Causes of Political Violence

Why This Matters

Political violence takes many forms: terrorism, civil war, revolution, ethnic conflict. It's one of the most consequential outcomes you'll study in comparative politics. The AP exam expects you to go beyond identifying that violence occurs and explain why it emerges in some contexts and not others. That means connecting structural conditions like state capacity, regime type, economic development, and social cleavages to the likelihood of violent conflict.

These causes also help you analyze the six AP course countries comparatively. Why did Nigeria experience civil war while Mexico's drug violence takes a different form? Why do some authoritarian regimes face revolution while others maintain stability? Don't just memorize a list of causes. Know which theoretical framework each cause represents and be ready to apply them to specific country cases on the FRQ.

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Structural Economic Grievances

Economic conditions create the underlying frustrations that can push populations toward violence. Relative deprivation theory is the key framework here: people rebel not when they're at their poorest, but when they perceive a gap between what they have and what they believe they deserve.

Economic Inequality and Poverty

• Relative deprivation: when marginalized groups see growing gaps between themselves and elites, resentment builds even if absolute conditions are improving. The gap itself is what matters.
• Horizontal inequality refers to inequality between identity groups rather than between individuals. This form is especially dangerous because it politicizes economic grievances along ethnic or religious lines, giving groups a shared sense of injustice.
• Resource curse dynamics in oil-rich states like Nigeria show how concentrated wealth fuels both corruption and violent competition for state control. Revenue flows to whoever holds power, so the stakes of political competition become enormous.

Resource Scarcity and Competition

• Environmental stress: competition over water, arable land, and grazing rights intensifies as populations grow and climate patterns shift.
• Pastoral-farmer conflicts in Nigeria's Middle Belt are a clear example of how resource competition intersects with ethnic and religious identity to produce sustained violence. These aren't purely "economic" disputes; they get layered with identity grievances.
• Weak property rights in fragile states mean groups cannot resolve resource disputes through legal channels, making violence a rational alternative when no court or institution can enforce a fair outcome.

Youth Unemployment and Lack of Opportunities

• Youth bulge theory: societies with large populations of unemployed young men face elevated risks of political violence and recruitment into armed groups. The demographic pressure alone doesn't cause violence, but it creates a large pool of potential recruits.
• Opportunity costs for joining violent movements drop dramatically when legitimate economic pathways are blocked. If you have no job and no realistic prospect of one, the cost of picking up a weapon is much lower.
• Urban migration concentrates frustrated youth in cities where they can be mobilized more easily. Iran's 1979 revolution and the Arab Spring protests both drew heavily on young, urban populations with blocked aspirations.

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State Weakness and Institutional Failure

When states cannot perform basic functions (providing security, delivering services, mediating disputes), violence often fills the vacuum. State capacity is the central concept: the ability of a government to effectively implement policies and maintain order across its territory.

Weak State Institutions and Governance

• Security vacuum: when states cannot monopolize legitimate force, armed groups, militias, and criminal organizations compete for territorial control. Think of northern Nigeria, where Boko Haram exploited the government's inability to project power.
• Corruption erodes legitimacy by signaling that the state serves elite interests rather than the public good. Citizens who see the state as predatory have less reason to invest in peaceful politics.
• Failed mediation: without functioning courts and bureaucracies, grievances that could be resolved institutionally instead escalate. Violence becomes a dispute-resolution mechanism.

Political Repression and Lack of Civil Liberties

• Authoritarian backlash: regimes that suppress dissent through force often radicalize the very opposition movements they're trying to crush. When people see no peaceful path to change, some turn to violence.
• Closed political systems (no free elections, banned parties, censored media) eliminate legitimate channels for grievances. If you can't vote, protest, or publish, violence starts to look like the only option with any chance of working.
• State violence begets opposition violence in an escalation cycle where repression and resistance feed each other. Syria after 2011 is a textbook case: peaceful protests met with military force eventually transformed into armed rebellion.

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Identity-Based Mobilization

Violence becomes more likely when political entrepreneurs mobilize populations along ethnic, religious, or ideological lines. Social cleavages don't automatically produce conflict. They become dangerous when they're politicized and when they overlap with other grievances like economic inequality or political exclusion.

Ethnic and Religious Tensions

• Politicized identity: ethnic and religious differences don't inherently cause violence. They become dangerous when leaders deliberately exploit them to mobilize supporters or scapegoat rivals. The violence is a political choice, not an inevitable result of diversity.
• Historical discrimination creates grievance narratives that can be reactivated during political crises. Biafran separatism in Nigeria, for example, drew on Igbo experiences of marginalization and the 1966 pogroms.
• Institutional design matters: federal systems, consociational arrangements (power-sharing among identity groups), and electoral rules can either manage or inflame identity-based competition. Nigeria's federal structure was partly designed to contain ethnic tensions, with mixed results.

Ideological Extremism

• Framing grievances: extremist ideologies provide narratives that justify violence as necessary, righteous, or divinely mandated. The ideology transforms personal frustration into a cause worth fighting for.
• Recruitment pipelines exploit existing frustrations (economic, political, identity-based) and channel them toward radical action. Groups like Boko Haram or ISIS don't create grievances from scratch; they redirect them.
• Transnational networks and social media allow ideologies to spread rapidly across borders, connecting local grievances to global movements like jihadism or far-right nationalism.

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Historical and External Factors

Violence rarely emerges from nowhere. It builds on historical legacies and responds to international pressures. Path dependence helps explain why some conflicts persist across generations: early decisions and events constrain later possibilities.

Historical Grievances and Unresolved Conflicts

• Colonial legacies: arbitrary borders, divide-and-rule policies, and extraction-focused institutions created fault lines that persist in post-colonial states. Nigeria's borders, for instance, grouped together hundreds of ethnic groups with little shared political identity.
• Cycles of violence: past atrocities create trauma and desire for revenge that political entrepreneurs can reactivate decades later. Memory of past violence becomes a tool for future mobilization.
• Transitional justice choices: how societies address past violence (trials, truth commissions, amnesty) shapes whether grievances heal or fester. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission represents one approach; Rwanda's gacaca courts represent another.

External Intervention and Foreign Influence

• Proxy conflicts: great power competition can transform local disputes into prolonged wars by providing arms, funding, and diplomatic cover to opposing sides. Cold War-era conflicts in Africa and Latin America followed this pattern.
• Sovereignty violations through military intervention can destabilize entire regions and create power vacuums. Libya after the 2011 NATO intervention is a clear example: removing the regime without building replacement institutions led to prolonged civil war.
• Diaspora financing and foreign sanctuary for rebel groups can sustain conflicts that might otherwise burn out from exhaustion or lack of resources.

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Rapid Change and Disruption

Sudden transformations can overwhelm existing institutions and social arrangements, creating instability even in previously stable societies. Modernization theory and its critics debate whether development reduces or temporarily increases violence risks. The short answer: rapid change can do both, depending on whether institutions can keep up.

Rapid Social and Economic Changes

• Disrupted livelihoods: globalization, technological change, and structural adjustment programs can devastate traditional economies faster than new opportunities emerge. The transition period is when violence risk peaks.
• Urbanization pressures: rapid rural-to-urban migration strains housing, services, and social cohesion, concentrating grievances in volatile urban spaces where mobilization is easier.
• Institutional lag: political systems often cannot adapt quickly enough to manage new social demands. This creates representation gaps where large segments of the population feel unheard, fueling protest and, potentially, violence.

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Quick Reference Table

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Self-Check Questions

1. Which two causes of political violence both stem from economic grievances but operate through different mechanisms, one emphasizing relative frustration and one emphasizing absolute deprivation?

2. How does the distinction between weak states and repressive states help explain why political violence takes different forms in Nigeria versus Iran?

3. Compare and contrast ethnic mobilization and ideological extremism as causes of violence. Under what conditions might they overlap or reinforce each other?

4. If an FRQ asks you to explain why a country experienced civil war, which causes would you prioritize if the country recently gained independence from colonial rule and has significant oil wealth?

5. Using the concept of political opportunity structure, explain why political repression sometimes prevents violence and sometimes provokes it. What factors determine the outcome?