Ted Robert Gurr (February 21, 1936 – November 25, 2017) was an American author and professor of political science who most notably wrote about political conflict and instability. His widely translated book Why Men Rebel (1970) emphasized the importance of social psychological factors ( relative deprivation ) and ideology as root sources of political violence. He was Distinguished University Professor emeritus at the University of Maryland and consulted on projects he established there. He died in November 2017.
61-708: The Mashpee Woodland Revolt or Mashpee Revolt was a non-violent, 1833–1834 uprising of the Mashpee people against white inhabitants in New England . A group of the Mashpee Wampanoags traveled to Boston to seek justice for settler encroachments. William Apess was one of their leaders. This article relating to the Indigenous peoples of North America is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . This Massachusetts -related article
122-437: A 1965 book that conceptualizes the inherent problem with an activity that has concentrated costs and diffuse benefits. In this case, the benefits of rebellion are seen as a public good , meaning one that is non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Indeed, the political benefits are generally shared by all in society if a rebellion is successful, not just the individuals that have partaken in the rebellion itself. Olson thus challenges
183-514: A grassroots movement by nature because they do more than change the modalities of power, they aim to transform the fundamental social structure of society. As a corollary, this means that some "revolutions" may cosmetically change the organization of the monopoly over power without engineering any true change in the social fabric of society. Her analysis is limited to studying the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions. Skocpol identifies three stages of
244-593: A laborer, for example, will be to move to a tenant position, then smallholder , then landlord; where there is less variance and more income. Voluntarism is thus non-existent in such communities. Popkin singles out four variables that impact individual participation: Without any moral commitment to the community, this situation will engineer free riders. Popkin argues that selective incentives are necessary to overcome this problem. Political Scientist Christopher Blattman and World Bank economist Laura Ralston identify rebellious activity as an "occupational choice". They draw
305-557: A lecturer and Visiting Scholar at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Gurr has written or edited more than twenty books and monographs. Most recent was Peace and Conflict 2012, with University of Maryland co-authors J. Joseph Hewitt and Jonathan Wilkenfeld . He and Monty G. Marshall established this biennial report series in 2001 to provide scholars, analysts and journalists with current information on global conflict trends and risks of future instability. Earlier editions documented
366-446: A parallel between criminal activity and rebellion, arguing that the risks and potential payoffs an individual must calculate when making the decision to join such a movement remains similar between the two activities. In both cases, only a selected few reap important benefits, while most of the members of the group do not receive similar payoffs. The choice to rebel is inherently linked with its opportunity cost , namely what an individual
427-431: A peasant, according to Popkin, will disregard the ideological dimension of a social movement and focus instead on whether or not it will bring any practical benefit to him. According to Popkin, peasant society is based on a precarious structure of economic instability. Social norms, he writes, are "malleable, renegotiated, and shifting in accord with considerations of power and strategic interaction among individuals" Indeed,
488-500: A perceived inequality or marginalization. The word "rebellion" comes from Latin "re" + "bellum," and, in Lockian philosophy, refers to the responsibility of the people to overthrow unjust government . An insurrection is an armed rebellion. A revolt is a rebellion with an aim to replace a government, authority figure, law, or policy. If a government does not recognize rebels as belligerents then they are insurgents and
549-412: A position with higher income and less variance". Popkin stresses this "investor logic" that one may not expect in agrarian societies, usually seen as pre-capitalist communities where traditional social and power structures prevent the accumulation of capital. Yet, the selfish determinants of collective action are, according to Popkin, a direct product of the inherent instability of peasant life. The goal of
610-496: A rational, profit maximizing logic. The authors conclude that the best way to fight rebellion is to increase its opportunity cost, both by more enforcement but also by minimizing the potential material gains of a rebellion. The decision to join a rebellion can be based on the prestige and social status associated with membership in the rebellious group. More than material incentives for the individual, rebellions offer their members club goods , public goods that are reserved only for
671-471: A system's value structure and its problems in order to conceptualize the revolutionary situation in any meaningful way". Skocpol introduces the concept of the social revolution, to be contrasted with a political revolution. While the latter aims to change the polity, the former is "rapid, basic transformations of a society's state and class structures; and they are accompanied and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below". Social revolutions are
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#1732790087879732-408: A voice of anger that manifests itself against the established order. More precisely, individuals become angry when they feel what Gurr labels as relative deprivation , meaning the feeling of getting less than one is entitled to. He labels it formally as the "perceived discrepancy between value expectations and value capabilities". Gurr differentiates between three types of relative deprivation: Anger
793-415: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Uprising Rebellion is a violent uprising against one's government. A rebel is a person who engages in a rebellion. A rebel group is a consciously coordinated group that seeks to gain political control over an entire state or a portion of a state. A rebellion is often caused by political, religious, or social grievances that originate from
854-434: Is a normal and endogenous reaction to competition for power between different groups within society. "Collective violence", Tilly writes, "is the product of just normal processes of competition among groups in order to obtain the power and implicitly to fulfill their desires". He proposes two models to analyze political violence: Revolutions are included in this theory, although they remain for Tilly particularly extreme since
915-415: Is at the intersection between the need for society to adapt to changes but at the same time firmly grounded in selective fundamental values. The legitimacy of political order, he posits, relies exclusively on its compliance with these societal values and in its capacity to integrate and adapt to any change. Rigidity is, in other words, inadmissible. Johnson writes "to make a revolution is to accept violence for
976-611: Is continued by a research team at the University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM), provides data for his and others’ analyses of the causes and management of ethnopolitical protest and rebellion, most recently in Peoples versus States: Minorities at Risk in the New Century and Ethnic Conflict in World Politics, coauthored with Barbara Harff. In 1994-95 Gurr helped establish
1037-416: Is heavily influenced by hyperlocal socio-economic factors, from the mundane traditional family rivalries to repressed grudges. Rebellion, or any sort of political violence, are not binary conflicts but must be understood as interactions between public and private identities and actions. The "convergence of local motives and supralocal imperatives" make studying and theorizing rebellion a very complex affair, at
1098-472: Is not always political in the sense that they cannot be reduced to a certain discourse, decisions, or ideologies from the "center" of collective action. Instead, the focus must be on "local cleavages and intracommunity dynamics". Furthermore, rebellion is not "a mere mechanism that opens up the floodgates to random and anarchical private violence". Rather, it is the result of a careful and precarious alliance between local motivations and collective vectors to help
1159-422: Is not taken into account seriously by the grievance model: individuals are fundamentally risk-averse. However, they allow that conflicts create grievances, which in turn can become risk factors. Contrary to established beliefs, they also find that a multiplicity of ethnic communities make society safer, since individuals will be automatically more cautious, at the opposite of the grievance model predictions. Finally,
1220-457: Is ready to give up in order to rebel. Thus, the available options beside rebellious or criminal activity matter just as much as the rebellion itself when the individual makes the decision. Blattman and Ralston, however, recognize that "a poor person's best strategy" might be both rebellion illicit and legitimate activities at the same time. Individuals, they argue, can often have a varied "portofolio" of activities, suggesting that they all operate on
1281-467: Is that violence is not an anarchic tactic or a manipulation by an ideology, but a conversation between the two. Rebellions are "concatenations of multiple and often disparate local cleavages, more or less loosely arranged around the master cleavage". Any pre-conceived explanation or theory of a conflict must not be placated on a situation, lest one will construct a reality that adapts itself to his pre-conceived idea. Kalyvas thus argues that political conflict
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#17327900878791342-510: Is thus comparative. One of his key insights is that "The potential for collective violence varies strongly with the intensity and scope of relative deprivation among members of a collectivity". This means that different individuals within society will have different propensities to rebel based on the particular internalization of their situation. As such, Gurr differentiates between three types of political violence: In From Mobilization to Revolution , Charles Tilly argues that political violence
1403-742: The University of Colorado at Boulder (1984–88). In 1968 Gurr was asked to join the staff of the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence , established by President Lyndon B. Johnson after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy . He teamed with historian Hugh Davis Graham to prepare the 1969 report Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, which
1464-580: The 2004 Stockholm International Forum on the Prevention of Genocide, an international conference hosted by the Foreign Ministry of Sweden. In 2002 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Sofia , Bulgaria. In 2004-05 he organized a workshop on economic roots of terrorism for the Club of Madrid 's International Summit on Democracy , Terrorism and Security , which was convened by
1525-539: The Marxist interpretation of rebellion. Rebellion is studied, in Theda Skocpol 's words, by analyzing "objective relationships and conflicts among variously situated groups and nations, rather than the interests, outlooks, or ideologies of particular actors in revolutions". Karl Marx 's analysis of revolutions sees such expression of political violence not as anomic, episodic outbursts of discontents but rather
1586-593: The Spanish Foreign Ministry to commemorate the first anniversary of the Madrid train bombings in March 2004. His recent projects included periodic assessments of risks of genocide and politicide , with Barbara Harff, and a comparative study of "unholy alliances" between terrorists and international criminal networks, with Lyubov Mincheva of the University of Sofia. In 2012 Gurr accepted an offer to be
1647-718: The State Failure Task Force (now the Political Instability Task Force ) at the request of Vice President Gore's office, to provide global risk assessments of impending intrastate conflicts. He continued to serve as senior consultant to the task force under the George W. Bush administration and the Obama administration. Gurr was a member of a network of scholars concerned with risks and prevention of genocide since 2001, and participated in
1708-449: The assumption that simple interests in common are all that is necessary for collective action . In fact, he argues the " free rider " possibility, a term that means to reap the benefits without paying the price, will deter rational individuals from collective action. That is, unless there is a clear benefit, a rebellion will not happen en masse. Thus, Olson shows that "selective incentives", only made accessible to individuals participating in
1769-409: The assumptions of an older moral economy, which taught the immorality of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions by profiteering upon the necessities of the people". In 1991, twenty years after his original publication, Thompson said that his, "object of analysis was the mentalité , or, as [he] would prefer, the political culture, the expectations, traditions, and indeed, superstitions of
1830-546: The authors also note that the grievances expressed by members of the diaspora of a community in turmoil has an important on the continuation of violence. Both greed and grievance thus need to be included in the reflection. Spearheaded by political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott in his book The Moral Economy of the Peasant , the moral economy school considers moral variables such as social norms, moral values, interpretation of justice, and conception of duty to
1891-447: The bourgeoisie. In Marx's theory, revolutions are the "locomotives of history" because revolution ultimately leads to the overthrow of a parasitic ruling class and its antiquated mode of production. Later, rebellion attempts to replace it with a new system of political economy, one that is better suited to the new ruling class, thus enabling societal progress. The cycle of revolution, thus, replaces one mode of production with another through
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1952-507: The business of surviving and producing enough to subsist. Therefore, any extractive regime needs to respect this careful equilibrium. He labels this phenomenon the "subsistence ethic". A landowner operating in such communities is seen to have the moral duty to prioritize the peasant's subsistence over his constant benefit. According to Scott, the powerful colonial state accompanied by market capitalism did not respect this fundamental hidden law in peasant societies. Rebellious movements occurred as
2013-415: The cause. Club goods serve not so much to coax individuals into joining but to prevent defection. World Bank economists Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler compare two dimensions of incentives: Vollier and Hoeffler find that the model based on grievance variables systematically fails to predict past conflicts, while the model based on greed performs well. The authors posit that the high cost of risk to society
2074-409: The challenger(s) aim for nothing less than full control over power. The "revolutionary moment occurs when the population needs to choose to obey either the government or an alternative body who is engaged with the government in a zero-sum game. This is what Tilly calls "multiple sovereignty". The success of a revolutionary movement hinges on "the formation of coalitions between members of the polity and
2135-621: The collective effort, can solve the free rider problem. Samuel L. Popkin builds on Olson's argument in The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam. His theory is based on the figure of a hyper rational peasant that bases his decision to join (or not) a rebellion uniquely on a cost-benefit analysis. This formalist view of the collective action problem stresses the importance of individual economic rationality and self-interest:
2196-427: The collective imaginary. For example, the development of the bourgeoisie class went from an oppressed merchant class to urban independence, eventually gaining enough power to represent the state as a whole. Social movements, thus, are determined by an exogenous set of circumstances. The proletariat must also, according to Marx, go through the same process of self-determination which can only be achieved by friction against
2257-422: The community as the prime influencers of the decision to rebel. This perspective still adheres to Olson's framework, but it considers different variables to enter the cost/benefit analysis: the individual is still believed to be rational, albeit not on material but moral grounds. British historian E.P. Thompson is often cited as being the first to use the term "moral economy", he said in his 1991 publication that
2318-442: The constant class friction. In his book Why Men Rebel , Ted Gurr looks at the roots of political violence itself applied to a rebellion framework. He defines political violence as: "all collective attacks within a political community against the political regime , its actors [...] or its policies. The concept represents a set of events, a common property of which is the actual or threatened use of violence". Gurr sees in violence
2379-473: The constant insecurity and inherent risk to the peasant condition, due to the peculiar nature of the patron-client relationship that binds the peasant to his landowner, forces the peasant to look inwards when he has a choice to make. Popkin argues that peasants rely on their "private, family investment for their long run security and that they will be interested in short term gain vis-à-vis the village. They will attempt to improve their long-run security by moving to
2440-483: The contenders advancing exclusive alternative claims to control over Government.". For Chalmers Johnson, rebellions are not so much the product of political violence or collective action but in "the analysis of viable, functioning societies". In a quasi-biological manner, Johnson sees revolutions as symptoms of pathologies within the societal fabric. A healthy society, meaning a "value-coordinated social system" does not experience political violence. Johnson's equilibrium
2501-423: The contrary, such riots involved a coordinated peasant action, from the pillaging of food convoys to the seizure of grain shops. A scholar such as Popkin has argued that peasants were trying to gain material benefits, such as more food. Thompson sees a legitimization factor, meaning "a belief that [the peasants] were defending traditional rights and customs". Thompson goes on to write: "[the riots were] legitimized by
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2562-627: The decision to enroll in such high stakes organization can be rationalized. Berman and Laitin show that religious organizations supplant the state when it fails to provide an acceptable quality of public goods such a public safety, basic infrastructure, access to utilities, or schooling. Suicide operations "can be explained as a costly signal of "commitment" to the community". They further note "Groups less adept at extracting signals of commitment (sacrifices) may not be able to consistently enforce incentive compatibility." Thus, rebellious groups can organize themselves to ask of members proof of commitment to
2623-456: The former rely on local conflicts to recruit and motivate supporters and obtain local control, resources, and information- even when their ideological agenda is opposed to localism". Individuals will thus aim to use the rebellion in order to gain some sort of local advantage, while the collective actors will aim to gain power. Violence is a mean as opposed to a goal, according to Kalyvas. The greater takeaway from this central/local analytical lens
2684-516: The global decline in internal wars during the 1990s and the ascendancy of negotiated agreements for managing ethnic and other internal conflicts. His latest academic book, coauthored with Lyubov Mincheva, is Crime-Terror Alliances and the State (2013) He also coauthored two books in genealogy and social history, Coming of Age in the West 1883-1906 and A Gurr Family Odyssey, with Paul Magel. Gurr held
2745-442: The individual cause. Rebel governance is the development of institutions, rules and norms by rebel groups with an intent to regulate civilians' social, economic and political life, usually in areas under the territorial control of the rebel groups. Rebel governance may include systems of taxation, regulations on social conduct, judicial systems, and public goods provision. One third of rebel leaders who sign peace agreements with
2806-516: The intersection between the political and the private, the collective and the individual. Kalyvas argues that we often try to group political conflicts according to two structural paradigms: Kalyvas' key insight is that the central vs periphery dynamic is fundamental in political conflicts. Any individual actor, Kalyvas posits, enters into a calculated alliance with the collective. Rebellions thus cannot be analyzed in molar categories, nor should we assume that individuals are automatically in line with
2867-441: The members inside that group. Economist Eli Berman and Political Scientist David D. Laitin's study of radical religious groups show that the appeal of club goods can help explain individual membership. Berman and Laitin discuss suicide operations, meaning acts that have the highest cost for an individual. They find that in such a framework, the real danger to an organization is not volunteering but preventing defection. Furthermore,
2928-631: The now illegitimate political order will have to use coercion to maintain its position. A simplified example would be the French Revolution when the Parisian Bourgeoisie did not recognize the core values and outlook of the King as synchronized with its own orientations. More than the King itself, what really sparked the violence was the uncompromising intransigence of the ruling class. Johnson emphasizes "the necessity of investigating
2989-419: The opposition movement saw itself not only as nonviolent, but also as upholding their country's constitutional system against a government that was unlawful, for example, if it had refused to acknowledge its defeat in an election. Thus the term rebel does not always capture the element in some of these movements of acting to defend the rule of law and constitutionalism. The following theories broadly build on
3050-571: The owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers". The conflict that arises from producers being dispossessed of the means of production, and therefore subject to the possessors who may appropriate their products, is at the origin of the revolution. The inner imbalance within these modes of production is derived from the conflicting modes of organization, such as capitalism emerging within feudalism, or more contemporarily socialism arising within capitalism. The dynamics engineered by these class frictions help class consciousness root itself in
3111-435: The purpose of causing the system to change; more exactly, it is the purposive implementation of a strategy of violence in order to effect a change in social structure". The aim of a revolution is to re-align a political order on new societal values introduced by an externality that the system itself has not been able to process. Rebellions automatically must face a certain amount of coercion because by becoming "de-synchronized",
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#17327900878793172-470: The reaction to an emotional grief, a moral outrage. Blattman and Ralston recognize the importance of immaterial selective incentives, such as anger, outrage, and injustice ("grievance") in the roots of rebellions. These variables, they argue, are far from being irrational, as they are sometimes presented. They identify three main types of grievance arguments: Stathis N. Kalyvas, a political science professor at Yale University, argues that political violence
3233-407: The rest of the actors simply by virtue of ideological, religious, ethnic, or class cleavage. The agency is located both within the collective and in the individual, in the universal and the local. Kalyvas writes: "Alliance entails a transaction between supralocal and local actors, whereby the former supply the later with external muscle, thus allowing them to win decisive local advantage, in exchange
3294-429: The revolt is an insurgency . In a larger conflict the rebels may be recognized as belligerents without their government being recognized by the established government, in which case the conflict becomes a civil war . Civil resistance movements have often aimed at, and brought about, the fall of a government or head of state, and in these cases could be considered a form of rebellion . In many of these cases,
3355-496: The revolution in these cases (which she believes can be extrapolated and generalized), each accordingly accompanied by specific structural factors which in turn influence the social results of the political action: Here is a summary of the causes and consequences of social revolutions in these three countries, according to Skocpol: The following theories are all based on Mancur Olson 's work in The Logic of Collective Action ,
3416-419: The state experience exile, imprisonment, or unnatural death while two thirds go into regular politics or pursue further rebellion. Ted Robert Gurr Before joining the University of Maryland faculty in 1989 Gurr held academic positions at Princeton University (1965–69), Northwestern University (1970–83), where he was Payson S. Wild Professor and chair of the political science department (1977–80), and
3477-550: The symptomatic expression of a particular set of objective but fundamentally contradicting class-based relations of power. The central tenet of Marxist philosophy, as expressed in Das Kapital , is the analysis of society's mode of production (societal organization of technology and labor) and the relationships between people and their material conditions. Marx writes about "the hidden structure of society" that must be elucidated through an examination of "the direct relationship of
3538-595: The term had been in use since the 18th century. In his 1971 Past & Present journal article, Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century , he discussed English bread riots, and other localized form of rebellion by English peasants throughout the 18th century. He said that these events have been routinely dismissed as "riotous", with the connotation of being disorganized, spontaneous, undirected, and undisciplined. He wrote that, on
3599-400: The two dozen Ph.D.'s whose doctoral work he has supervised. The Polity data is widely used by researchers and government agencies to track democratization and to assess the stability of contemporary regimes. The Minorities at Risk project, which he began in 1985, assesses the political status and activities of more than 300 ethnic and religious minorities world-wide. The MAR project, which
3660-661: The working population most frequently involved in actions in the market". The opposition between a traditional, paternalist, and the communitarian set of values clashing with the inverse liberal, capitalist, and market-derived ethics is central to explain rebellion. In his 1976 book The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia , James C. Scott looks at the impact of exogenous economic and political shocks on peasant communities in Southeast Asia. Scott finds that peasants are mostly in
3721-525: Was widely publicized and published in many editions, the last of them in 1989, Violence in America, vol. 1, The History of Crime, and vol. 2, Protest, Rebellion, Reform. The Polity study , begun by Gurr in the late 1960s, profiles the democratic and autocratic traits of all regimes worldwide from 1800 to the present. The project is now directed by Dr. Monty G. Marshall of the Center for Systemic Peace, one of
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