Pathways to political violence and peaceful protest in conflict-affected environments

Abstract

Why do some individuals embrace violence as a political means — often at extreme personal cost — while others in similar circumstances pursue moderate protest or remain politically inactive? This fundamental question is of considerable importance as violent conflict remains a threat to social cohesion worldwide. Yet recent meta-analyses highlight a dearth of robust research on the psychological drivers of political violence, particularly among some of the populations most affected by its consequences. Moreover, fewer than 12% of contemporary studies employ inferential statistical methods, constraining their reliability and capacity for theory-building. This thesis is an attempt to fill this gap by extending collective action concepts into the domain of political violence. Although three factors — moral outrage, perceived efficacy, and group identification — have been demonstrated as pathways towards lower-risk protest forms, this research examines their differential role in translating grievances into high-risk political action in conflict-affected environments, where participation costs are especially pronounced. This framework is tested across four studies involving fieldwork and the collection of large-scale, quantitative data in six populations in the Middle East (total N = 13,370). Each chapter advances the broader analysis in methodological or thematic aspects. Study I employs geospatial methods to examine how the presence of Israeli settlements in the West Bank shifts Palestinian protest behaviour from moderate towards confrontational and violent forms. Study II isolates a novel cognitive tendency in outgroup motive attributions among Jewish Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza during an ongoing period of extreme violence. This ‘hate-love bias’ works alongside other psychological and ideological factors explaining how ordinary people can come to support violence against civilians that they would normally deplore. Studies III and IV directly test the collective action models: first, to predict extreme commitment and costly sacrifice among combatants in armed opposition groups during the Syrian civil war; and second, in the context of political protest intentions in Iraq and Lebanon. The thesis also integrates qualitative findings from several years of fieldwork and interviews that inform and contextualise the analysis. Across the studies, moral outrage consistently outweighed social identity and instrumental beliefs about group efficacy in explaining individual engagement in high-risk protest and political violence. Efficacy retained a motivational effect only for lower-risk actions; identification with various target groups had largely no influence. By integrating these deviations from existing theory, this thesis formulates a ‘divergent pathways’ framework of collective action in which instrumental and moral reasoning jointly drive lower-risk protest; yet as actions become riskier, instrumental motives weaken while moral motives become central. Building on critiques of rational actor assumptions, this research clarifies engagement mechanisms in collective political violence, pointing to behavioural science levers for effective responses to an enduring social challenge.