Violence and Regime Stability: A Conceptual and Experimental Approach

This paper identifies the absence of a clear concept of violence as an obstacle to research on its causes and consequences. Standard practice in the proliferating literatures on political violence is to use damage measured in casualties as a surrogate. But damage can be produced nonviolently and, depending on how it is theorized, violence, per se, might not result in damage. After analyzing the costs of avoiding the conceptual and definitional problems involved in the study of violence, we present a concept of violence that can be directly and unambiguously operationalized as a sudden and drastic increase in the scale of negative values at stake in an encounter. The paper reports the results of computer assisted agent-based modeling experiments designed to evaluate the consistency, transparency, precision, and heuristic power of thinking about violence in this way. The substantive focus of these experiments is the relationship between violence and the integrity of political regimes within whose ambit it occurs. Results of the experiments are reported and analyzed in terms of intuitions and expectations about the relationship between violence and regime stability. These findings are interpreted as corroboration of the plausibility and promise of the paper’s conceptualization of violence.