ABSTRACT
Introduction How do violent political movements transform in conflict and post-conflict environments? This is the question at the core of the transformations occurring around the world – from Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the Taliban in Afghanistan to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and Sinn Féin (SF ) in Northern Ireland to Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador to the African National Congress (ANC) and Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) in South Africa. Exploring the “how” is the focus of this work. All one has to do is open the newspaper, listen to the radio, or turn on the television and people are bombarded with scenes of violence. Much of this is interpersonal violence associated with criminal activity. Yet people are also flooded with images of civil wars, terrorist attacks, and inter-state wars.1 From the end of World War II till 1990, many events in the world centered on the bipolar struggle between the United States and the USSR. Though numerous civil wars occurred during the Cold War era, many of these conflicts went virtually unnoticed unless they were linked to the Cold War struggle for ideological dominance.2 In the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, intra-state conflicts were prevalent around the globe. As noted by Collier et al., 21 civil wars began after 1989.3 As a result of these civil wars alone, approximately 20 million people were killed and 67 million people displaced.4 These intra-state conflicts ranged across the international community, from Afghanistan to Angola to Yugoslavia to Georgia, as shown in Appendix A, p. 192.5 As illustrated by Appendix A, the phenomenon of intra-state struggle is not a recent occurrence found only in the post-Cold War era. According to a dataset collected by Håvard Strand at the Centre for the Study of Civil War (ICWS), located at the International Peace Research Institute (PRIO), from 1945 to 2011 there were 169 recorded struggles between opposing organizations and the government of a state. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the number of struggles between a state government and an opposing force grew exponentially. As delineated in Table 1.1, most of these intra-state struggles were initiated between 1989 and 1999. Along with the occurrence of civil wars, a variety of violent political movements also emerged. From 1945 to 2011, the struggles included approximately 337 different organizations and defined rebellious movements.6
