expelling their government. As a result of these characteristics, violent and nonviolent individuals from Germany can serve as a control group, checking on the findings obtained for the individuals from Egypt. Specifically, studying violent and nonviolent individuals from Germany ensures that results are not subject to individuals who believe in Islam and live in a state that is authoritarian or suffers from economic hardship.
Most of the individuals I study in this book were living in hiding or persecuted by the government at the time I conducted field research for this study (2009–2010). Specifically, the formerly violent individuals I met in Egypt are members of al-Jamaʿat al-Islamiyya and al-Jihad. These groups are responsible for numerous attacks on the Egyptian state, including the assassination of President Sadat in 1981. After the assassination, most of the members of these groups were imprisoned, but some were released a few years later. Some of them, including Ayman al-Zawahiri, left Egypt to unite with other individuals abroad, where they helped form al-Qaeda. Most of them, however, spent decades in Egyptian prisons, where they were often tortured and isolated from their families for extended periods of time. At the end of the 1990s, al-Jamaʿat al-Islamiyya announced an initiative to end violence, which encouraged the state to begin releasing its members from prison. At the time I conducted research for this book, some of them had just been released, which allowed me to contact them in private and try to set up meetings. Although they were usually highly reluctant to talk with me, some agreed to meet with me and, after many hours together, let me ask questions about why they had decided to take up arms.
The nonviolent individuals I interviewed in Egypt are members of the Muslim Brotherhood. At the time I conducted field research, President Husni Mubarak was still in power and the Muslim Brotherhood was his largest opposition. The movement was outlawed and its members were persecuted, although they were allowed to run in the elections as independents. Most of the nonviolent individuals I met had spent time in prison and experienced torture as well. All of them believed they could be arrested and imprisoned because of their resistance to the state. As a result, many of them were difficult to locate and highly reluctant to speak with me.
In Germany, I interviewed formerly violent individuals from the Red Army Faction and Bewegung 2. Juni. The Red Army Faction was the most violent or ga ni za tion in Germany after World War II and responsible for the killing of dozens of people between 1971 and 1993. Bewegung 2. Juni was active during the same period, but since it killed only two people, it received much less attention. Although they are no longer persecuted by the state, the members of these groups receive a lot of media attention, especially related to attacks that remain unresolved (for example, the assassination of German attorney general Siegfried Buback). These individuals were also very difficult to locate, and highly reluctant to speak with me. Dozens refused to be interviewed for this study, but those who agreed gave me the chance to ask questions about their actions for many hours.
The nonviolent individuals I interviewed in Germany are from the Socialist German Student Union and Kommune 1. These groups developed as part of the worldwide student revolts that broke out at the end of the 1960s, and became the major drivers of these protests in Germany. While many of these individuals were under surveillance during and after the student revolts, they were living ordinary lives at the time I conducted field research. Most were even mentioned in the phone book, which made it easy to locate and establish contact with them. With the exception of one individual, none asked to remain anonymous.
Before elaborating on the analysis of these individuals, the following pages further introduce the subject of this book: they critique the existing literature on political violence, develop several working hypotheses that serve as an analytical framework for this study, and define violent and nonviolent activism.
Studying Beliefs Related to Political Violence
This book contributes to the study of beliefs related to political behavior. Beliefs can be considered “the set of lenses through which information concerning the physical and social environment is received” (Holsti 1962: 245), and have been a powerful tool to understand political behavior. Focusing on the actors’ perspective on the world, beliefs contribute to studies of structural factors, which cannot by themselves explain human behavior (see Young 1996: 395). As Jonathan Renshon observes, “In the context of political decision making, leaders react not to an objective reality but to a subjective reality that is filtered through their belief system” (Renshon 2008: 822, my italics).
The study of beliefs originated in the field of foreign policy analysis (George 1969; Holsti 1962; Leites 1953). Although it has spread to other fields including public opinion or voting behavior (Caplan 2007; Page and Shapiro 1992), there are only a few studies about the beliefs connected to political violence.1 Due to this gap, we have very little knowledge about the subjective reality to which violent individuals react, and about whether the external categories presented by existing studies of political violence actually matter from the actors’ own perspective. This gap not only prevents us from understanding the rich microlevel mechanisms that drive the people who engage in political violence, but also from comparing the motivations underlying political violence as opposed to other types of behavior, such as nonviolent activism.
This book explores the beliefs of violent individuals and compares them with the beliefs of nonviolent individuals. This exploration suggests that, unlike what is widely assumed, the motivations underlying extremist behavior such as violence and mainstream behavior such as nonviolent activism appear to be rather similar. Specifically, I find that both violent and nonviolent individuals act in response to particular beliefs about aggressive state behavior. This implies that rather than being crazy religious fanatics, violent individuals are not that different from nonviolent individuals and engage in very similar reasoning processes.
These findings put into perspective existing explanations of political violence that apply external categories of research. In the following paragraphs, I elaborate on these theories and explain how this book contributes to them by investigating the beliefs of violent individuals. Rather than offering a comprehensive overview of the vast literature on political violence, I focus on theories that continue being examined in the major political science publications and that speak to the belief systems literature by implying that violent individuals hold certain beliefs (although they do not explicitly explore the subjective reality of violent individuals). I proceed by providing brief introductions to each theory, commenting on its limits, and explaining the contribution of this book.
Cultural-Psychological Theories
Cultural-psychological theories are arguably the most famous type of theories about the beliefs of violent individuals. Focusing on religion, they imply that violent individuals are motivated by religious beliefs.
In “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Bernard Lewis (1990) argues that “Islam, like other religions has also known periods when it inspired in some of its followers a mood of hatred and violence”—an argument Samuel Huntington later developed into the theory of the “clash of civilizations” (1993). In spite of their publicity, cultural-psychological theories have been widely disputed. On the one hand, the claim that religion matters to violence has been supported. As Jessica Stern has pointed out, violent individuals are “spiritually intoxicated” and engage in violence “to ‘cleanse’ the world of ‘impurities’” (2003: 281; cf. Juergensmeyer 2009).
On the other hand, recent findings have questioned the role of religious beliefs. “Large-scale political violence is not disproportionately common or deadly in Muslim lands,” Fish, Jensenius, and Michel (2010: 1342) conclude in a statistical analysis building on Monty Marshall’s Major Episodes of Political Violence dataset. At the same time, the authors note that this finding does not provide information about the motivations of individuals (1342). In a statistical analysis of two distinct datasets and an independent sample of Muslims and Jews, Canetti et al. (2010) have explored these motivations. They find that religion does not directly encourage individuals to take up arms, and that “the relationship between religion
