Rebellion, uprising, or insurrection is a
refusal of obedience or order. It refers to
the open resistance against the orders of
an established authority.
A rebellion originates from a sentiment of
indignation and disapproval of a situation
and then manifests itself by the refusal to
submit or to obey the authority responsible
for this situation. Rebellion can be individual
or collective, peaceful (civil disobedience,
civil resistance, and nonviolent resistance)
or violent (terrorism, sabotage and guerrilla
warfare.)
In political terms, rebellion and revolt are
often distinguished by their different aims.
If rebellion generally seeks to evade and/or
gain concessions from an oppressive power,
a revolt seeks to overthrow and destroy that
power, as well as its accompanying laws. The
goal of rebellion is resistance while a revolt
seeks a revolution. As power shifts relative
to the external adversary, or power shifts
within a mixed coalition, or positions harden
or soften on either side, an insurrection
may seesaw between the two forms.
== Classification ==
An armed but limited rebellion is an insurrection,
and if the established government does not
recognize the rebels as belligerents then
they are insurgents and the revolt is an insurgency.
In a larger conflict the rebels may be recognized
as belligerents without their government being
recognized by the established government,
in which case the conflict becomes a civil
war.Civil resistance movements have often
aimed at, and brought about, the fall of a
government or head of state, and in these
cases could be considered a form of rebellion.
In many of these cases the opposition movement
saw itself not only as nonviolent, but also
as upholding their country's constitutional
system against a government that was unlawful,
for example if it had refused to acknowledge
its defeat in an election. Thus the term "rebel"
does not always capture the element in some
of these movements of acting as a defender
of legality and constitutionalism.There are
a number of terms that are associated with
rebel and rebellion. They range from those
with positive connotations to those with pejorative
connotations. Examples include:
Boycott, similar to civil disobedience, but
it simply means separating yourself, primarily
financial, from the system that you are rebelling
against. This entails refusing to participate
in the monetary system, limiting consumption,
or ignoring notions of property rights (AKA
squatting, simple living).
Civil resistance, civil disobedience, and
nonviolent resistance which do not include
violence or paramilitary force.
Mutiny, which is carried out by military or
security forces against their commanders
Armed resistance movement, which is carried
out by freedom fighters, often against an
occupying foreign power
Revolt, a term that is sometimes used for
a more localized rebellions rather than a
general uprising
Revolution, which is carried out by radicals,
usually meant to overthrow the current government
Riot, a form of civil disorder involving violent
public disturbance
Subversion, which are covert attempts at sabotaging
a government, carried out by spies or other
subversives
Terrorism, which is carried out by different
kinds of political, economic or religious
militant individuals or groups
== 
Causes ==
=== 
Macro approach ===
The following theories broadly build on the
Marxist interpretation of rebellion. They
explore the causes of rebellion from a wide
lens perspective. Rebellion is studied, in
Theda Skocpol's words, by analyzing "objective
relationships and conflicts among variously
situated groups and nations, rather than the
interests, outlooks, or ideologies of particular
actors in revolutions".
==== Marxist insight ====
Karl Marx's analysis of revolutions sees such
expression of political violence not as anomic,
episodic outbursts of discontents but rather
the symptomatic expression of a particular
set of objective but fundamentally contradicting
class-based relations of power. Indeed, the
central tenet of Marxist philosophy, as expressed
in Capital, is the analysis of society's mode
of production (technology and labor) concomitant
with the ownership of productive institutions
and the division of profit. Marx writes about
"the hidden structure of society" that must
be elucidated through an examination of "the
direct relationship of the owners of the conditions
of production to the direct producers". The
mismatch, between one mode of production,
between the social forces and the social ownership
of the production, is at the origin of the
revolution. The inner imbalance within these
modes of production is derived from the conflicting
modes of organization, such as capitalism
within feudalism, or more appropriately socialism
within capitalism. The dynamics engineered
by these class frictions help class consciousness
root itself in the collective imaginary. For
example, the development of the bourgeoisie
class went from oppressed merchant class to
urban independence, eventually gaining enough
power to represent the state as a whole. Social
movements, thus, are determined by an exogenous
set of circumstances. The proletariat must
also, according to Marx, go through the same
process of self-determination which can only
be achieved by friction against the bourgeoisie.
In Marx's theory revolutions are the "locomotives
of history", it is because rebellion has for
ultimate goal to overthrow the ruling class
and its antiquated mode of production. Later,
rebellion attempts to replace it with a new
system of political economy, one that is better
suited to the new ruling class, thus enabling
societal progress. The cycle of rebellion,
thus, replaces one mode of production by another
through the constant class friction.
==== Ted Gurr: Roots of political violence
====
In his book Why Men Rebel, Ted Gurr looks
at the roots of political violence itself
applied to a rebellion framework. He defines
political violence as: "all collective attacks
within a political community against the political
regime, its actors [...] or its policies.
The concept represents a set of events, a
common property of which is the actual or
threatened use of violence". Gurr sees in
violence a voice of anger that manifests itself
against the established order. More precisely,
individuals become angry when they feel what
Gurr labels as relative deprivation, meaning
the feeling of getting less than one is entitled
to. He labels it formally as the "perceived
discrepancy between value expectations and
value capabilities". Gurr differentiates between
three types of relative deprivation:
Decremental deprivation: one's capacities'
decrease when expectations remain high. One
example of this is the proliferation and thus
depreciation of the value of higher education.
Aspirational Deprivation: one's capacities
stay the same when expectations rise. An example
would be a first generation college student
lacking the contacts and network to obtain
a higher paying job while watching her better-prepared
colleagues bypass her.
Progressive deprivation: expectation and capabilities
increase but the former cannot keep up. A
good example would be an automotive worker
being increasingly marginalized by the automatisation
of the assembly line.Anger is thus comparative.
One of his key insight is that "The potential
for collective violence varies strongly with
the intensity and scope of relative deprivation
among members of a collectivity". This means
that different individuals within society
will have different propensities to rebel
based on their particular internalization
of their situation. As such, Gurr differentiates
between three types of political violence:
Turmoil when only the mass population encounters
relative deprivation;
Conspiracy when the population but especially
the elite encounters relative deprivation;
Internal War, which includes revolution. In
this case, the degree of organization is much
higher than turmoil, and the revolution is
intrinsically spread to all sections of society,
unlike the conspiracy.
==== Charles Tilly: Centrality of collective
action ====
In From Mobilization to Revolution, Charles
Tilly argues that political violence is a
normal and endogenous reaction to competition
for power between different groups within
society. "Collective violence", Tilly writes,
"is the product of just normal processes of
competition among groups in order to obtain
the power and implicitly to fulfill their
desires”. He proposes two models to analyze
political violence:
The polity model takes into account government
and groups jockeying for control over power.
Thus, both the organizations holding power
and the ones challenging them are included.
Tilly labels those two groups "members" and
"challengers".
The mobilization model aims to describe the
behavior of one single party to the political
struggle for power. Tilly further divides
the model in two sub-categories, one that
deals with the internal dynamics of the group,
and the other that is concerned with the "external
relations" of the entity with other organizations
and/or the government. According to Tilly,
the cohesiveness of a group mainly relies
on the strength of common interests and the
degree of organization. Thus, to answer Gurr,
anger alone does not automatically create
political violence. Political action is contingent
on the capacity to organize and unite. It
is far from irrational and spontaneous.Revolutions
are included in this theory, although they
remain for Tilly particularly extreme since
the challenger(s) aim for nothing less than
full control over power. The "revolutionary
moment occurs when the population needs to
choose to obey either the government or an
alternative body who is engaged with the government
in a zero-sum game. This is what Tilly calls
"multiple sovereignty". The success of a revolutionary
movement hinges on "the formation of coalitions
between members of the polity and the contenders
advancing exclusive alternative claims to
control over Government.".
==== 
Chalmers Johnson and societal values ====
For Chalmers Johnson, rebellions are not so
much the product of political violence or
collective action but in "the analysis of
viable, functioning societies". In a quasi-biological
manner, Johnson sees revolutions as symptoms
of pathologies within the societal fabric.
A healthy society, meaning a "value-coordinated
social system" does not experience political
violence. Johnson's equilibrium is at the
intersection between the need for society
adapt to changes but at the same time firmly
grounded in selective fundamental values.
The legitimacy of a political order, he posits,
relies exclusively on its compliance with
these societal values and in its capacity
to integrate and adapt to any change. Rigidity
is, in other words, inadmissible. Johnson
writes "to make a revolution is to accept
violence for the purpose of causing the system
to change; more exactly, it is the purposive
implementation of a strategy of violence in
order to effect a change in social structure".
The aim of a revolution is to re-align a political
order on new societal values introduced by
an externality that the system itself has
not been able to process. Rebellions automatically
must face a certain amount of coercion because
by becoming "de-synchronized", the now illegitimate
political order will have to use coercion
to maintain its position. A simplified example
would be the French Revolution when the Parisian
Bourgeoisie did not recognize the core values
and outlook of the King as synchronized with
its own orientations. More than the King itself,
what really sparked the violence was the uncompromising
intransigence of the ruling class. Johnson
emphasizes "the necessity of investigating
a system's value structure and its problems
in order to conceptualize the revolutionary
situation in any meaningful way".
==== Theda Skocpol and the Autonomy of the
State ====
Skocpol introduces the concept of the social
revolution, to be contrasted with a political
revolution. While the later aims to change
the polity, the former is "rapid, basic transformations
of a society's state and class structures;
and they are accompanied and in part carried
through by class-based revolts from below".
Social revolutions are grassroots movement
by nature because they do more than change
the modalities of power, they aim to transform
the fundamental social structure of society.
As a corollary, this means that some "revolutions"
may cosmetically change the organization of
the monopoly over power without engineering
any true change in the social fabric of society.
Her analysis is limited to studying the French,
Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Skocpol
identifies three stages of the revolution
in these cases (which she believes can be
extrapolated and generalized), each accordingly
accompanied by specific structural factors
which in turn influence the social results
of the political action.
The Collapse of the Old-Regime State: this
is an automatic consequence of certain structural
conditions. She highlights the importance
of international military and economic competition
as well as the pressure of the misfunctioning
of domestic affairs. More precisely, she sees
the breakdown of the governing structures
of society influenced by two theoretical actors,
the "landed upper class" and the "imperial
state". Both could be considered as "partners
in exploitation" but in reality competed for
resources: the state (monarchs) seek to build
up military and economic power to ascertain
their geopolitical influence. The upper class
works in a logic of profit maximization, meaning
preventing as much as possible the state to
extract resources. All three revolutions occurred,
Skocpol argues, because states failed to be
able to "mobilize extraordinary resources
from the society and implement in the process
reforms requiring structural transformations".
The apparently contradicting policies were
mandated by a unique set of geopolitical competition
and modernization. "Revolutionary political
crises occurred because of the unsuccessful
attempts of the Bourbon, Romanov, and Manchu
regimes to cope with foreign pressures." Skocpol
further concludes "the upshot was the disintegration
of centralized administrative and military
machineries that had theretofore provided
the sole unified bulwark of social and political
order".
Peasant Uprisings: more than simply a challenge
by the landed upper class in a difficult context,
the state needs to be challenged by mass peasant
uprisings in order to fall. These uprisings
must be aimed not at the political structures
per se but at the upper class itself, so that
the political revolution becomes a social
one as well. Skocpol quotes Barrington Moore
who famously wrote: "peasants [...] provided
the dynamite to bring down the old building".
Peasant uprisings are more effective depending
on two given structural socioeconomic conditions:
the level of autonomy (from both an economic
and political point of view) peasant communities
enjoy, and the degree of direct control the
upper class on local politics. In other words,
peasants must be able to have some degree
of agency in order to be able to rebel. If
the coercive structures of the state and/or
the landowners keep a very close check on
peasant activity, then there is no space to
forment dissent.
Societal Transformation: this is the third
and decisive step after the state organization
has been seriously weakened and peasant revolts
become widespread against landlords. The paradox
of the three revolutions Skocpol studies is
that stronger centralized and bureaucratic
states emerge after the revolts. The exact
parameters depend, again, on structural factors
as opposed to voluntarist factors: in Russia,
the new state found most support in the industrial
base, rooting itself in cities. In China,
most of the support for the revolt had been
in the countryside, thus the new polity was
grounded in rural areas. In France, the peasantry
was not organized enough, and the urban centers
not potent enough so that the new state was
not firmly grounded in anything, partially
explaining its artificiality.Here is a summary
of the causes and consequences of social revolutions
in these three countries, according to Skocpol:
=== Microfoundational evidence on causes ===
The following theories are all based on Mancur
Olson's work in The Logic of Collective Action,
a 1965 book that conceptualizes the inherent
problem with an activity that has concentrated
costs and diffuse benefits. In this case,
the benefits of rebellion are seen as a public
good, meaning one that is non-excludable and
non-rivalrous. Indeed, the political benefits
are generally shared by all in society if
a rebellion is successful, not just the individuals
that have partaken in the rebellion itself.
Olson thus challenges the assumption that
simple interests in common are all that is
necessary for collective action. In fact,
he argues the "free rider" possibility, a
term that means to reap the benefits without
paying the price, will deter rational individuals
from collective action. That is, unless there
is a clear benefit, a rebellion will not happen
en masse. Thus, Olson shows that "selective
incentives", only made accessible to individuals
participating in the collective effort, can
solve the free rider problem.
==== The Rational Peasant ====
Samuel L. Popkin builds on Olson's argument
in The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy
of Rural Society in Vietnam. His theory is
based on the figure of a hyper rational peasant
that bases his decision to join (or not) a
rebellion uniquely on a cost-benefit analysis.
This formalist view of the collective action
problem stresses the importance of individual
economic rationality and self-interest: a
peasant, according to Popkin, will disregard
the ideological dimension of a social movement
and focus instead on whether or not it will
bring any practical benefit to him. According
to Popkin, peasant society is based on a precarious
structure of economic instability. Social
norms, he writes, are "malleable, renegotiated,
and shifting in accord with considerations
of power and strategic interaction among individuals"
Indeed, the constant insecurity and inherent
risk to the peasant condition, due to the
peculiar nature of the patron-client relationship
that binds the peasant to his landowner, forces
the peasant to look inwards when he has a
choice to make. Popkin argues that peasants
rely on their "private, family investment
for their long run security and that they
will be interested in short term gain vis-à-vis
the village. They will attempt to improve
their long-run security by moving to a position
with higher income and less variance". Popkin
stresses this "investor logic" that one may
not expect in agrarian societies, usually
seen as pre-capitalist communities where traditional
social and power structures prevent the accumulation
of capital. Yet, the selfish determinants
of collective action are, according to Popkin,
a direct product of the inherent instability
of peasant life. The goal of a laborer, for
example, will be to move to a tenant position,
then smallholder, then landlord; where there
is less variance and more income. Voluntarism
is thus non-existent in such communities.
Popkin singles out four variables that impact
individual participation:
Contribution to the expenditure of resources:
collective action has a cost in terms of contribution,
and especially if it fails (an important consideration
with regards to rebellion)
Rewards : the direct (more income) and indirect
(less oppressive central state) rewards for
collective action
Marginal impact of the peasant's contribution
to the success of collective action
Leadership "viability and trust" : to what
extent the resources pooled will be effectively
used.Without any moral commitment to the community,
this situation will engineer free riders.
Popkin argues that selective incentives are
necessary to overcome this problem.
===== Opportunity cost of rebellion =====
Political Scientist Christopher Blattman and
World Bank economist Laura Alston identify
rebellious activity as an "occupational choice".
They draw a parallel between criminal activity
and rebellion, arguing that the risks and
potential payoffs an individual must calculate
when making the decision to join such a movement
remains similar between the two activities.
In both cases, only a selected few reap important
benefits, while most of the members of the
group do not receive similar payoffs. The
choice to rebel is inherently linked with
its opportunity cost, namely what an individual
is ready to give up in order to rebel. Thus,
the available options beside rebellious or
criminal activity matter just as much as the
rebellion itself when the individual makes
the decision. Blattman and Alston, however,
recognize that "a poor person's best strategy"
might be both rebellion illicit and legitimate
activities at the same time. Individuals,
they argue, can often have a varied "portofolio"
of activities, suggesting that they all operate
on a rational, profit maximizing logic. The
authors conclude that the best way to fight
rebellion is to increase its opportunity cost,
both by more enforcement but also by minimizing
the potential material gains of a rebellion.
===== Selective incentives based on group
membership =====
The decision to join a rebellion can be based
on the prestige and social status associated
with membership in the rebellious group. More
than material incentives for the individual,
rebellions offer their members club goods,
public goods that are reserved only for the
members inside that group. Economist Eli Berman
and Political Scientist David D. Laitin's
study of radical religious groups show that
the appeal of club goods can help explain
individual membership. Berman and Laitin discuss
suicide operations, meaning acts that have
the highest cost for an individual. They find
that in such a framework, the real danger
to an organization is not volunteering but
preventing defection. Furthermore, the decision
to enroll in such high stakes organization
can be rationalized. Berman and Laitin show
that religious organizations supplant the
state when it fails to provide an acceptable
quality of public goods such a public safety,
basic infrastructure, access to utilities,
or schooling. Suicide operations "can be explained
as a costly signal of “commitment” to
the community". They further note "Groups
less adept at extracting signals of commitment
(sacrifices) may not be able to consistently
enforce incentive compatibility." Thus, rebellious
groups can organize themselves to ask of members
proof of commitment to the cause. Club goods
serve not so much to coax individuals into
joining but to prevent defection.
===== Greed vs grievance model =====
World Bank economists Paul Collier and Anke
Hoeffler compare two dimensions of incentives:
Greed rebellion: "motivated by predation of
the rents from primary commodity exports,
subject to an economic calculus of costs and
a military survival constraint".
Grievance rebellion: "motivated by hatreds
which might be intrinsic to ethnic and religious
differences, or reflected objective resentments
such as domination by an ethnic majority,
political repression, or economic inequality".
The two main sources of grievance are political
exclusion and inequality.Vollier and Hoeffler
find that the model based on grievance variables
systematically fails to predict past conflicts,
while the model based on greed performs well.
The authors posit that the high cost of risk
to society is not taken into account seriously
by the grievance model: individuals are fundamentally
risk-adverse. However, they allow that conflicts
create grievances, which in turn can become
risk factors. Contrary to established beliefs,
they also find that a multiplicity of ethnic
communities make society safer, since individuals
will be automatically more cautious, at the
opposite of the grievance model predictions.
Finally, the authors also note that the grievances
expressed by members of the diaspora of a
community in turmoil has an important on the
continuation of violence. Both greed and grievance
thus need to be included in the reflection.
==== The Moral Economy of the Peasant ====
Spearheaded by political scientist and anthropologist
James C. Scott in his book The Moral Economy
of the Peasant, the moral economy school considers
moral variables such as social norms, moral
values, interpretation of justice, and conception
of duty to the community as the prime influencers
of the decision to rebel. This perspective
still adheres to Olson's framework, but it
considers different variables to enter the
cost/benefit analysis: the individual is still
believed to be rational, albeit not on material
but moral grounds.
===== Early conceptualization: E. P. Thompson
and bread riots in England =====
Before being fully conceptualized by Scott,
British historian E.P. Thompson was the first
to use the term "moral economy" in Moral Economy
of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.
In this work, he discussed English bread riots,
regular, localized form of rebellion by English
peasants all through the 18th century. Such
events, Thompson argues, have been routinely
dismissed as "riotous", with the connotation
of being disorganized, spontaneous, undirected,
and undisciplined. In other words, anecdotal.
The reality, he suggests, was otherwise: such
riots involved a coordinated peasant action,
from the pillaging of food convoys to the
seizure of grain shops. Here, while a scholar
such as Popkin would have argued that the
peasants were trying to gain material benefits
(crudely: more food), Thompson sees a legitimization
factor, meaning "a belief that [the peasants]
were defending traditional rights and customs".
Thompson goes on to write: "[the riots were]
legitimized by the assumptions of an older
moral economy, which taught the immorality
of any unfair method of forcing up the price
of provisions by profiteering upon the necessities
of the people". Later, reflecting on this
work, Thompson would also write: "My object
of analysis was the mentalité, or, as I would
prefer, the political culture, the expectations,
traditions, and indeed, superstitions of the
working population most frequently involved
in actions in the market". The opposition
between a traditional, paternalist, and the
communitarian set of values clashing with
the inverse liberal, capitalist, and market-derived
ethics is central to explain rebellion.
===== James C. Scott and the formalization
of the moral economy argument =====
In The Moral Economy of Peasant: Rebellion
and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, James C.
Scott looks at the impact of exogenous economic
and political shocks on peasant communities
in Southeast Asia. Scott finds that peasants
are mostly in the business of surviving and
producing enough to subsist. Therefore, any
extractive regime needs to respect this careful
equilibrium. He labels this phenomenon the
"subsistence ethic". A landowner operating
in such communities is seen to have the moral
duty to prioritize the peasant's subsistence
over his constant benefit. According to Scott,
the powerful colonial state accompanied by
market capitalism did not respect this fundamental
hidden law in peasant societies. Rebellious
movements occurred as the reaction to an emotional
grief, a moral outrage.
===== Other non-material incentives =====
Blattman and Ralston recognize the importance
of immaterial selective incentives, such as
anger, outrage, and injustice ("grievance")
in the roots of rebellions. These variables,
they argue, are far from being irrational,
as they are sometimes presented. They identify
three main types of grievance arguments:
Intrinsic incentives holds that "injustice
or perceived transgression generates an intrinsic
willingness to punish or seek retribution".
More than material rewards, individuals are
naturally and automatically prompted to fight
for justice if they feel they have been wronged.
The ultimatum game is an excellent illustration:
player one receives $10 and must split it
with another player who doesn't get the chance
to determine how much he receives, but only
if the deal is made or not (if he refuses,
everyone loses their money). Rationally, player
2 should take whatever the deal is because
it is better in absolute term ($1 more remains
$1 more). However, player 2 is most likely
unwilling to accept less than 2 or 2 dollars,
meaning that they are willing to pay a-$2
for justice to be respected. This game, according
to Blattman and Ralston, represents "the expressive
pleasure people gain from punishing an injustice".
Loss aversion holds that "people tend to evaluate
their satisfaction relative to a reference
point, and that they are 'loss adverse". Individuals
prefer not losing over the risky strategy
of making gains. There is a substantial subjective
part to this, however, as some may realize
alone and decide that they are comparatively
less well off than a neighbor, for example.
To "fix" this gap, individuals will in turn
be ready to take great risks so as to not
enshrine a loss.
Frustration-aggression: this model holds that
the immediate emotional reactions to highly
stressful environments do not obey to any
"direct utility benefit but rather a more
impulsive and emotional response to a threat".
There are limits to this theory: violent action
is to a large extent a product of goals by
an individual which are in turn determined
by a set of preferences. Yet, this approach
shows that contextual elements like economic
precarity have a non-negligible impact on
the conditions of the decisions to rebel at
minimum.
== Recruitment ==
Stathis N. Kalyvas, a political science professor
at Yale University, argues that political
violence is heavily influenced by hyperlocal
socio-economic factors, from the mundane traditional
family rivalries to repressed grudges. Rebellion,
or any sort of political violence, are not
binary conflicts but must be understood as
interactions between public and private identities
and actions. The "convergence of local motives
and supralocal imperatives" make studying
and theorizing rebellion a very complex affair,
at the intersection between the political
and the private, the collective and the individual.
Kalyvas argues that we often try to group
political conflicts according to two structural
paradigms:
The idea that political violence, and more
specifically rebellion, is characterized by
a complete breakdown of authority and an anarchic
state. This is inspired by Thomas Hobbes'
views. The approach sees rebellion as being
motivated by greed and loot, using violence
to break down the power structures of society.
The idea that all political violence is inherently
motivated by an abstract group of loyalties
and beliefs, "whereby the political enemy
becomes a private adversary only by virtue
of prior collective and impersonal enmity".
Violence is thus not a "man to man" affair
as much as a :state to state" struggle, if
not an "idea vs idea" conflict.Kalyvas' key
insight is that the central vs periphery dynamic
is fundamental in political conflicts. Any
individual actor, Kalyvas posits, enters into
a calculated alliance with the collective.
Rebellions thus cannot be analyzed in molar
categories, nor should we assume that individuals
are automatically in line with the rest of
the actors simply by virtue of ideological,
religious, ethnic, or class cleavage. The
agency is located both within the collective
and in the individual, in the universal and
the local. Kalyvas writes: "Alliance entails
a transaction between supralocal and local
actors, whereby the former supply the later
with external muscle, thus allowing them to
win decisive local advantage, in exchange
the former rely on local conflicts to recruit
and motivate supporters and obtain local control,
resources, and information- even when their
ideological agenda is opposed to localism".
Individuals will thus aim to use the rebellion
in order to gain some sort of local advantage,
while the collective actors will aim to gain
power. Violence is a mean as opposed to a
goal, according to Kalyvas.
The greater takeaway from this central/local
analytical lens is that violence is not an
anarchic tactic or a manipulation by an ideology,
but a conversation between the two. Rebellions
are "concatenations of multiple and often
disparate local cleavages, more or less loosely
arranged around the master cleavage". Any
pre-conceived explanation or theory of a conflict
must not be placated on a situation, lest
one will construct a reality that adapts itself
to his pre-conceived idea. Kalyvas thus argues
that political conflict is not always political
in the sense that they cannot be reduced to
a certain discourse, decisions, or ideologies
from the "center" of collective action. Instead,
the focus must be on "local cleavages and
intracommunity dynamics". Furthermore, rebellion
is not "a mere mechanism that opens up the
floodgates to random and anarchical private
violence". Rather, it is the result of a careful
and precarious alliance between local motivations
and collective vectors to help the individual
cause.
== See also ==
List of revolutions and rebellions
== Notes
