human rights violations. With the 45th session of the Human Rights Council beginning today, we call on the UN Human Rights Council to exercise its mandate and urgently create an independent and impartial investigative mechanism on the rampant extrajudicial killings and human rights violations in the Philippines. The Human Rights Council’s action may contribute significantly to deter further human rights violations in the Philippines. Likewise, we also support other initiatives in urging States all over the world to send the message that such level of impunity in the Philippines is unacceptable. This must happen now before we lose another Zara Alvarez, another Randall Echanis, another Jory Porquia, another Kian delos Santos, and another Filipino to these cruel, widespread and systematic violations. Organizers Karapatan Alliance Philippines National Union of People’s Lawyers (NUPL) Kalikasan People’s Network for the Environment 350.org Pilipinas Ecumenical Voice for Human Rights and Peace in the Philippines Civicus World Alliance for Citizen Participation International Movement for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ESCR-Net) Association of Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL) Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) Asia Pacific Network of Environmental Defenders (APNED) International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines Supporters: Nnimmo Bassey, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), Nigeria Iniciativa Mesoamericana de Mujeres Defensoras de Derechos Humanos Proyecto de Derechos Economicos, Sociales y Culturales (Pro-DESC), Mexico Project South, US Odhikar, Bangladesh Public Association Dignity, Kazakhstan AwazCDS, Pakistan Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law

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Political Killings in Philippines

We, the undersigned individuals and organizations, join our voices in a call for an end to the wave of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines. Over the past five years, a stark increase in politically-motivated violence has claimed the lives of pro-democracy activists, human rights defenders, political opposition figures, lawyers, teachers, peasants, students, union leaders, and religious leaders. These murders are committed under the auspices of an anti-leftist, anti-communist military offensive that targets village and community leaders in communities that are suspected of supporting or being sympathetic to leftist insurgent groups.

We voice a special concern for acts of violence perpetrated against trade unionists. These hard-working men and women who organize to protect their basic rights have paid a heavy price. According to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the Philippines is now the second most dangerous country on earth for trade unionists. Both government officials and the corporations that employ union members must take strong action to safeguard the lives and rights of all working people in the Philippines.

Tomorrow, September 22, marks the one-year anniversary of the murder of Diosdado “Ka Fort” Fortuna, a leading figure in the Filipino trade union movement, at the hands of unidentified assailants. As the Commission on Human Rights Philippines (CHRP) would later declare, this killing was a human rights violation and not an isolated incident of tragedy. Fortuna worked at the Nestlé Philippines facility in Cabuyao, Laguna, where the workers have been on strike since 2002; he was shot and killed on his way home from the picket line. We urge Nestlé Philippines to bring a quick and amicable resolution to the labor dispute at the Cabuyao facility. We call on Nestlé and the Filipino government to respect and protect the lives of all trade unionists, guarantee the right to union activity, and investigate the murder of “Ka Fort” and all extrajudicial killings in the Philippines.

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• Violence Against Trade Unions

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What to know about the crisis of violence, politics and hunger engulfing Haiti

A long-simmering crisis over Haiti’s ability to govern itself, particularly after a series of natural disasters and an increasingly dire humanitarian emergency, has come to a head in the Caribbean nation, as its de facto president remains stranded in Puerto Rico and its people starve and live in fear of rampant violence. 

The chaos engulfing the country has been bubbling for more than a year, only for it to spill over on the global stage on Monday night, as Haiti’s unpopular prime minister, Ariel Henry, agreed to resign once a transitional government is brokered by other Caribbean nations and parties, including the U.S.

But the very idea of a transitional government brokered not by Haitians but by outsiders is one of the main reasons Haiti, a nation of 11 million, is on the brink, according to humanitarian workers and residents who have called for Haitian-led solutions. 

“What we’re seeing in Haiti has been building since the 2010 earthquake,” said Greg Beckett, an associate professor of anthropology at Western University in Canada. 

What is happening in Haiti and why?

In the power vacuum that followed the assassination of democratically elected President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, Henry, who was prime minister under Moïse, assumed power, with the support of several nations, including the U.S. 

When Haiti failed to hold elections multiple times — Henry said it was due to logistical problems or violence — protests rang out against him. By the time Henry announced last year that elections would be postponed again, to 2025, armed groups that were already active in Port-au-Prince, the capital, dialed up the violence.

Even before Moïse’s assassination, these militias and armed groups existed alongside politicians who used them to do their bidding, including everything from intimidating the opposition to collecting votes . With the dwindling of the country’s elected officials, though, many of these rebel forces have engaged in excessively violent acts, and have taken control of at least 80% of the capital, according to a United Nations estimate. 

Those groups, which include paramilitary and former police officers who pose as community leaders, have been responsible for the increase in killings, kidnappings and rapes since Moïse’s death, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program at Uppsala University in Sweden. According to a report from the U.N . released in January, more than 8,400 people were killed, injured or kidnapped in 2023, an increase of 122% increase from 2022.

“January and February have been the most violent months in the recent crisis, with thousands of people killed, or injured, or raped,” Beckett said.

Armed groups who had been calling for Henry’s resignation have already attacked airports, police stations, sea ports, the Central Bank and the country’s national soccer stadium. The situation reached critical mass earlier this month when the country’s two main prisons were raided , leading to the escape of about 4,000 prisoners. The beleaguered government called a 72-hour state of emergency, including a night-time curfew — but its authority had evaporated by then.

Aside from human-made catastrophes, Haiti still has not fully recovered from the devastating earthquake in 2010 that killed about 220,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless, many of them living in poorly built and exposed housing. More earthquakes, hurricanes and floods have followed, exacerbating efforts to rebuild infrastructure and a sense of national unity.

Since the earthquake, “there have been groups in Haiti trying to control that reconstruction process and the funding, the billions of dollars coming into the country to rebuild it,” said Beckett, who specializes in the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. 

Beckett said that control initially came from politicians and subsequently from armed groups supported by those politicians. Political “parties that controlled the government used the government for corruption to steal that money. We’re seeing the fallout from that.”

Many armed groups have formed in recent years claiming to be community groups carrying out essential work in underprivileged neighborhoods, but they have instead been accused of violence, even murder . One of the two main groups, G-9, is led by a former elite police officer, Jimmy Chérizier — also known as “Barbecue” — who has become the public face of the unrest and claimed credit for various attacks on public institutions. He has openly called for Henry to step down and called his campaign an “armed revolution.”

But caught in the crossfire are the residents of Haiti. In just one week, 15,000 people have been displaced from Port-au-Prince, according to a U.N. estimate. But people have been trying to flee the capital for well over a year, with one woman telling NBC News that she is currently hiding in a church with her three children and another family with eight children. The U.N. said about 160,000 people have left Port-au-Prince because of the swell of violence in the last several months. 

Deep poverty and famine are also a serious danger. Gangs have cut off access to the country’s largest port, Autorité Portuaire Nationale, and food could soon become scarce.

Haiti's uncertain future

A new transitional government may dismay the Haitians and their supporters who call for Haitian-led solutions to the crisis. 

But the creation of such a government would come after years of democratic disruption and the crumbling of Haiti’s political leadership. The country hasn’t held an election in eight years. 

Haitian advocates and scholars like Jemima Pierre, a professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, say foreign intervention, including from the U.S., is partially to blame for Haiti’s turmoil. The U.S. has routinely sent thousands of troops to Haiti , intervened in its government and supported unpopular leaders like Henry.

“What you have over the last 20 years is the consistent dismantling of the Haitian state,” Pierre said. “What intervention means for Haiti, what it has always meant, is death and destruction.”

In fact, the country’s situation was so dire that Henry was forced to travel abroad in the hope of securing a U.N. peacekeeping deal. He went to Kenya, which agreed to send 1,000 troops to coordinate an East African and U.N.-backed alliance to help restore order in Haiti, but the plan is now on hold . Kenya agreed last October to send a U.N.-sanctioned security force to Haiti, but Kenya’s courts decided it was unconstitutional. The result has been Haiti fending for itself. 

“A force like Kenya, they don’t speak Kreyòl, they don’t speak French,” Pierre said. “The Kenyan police are known for human rights abuses . So what does it tell us as Haitians that the only thing that you see that we deserve are not schools, not reparations for the cholera the U.N. brought , but more military with the mandate to use all kinds of force on our population? That is unacceptable.”  

Henry was forced to announce his planned resignation from Puerto Rico, as threats of violence — and armed groups taking over the airports — have prevented him from returning to his country.  

Now that Henry is to stand down, it is far from clear what the armed groups will do or demand next, aside from the right to govern. 

“It’s the Haitian people who know what they’re going through. It’s the Haitian people who are going to take destiny into their own hands. Haitian people will choose who will govern them,” Chérizier said recently, according to The Associated Press .

Haitians and their supporters have put forth their own solutions over the years, holding that foreign intervention routinely ignores the voices and desires of Haitians. 

In 2021, both Haitian and non-Haitian church leaders, women’s rights groups, lawyers, humanitarian workers, the Voodoo Sector and more created the Commission to Search for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis . The commission has proposed the “ Montana Accord ,” outlining a two-year interim government with oversight committees tasked with restoring order, eradicating corruption and establishing fair elections. 

For more from NBC BLK, sign up for our weekly newsletter .

CORRECTION (March 15, 2024, 9:58 a.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misstated which university Jemima Pierre is affiliated with. She is a professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, not the University of California, Los Angeles, (or Columbia University, as an earlier correction misstated).

Patrick Smith is a London-based editor and reporter for NBC News Digital.

Char Adams is a reporter for NBC BLK who writes about race.