Defining Violence in Order to Model Political Violence
Ian S. Lustick, University of Pennsylvania
Political scientists have recently focused extraordinary attention on the effects and causes of violence. Strikingly absent from this body of research, including contributions by Kalyvas, Laitin and Fearon, Wood, Wilkinson, Varshney, and many many others, is an explict and clear definition of violence. What is it about a particular behavior, event, or situation, independent of the damage it causes (which could be caused non-violently, for example) or its legality or morality, that can be coded as “violent?” Are all insults violent? Are lawsuits resulting in the destruction of whole villages violent? Are unintended casualties the result of violence? Is the prolonged application of steady, low level pain violent? Can threats, per se, be violent? Must violence be physical? What about the prolonged application of discomfort? Are protestors massing themselves against the movement of traffic violent?
Most analysts finesse the difficulty of defining violence by treating it as pornography (I know it when I see it but I can’t explain it.) or by employing an arbitrary marker relating to the amount of damage involved (civil wars coded as such by numbers of deaths in conflict, or fatalities or injuries) or treating some source as if it had a definition of violence (using newspaper reports of violence to code violent events). Such approaches can never yield answers to questions about the distinctiveness of violence as opposed to non-violent conflict as a variable in explaining or shaping political outcomes. More specifically, it is impossible include violence, per se, in modeling enterprises to study political dynamics without employing a denotative definition of violence as a form of behavior or as a kind of event that can be identified as “violent” independent of what others think, independent of conditions thought to produce it, independent of the damage it is thought to cause, and independent of its consistency or inconsistency with particular norms.
My paper will present an abstract definition of violence, compare it to existing definitional exercises, and then explain and illustrate how it can be operationalized in a highly stylized agent based model of an authority structure under pressure. The definition centers on the sudden increase in the order of magnitude of negative values at stake in an encounter.