Elections and Violence: New Research on Actors, Targets, and Strategies

Overview

Elections are now held in many countries across the world; however, despite elections’ intended purpose as instruments of democracy and to allow for peaceful handover of power, electoral competition often turns violent before, during, or after elections. Our understanding of the relationship between elections and violence has improved greatly in recent years, benefitting from an explosion of cross-national and subnational research reflecting diverse methodological approaches. In this online research workshop, we aim to build on and expand this growing research agenda by identifying new questions arising from the diverse patterns of violence we observe. The workshop furthers our understanding of the actors, targets, and strategies of violence involved, and how such patterns differ across time and space.

The workshop prioritizes research that explores the role of actors that have received.  limited attention. These include the role of political parties, armed groups, criminal organizations, among other nonstate actors that at times violently mediate the relationship between politicians and citizens. Likewise, for targets, panels examine the geography of targeting, variation in targeting of candidates vs. voters, and gendered dimensions of violence. Under strategies, participants explore how politicians’ use of violence interacts with other strategies, including non-violent mobilization, and how violence varies in publicness and intensity. Finally, contributions examine particular regions, especially South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, but also regional contexts or historical periods that have seen less attention, including work that studies election violence in the Global North.

Event Images