Busher and Bjørgo (2020) ‘Restraint in Terrorist Groups and Radical Milieus.’
Citation: Busher, Joel and Bjørgo, Tore (2020) ‘Restraint in Terrorist Groups and Radical Milieus: Towards a Research Agenda,’ Perspectives on Terrorism, Vol. 14, No. 6, pp. 2-12.
Time Period Covered:
Theory, Research Question, Hypothesis:
Relationship to Other Research/Ideas Contested/Noted Gaps:
Busher and Bjørgo (2020): Existing literature has paid less attention to why groups and individuals do not carry out more violence than they do, particularly when they possess the capacity; where the issue has received attention, it has largely focused on questions of effectiveness. Argue this neglect is problematic if theory should be able to explain absent or weak cases as well as strong ones.
Busher and Bjorgo (2020): Call for greater attention to be paid to the question of why groups do not carry out more violence than they do, rather than interrogating the more traditional question of why they are violent in the first place. Even the literature on the strategic rationale for non-violence tells us little about restraint as a process. There is a dominance of binaries (violent v. non-violent, radical v. non-radical).
Concepts and Definitions:
Busher and Bjørgo (2020:3): Restraint: “a process whereby militants choose to drop, downscale or limit an attack or campaign, or adopt tactical or strategic innovations that lead them away from violence, whether that is due to the perceived risk of failure, anticipation of harsh government repression, concern about a possible backlash from their constituency, moral concerns, or a matter of tactical preference.” Restraint may be externally or internally imposed. It concerns holding back from violence, not necessarily non-violence, and so can apply across groups that display different levels of violence.
Method:
Primary/Original Data:
Argument/Conclusion:
Limitations/Flaws:
Abstract: Questions about why and how terrorist groups, radical milieus and the individuals that comprise them do not carry out more violence than they do – particularly when they apparently have the ability and opportunity to do so – have tended to receive less scholarly attention than questions about what leads towards violence or why it abates. Yet if we look closely at almost any group, we can usually find evidence of some kind of restraint taking place, whether in the form of limitations on what or who is deemed an ‘appropriate’ target, or placing limits on the scale or style of violence that militants should deploy. This Special Issue of Perspectives on Terrorism, for which this article comprises the introduction, responds to this state of affairs by bringing together a series of articles that focus specifically on the issue of restraint within terrorist groups and radical milieus. This article provides a brief conceptual sketch of restraint, and makes the case that paying greater attention to restraint can offer rich rewards for researchers, policymakers and practitioners concerned with understanding and responding to political violence associated with terrorist groups and radical milieus, as well as other forms of political violence.
Notes:
Busher and Bjorgo (2020): Emphasise that actors can choose to engage in less violence, i.e. reduced violence cannot be attributed purely to externally imposed constraints.