Dissertation

The Role of Participatory Violence in Contentious Politics

Why do social movements embrace violence that is incongruous with, and often harmful to, their stated political aims?

I introduce participatory violence as an analytical lens for the intra-movement social dynamics that make disproportionate, theatrical violence rational for its participants even when it makes movement success less likely. Three chapters combine a formal model, three comparative case studies, and large-scale digital trace analysis of the online extreme right. Prospectus defended April 2026; expected defense May 2028.

Email about the project · Job market paper

The puzzle

Conventional accounts of social movements and terrorism hold that cohesion, organizational unity, and well-defined systems of resource mobilization are important — if not necessary — to achieve movement goals. A large literature on strategic nonviolence goes further: violent campaigns succeed less often than nonviolent ones, because violence alienates the public, forfeits sympathy during repression, and deters defections from state security forces.

Yet movements routinely orient themselves around violence, up to and including mass-casualty, gratuitous, and theatrical attacks far beyond what any strategic logic would predict to be useful. The perpetrators of the current wave of extreme-right apocalyptic violence are dispersed across the world, often know few fellow believers offline, and plan attacks independently with support coming only from online communities. During and after an attack, that community infrastructure comes alive to celebrate the violence, circulate artifacts associated with the perpetrator, and collectively decide how far to adopt the event into its canon.

If nonviolence works better, why do we see this? And why does the violence that movements do employ so often look nothing like what instrumental reasoning would recommend?

The argument

I define participatory violence as a repertoire of political violence in which the production of violent action, and of its meaning, is distributed across a large population of contributors who face low barriers to symbolic contribution and who materially co-determine the movement’s targets, tactics, aesthetics, and criteria of legitimacy. The line between audience and perpetrator blurs, and the process of making sense of one act of violence feeds into the next.

The key move is that participants accrue benefits — social, psychological, and political — that are decoupled from whether the movement achieves its stated objectives. Those incentives can diverge from, and even oppose, the movement’s near-term political goals. A movement can therefore rationally cultivate participatory violence while sacrificing ideological coherence and tactical coordination, because what it gets in return is resilience: the persistence of its repertoires, artifacts, and identity through time and space.

I use “participatory” in two senses at once. In the political science sense, it is participation in contentious politics that binds low-stakes acts — posting, celebrating, remixing — to a violent outcome. In the media studies sense, it is participatory culture: a collectivity with low barriers to entry, strong norms of sharing and remixing, genuine co-determination of the collective’s direction, mechanisms of generational transmission, and a distinctive interplay between personal and collective identity. Where participatory democratic theory explains why engaging whole communities in a political process produces benefits for participants, I argue that movements cultivate participatory violence for the same ends.

The framework draws on contentious politics, political psychology, and the study of political violence; on media and information studies of participatory culture; and on scholarship on performativity and theatrics in violence.

Chapters

Chapter 1: The logic of participatory violence

I survey the literature on contentious politics and the well-documented strategic advantages of nonviolence, then ask why movements nonetheless employ disproportionate violence. I distinguish conventional, instrumental political violence from participatory violence, broaden the conception of movement “goals” beyond near-term change to the state order — to individual- and network-level goals of propagation, cohesion, and mobilization — and formalize the argument.

  • Method: A formal model with five players — existing militants, internal audiences (from passive supporters to near-mobilized cells), external audiences, the regime, and regime support structures such as security forces.
  • Result: The model shows why a movement may embrace and promote “extra-lethal” violence even when it knows such acts make achievement of its immediate political goals less likely, provided participants can accrue participatory benefits from them.

Chapter 2: How participatory violence drives movement identity

Three case studies trace how participatory violence is cultivated and what it does to movements.

  • The Years of Lead (Italy). As the Strategy of Tension failed and state support fell away, neo-fascist militancy fragmented into “armed spontaneity” and embraced a radical apoliteia: violence for its own sake, indifferent to state capture. I show through historical analysis how this gave neo-fascist activism resilience to strategic failure that its instrumentally focused Marxist-Leninist rivals did not have — a clear case of participatory violence before the Internet.
  • The Arab Spring. Avidly nonviolent movements diverged sharply from those that embraced participatory violence in their relationships with security forces and in the long-term transmission of movement identity.
  • QAnon (United States and Canada). A decentralized, primarily online movement whose participatory structure explains its deep integration with acute antidemocratic action: the attempted insurrections in the United States (2021), Germany (2022), and Brazil (2023).

Chapter 3: Propagation and resilience via participatory violence

I use large-scale digital trace data to show the social-psychological “benefits” of participatory violence, focusing on apocalyptic neo-fascism as the interplay between attackers and the online communities that celebrate them (and of which the attackers are often members).

  • Data: A longitudinal, multi-platform database built from the platforms most strongly associated with these attackers — 4chan’s /pol/ board, Gab, and a subset of Telegram channels — paired with a novel dataset of mass-casualty attacks.
  • Methods: Transformer-based NLP to measure apocalyptic rhetoric, celebration, and canonization; intervention analysis and regression on the resulting time series.
  • Expected findings: Participatory characteristics of an attack — disproportionality, theatrics, the generation of shareable artifacts — strongly predict the level of celebration that follows it; and the processes of celebration and canonization drive the transmission of the movement’s symbols and iconography, linking participatory violence to the indicators of long-term resilience and propagation.

The job market paper, which shows apocalyptic rhetoric on /pol/ rising sharply in the immediate aftermath of mass-casualty attacks, is the first empirical piece of this chapter.

Contributions

  • Theoretical: A new lens on intra-movement social dynamics as a mechanism for violent action, connecting the strategic-nonviolence debate to the study of movement participants, networks, and cells that has largely unfolded in other disciplines.
  • Conceptual: A distinction between conventional and participatory political violence, and a definition of resilience — the persistence of repertoires, artifacts, and goals rather than of any particular organization — that fits movements with no organization to repress.
  • Empirical: A mixed-methods design that pairs a formal model with historical, comparative, and computational evidence, including transformer-based measures of celebration and canonization across eleven years of multi-platform text.
  • Policy: Efforts to mitigate political violence should account for the participatory infrastructure surrounding attacks — the communities that celebrate, remix, and canonize them — rather than only the perpetrators and organizations.

Student research involvement

Each chapter offers opportunities for undergraduate research assistants to contribute meaningfully:

  • Chapter 2 (Case studies): Archival and secondary-source research on the Years of Lead, the Arab Spring, and QAnon; structured coding of movement events and repertoires.
  • Chapter 3 (Digital trace): Annotation of posts for training the transformer-based classifiers, construction of the mass-casualty attack dataset, coding of attack characteristics, and validation of time-series measures.

I have supervised 52 undergraduate and graduate research assistants across my research career, and I actively seek to integrate students into all stages of the research process.

Committee

Co-Chairs:

Members:

  • Alexandra Siegel, Department of Political Science, CU Boulder
  • Brian Keegan, Department of Information Science, CU Boulder (external advisor)

Prospectus

The prospectus was defended on April 14, 2026. The project has since been reframed around participatory violence, and a revised prospectus reflecting the current design is in preparation. Email me for the current draft.

Timeline

Milestone Target date
Prospectus defense Completed (April 14, 2026)
Chapter 1 draft (logic and formal model) Fall 2026
Chapter 2 draft (case studies) Spring 2027
Chapter 3 draft (digital trace) Fall 2027
Revision and job market AY 2027–28
Defense May 2028

For questions about my dissertation research, contact alex.newhouse@colorado.edu.

Last updated: September 2026

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