Episode 8: How to Undercut Political Violence

Jay Ulfelder:
You are listening to the Nonviolent Action Lab podcast. I’m your host, Jay Felder. He him together with Harvard Kennedy School Professor Erica Chenoweth, and other members of the Nonviolent Action Lab Team. Each episode we bring you the latest research, insights and ideas on how nonviolent action can or sometimes fails to transform injustice. It’s Tuesday, September 24th, 2024, and I’m talking this afternoon with Hardy Merman about hope, not the emotion in this case, but a recently published guide called Harnessing Our Power to End Political Violence. Hardy’s the author of that guide, which is freely downloadable@endpoliticalviolence.org. For over two decades, Hardy’s worked in the field of civil resistance, focusing on how people can organize and mobilize to advance rights, freedom and justice in countries around the world. He’s president of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, but he does his work on countering political violence in the US in an independent capacity, working closely with Horizon’s Project, the 22nd Century initiative and other allies. So Hardy, thanks for making time to talk with me today.

Hardy Merriman:
Thank you, Jay. It’s good to be here.

Jay Ulfelder:
Now let’s start by establishing our terms. When you say political violence, what do you mean? What kinds of threats or actions did you have in mind when you were writing this guide?

Hardy Merriman:
Sure. So it’s a very simple definition of political violence is basically violence to advance the political goal or send a political message. And then getting a little more specific. I count violence not just as physical acts that intend to hurt or injure someone, but also acts that create the fear of physical injury. So those would be threats, various forms of intimidation, doxing, which for those who don’t know, is posting someone’s personal contact information online so others become more likely to threaten them. All of those would count as acts of violence under my definition. But then there’s the question of what makes violence political? Because we have so many different forms of violence in the United States. We have violent crime, we have structural violence, we have psychological violence, domestic violence, terrorism, hate crimes, so many different kinds and all of these different kinds of violence have political implications.

But what makes violence, political violence is the political intention of the perpetrator. We look at the motive of the perpetrator and when that motive is really clearly to again, send a political message or advance a political goal, then we label it as political violence. There are some gray areas. It’s not always clear what the intent is of an individual and there’s no one sort of perfect criteria or definition for assessing it. But this is how we sort of look at political violence as actually a subset of many forms of violence by looking at the motive of the perpetrator.

Jay Ulfelder:
And I appreciate the attention to threats I feel like, and some of the work we’ve done, and for example in the last couple of years, looking at organization from the right against drag story hours for example, there are a lot of threats and they’ve had a lot of effects on the behavior of people intimidating them out of things they would like to be doing, but that doesn’t show up in lots of conventional ways of counting political violence. So I appreciate the attention of that here.

Hardy Merriman:
I mean, threats are, we have an epidemic of threats in the United States right now. So depending on how one defines political violence, precisely, you could say we have a significant problem of physical political violence or not. I would argue that our actual, the number of people who are getting physically injured or hurt for their political activities or views is still relatively low in this country for a country of 330 million people. But the threats have skyrocketed,
And you don’t need that many acts of physical, political violence to make the threats seem credible. And so threats are doing a huge amount of damage. The government is limited in what it can do about threats because of First Amendment protections. And so part of the motivation for the harnessing our power and political violence project and the guide is to say, communities have a really big role in pushing back against threats and other forms of political violence. We want to advance that perspective and give communities tools and methodologies that we know have worked in other parts of the world to deal with injustice and political violence.

Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah, I was going to ask why write this guide now? And I think that you were just getting it part of that, but was that the primary trend you were interested in? Are there others or were you thinking a lot about this year’s elections and possible aftermath? What’s the this now?

Hardy Merriman:
Well, I think after the 2020 election presidential election, it was encouraging to see how many people really change their views to say, my gosh, it can happen here. Our democracy is weak. It can crumble. It can be attacked in ways that shake it to its foundation. And so after, by early 2021, there was a real growing emphasis among funders and civil society organizations to do something about US democracy, which is great and strengthen it. And so at the time, I remember thinking particularly around political violence is in the wake of January 6th, there were lots of top-down measures and judicial measures, excuse me, investigations by the Justice Department and ideas for what social media companies could do to get at political violence. And for me, as someone who focuses on movements, I thought, what’s the bottom up component here?

Top-down alone is not going to do it. And ironically, the people who are really clear that top down alone is not enough, are people who actually work in police and justice department. I mean, there’s a quote from a capitol police psychologist who said, we can’t arrest our way out of this problem because the threats are growing so much. And again, because they’re protected, the vast majority of them don’t get prosecuted. And so for me, in the Horizons Project in 22nd century initiative, we thought, look, this is one of the ways that democracy can really get damaged in which authoritarianism is advanced. There are hundreds of millions of Americans who oppose political violence. The polls tell us that it’s a really high 80 plus percent of Democrats, republicans, and independents oppose it, and yet they’re not given a lot of guidance on how to use that power on how to use their power on what to do about it. And so again, the idea was top down alone is not enough. Let’s focus on bottom up and let’s see what we can do here.

Jay Ulfelder:
Right? Yeah. And so the heart of the guide is a set of five principles people can use to try to make political violence backfire. Before we talk about the principles though, can you talk a little bit about why you framed the task that way as making political violence backfire rather than say preventing or stopping it?

Hardy Merriman:
Yeah, absolutely. My view is that, look, political violence is used to achieve specific political goals. So there are some actors who are using it quite rationally. They have political goals and they see political violence as a means to get there. And a lot of times when an incident happens, we’ll focus, especially an incident that involves physical political violence, it’ll be a great deal of focus on the particular assailant, but not nearly as much focus on the ecosystem and enablers and people who incited that assailant, right? In a sense, there really is there any real lone wolf. They exist in a context that enables and norms certain behaviors and pushes people towards violence. And so if we take a step back, we can see that there are in insiders who are these sort of political entrepreneurs who are actually profiting the most from creating a toxic polarization. They’re getting followers. Sometimes they’re monetizing their follower base, so they’re doing great in terms of their political power and economic power from actually doing a lot of damage to democracy. And the minute an attack comes that hits the news, they can distance themselves from it and say, well, we didn’t do it.
And then there are threat makers of which there are plenty who also have some rational actor sort of qualities because either they’re doing it because it makes them feel powerful or they’re doing it because it makes them feel part of a group, or they’re doing it because they have specific political goals that they want to advance. And then yes, then there are some who actually move from threat making to actual enactment. And communities can deal with try to shift the cost benefit analysis of insiders and threat makers. I don’t know that communities can deal with people who have decided they’re going to take violent action. I think that is a problem for the government to handle. But I think with regards to changing the cost benefit calculation of in insiders and threat makers, communities can do quite a bit.

Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah. So okay, I mentioned the five principles here. Could you go ahead and let us know what those are?

Hardy Merriman:
Sure. Yeah. So the five principles come from the work of scholar Brian Martin and others who looked at examples around the world of where injustice backfired, as well as examples where it didn’t. And backfire, just to be clear, is basically when an attack has the opposite effect of what a perpetrator intends, that’s what backfire is. And so they found that often backfire doesn’t happen. Often, perpetrators of human rights, abuse or torture or other violence get away with it without paying an adequate cost, but there are cases where they don’t. And so what’s the difference maker there? And what they came away with was identifying first five steps that perpetrators use to try to inhibit backfire, to try to inhibit outrage. And then they found the counterpart to that, which is the five steps that movements can take to try to increase backfire or increase outrage. And so to run through, it’s easiest to look at this as strategic interaction.

And so the five steps that are used to try to inhibit outrage, which are familiar to everyone when I say them, is the first is coverup, right? Perpetrators will try to cover up what they did. If that fails, they have to have some kind of communication strategy. So they’ll try to dehumanize their victim. That’s their second strategy to try to say that the victim has low social worth and therefore is not worth caring about. The third thing they’ll do is they’ll try to reinterpret what happened, and there’s a number of different ways they can do this. One is they can try to minimize claim that the harm done wasn’t that significant. So we know for example, that threats of political violence actually do a lot of damage, but because they leave no physical trace, a perpetrator can say, what harm did I really do?

Or conversely, in the case of people who incite political violence, they could say, yeah, I didn’t actually make the threat, so I’m just going to distance myself from it. I’m going to reinterpret this whole thing, right? Or some might say, yes, some damage was done, but it was necessary to achieve justice or restore order, or whatever rationale they do. So they reinterpret the whole thing as justified. The fourth step that perpetrators use to try to inhibit outrageous, when it comes to the point that someone calls for an investigation, they try to control the investigation, they’re going to try to keep investigations closed, they’re going to try to keep them not independent. So for example, the police investigating themselves, they’re going to try to make them very technical so that the public can’t really get access to them, or there’s tight controls over who can provide testimony or they’re difficult to follow with the hope that by the time that the investigation concludes up, the public will have moved on. There won’t be a lot of interest in the outcome at that point, and certainly not a lot of mobilization. And then the fifth thing that perpetrators do is they use additional threats, or conversely, they’ll use rewards or bribes to try to get people to remain silent. So that’s the perpetrator playbook. And what’s interesting is it’s used by autocratic regimes. It’s used in democracies, it’s used in workplaces, it’s used at a micro scale, it’s used at a macro scale.

Those sort of five methods are remarkably present across lots of different contexts. So then how do movements counter them? The first step, of course, is we call this, they’re sort of five steps. We call them the five Rs. The first is to reveal, right? You counter cover up by revealing. Now with political violence, it’s tricky to reveal. One of the goals of political violence is to make people afraid. So if you share the details of a particular threat, some of these threats are really scary. You can actually inadvertently do the work of the threat maker by making the public more afraid. So it’s important when we apply this to a political violence context that you reveal at the time and place and manner of your choosing if you reveal it, for example, when there’s multiple community members behind you of who represent different respected groups or different bridges to different constituencies in the community, you reveal it in a way that shows that the community is united and wants to counter political violence. That can be really powerful. So those are some of the implications we think about with the first R reveal. The second is redeem, right? You have to counter attempts at dehumanization. So here you have to bridge the victim’s values and actions with the broader community and show that actually they’re not that different than anyone else in the community. They stand for the same things that the community does. They are somebody’s child. They may have children of their own, they have friends, they have a family.

And so do the things that actually show that the victim, that this was totally unjustified and that this victim really could have been any of us. So the third is to reframe, and this is what you do to counter reinterpretation. And reframing involves developing a narrative and the narrative should say what the damage was that was done. And with political violence, you can focus on the damage that was done to the individual, but also you can focus on it as an attack on a community as a whole or an attack on democracy and society as a whole. Political violence is an attack on any of those three things or all of them. So your narrative could emphasize any or all of those aspects of the damage done. It also has to emphasize who the perpetrator was. And here you get to decide. You don’t just have to focus on one individual.

You could focus on the enablers, you could focus on the insiders, and then it also has to focus on what the solution is that you want. What are you demanding now? And so it takes work to reframe effectively. And one thing about that activists sometimes encounter is it seems self-evident to them why something is outrageous, why something is abusive, why something isn’t injustice, and they don’t realize that it’s not necessarily obvious to everyone else, right? You have powerful perpetrators that are using their megaphone and misinformation sometimes and willing to lie and spread rumors to try to devalue victims and reinterpret things as justifiable. It takes work to break through that noise even when something seems clear cut. One other thing I’ll say about reframing is it’s important in the reframing process not to make sure that your attempts at developing a narrative don’t end up backfiring against you. And so for example, if you reframe in a way that shows a desire for a certain kind of vengeance, suddenly you could act fire methods applied against you by the perpetrator. And in fact, that’s what they’ll try to do. If they can portray you actually as a public threat, they will do that. And so it’s important to understand that part and parcel of this extremist political violence rhetoric is the idea that there is an existential threat of them somewhere, and that them, that it’s irreconcilable. We cannot live with them. It’s us or them. We cannot coexist.

What they don’t want is a counter narrative that actually says, we can coexist, actually. We can coexist. Actually. We respect everyone’s right to have views, even views that we abhor, but we have no tolerance for violence. Violence is outside of the democratic bargain, it’s outside of how we do things in this country. It is a total attack on the Constitution and it’s intolerable. And so it’s important that it’s challenging when people have been traumatized, understandably traumatized by prejudice, by repeated attacks, by racism. And at the same time, it’s important to understand that the perpetrators have a game plan and they have a way of framing things. And again, if they can try to frame you as a threat, they will do that and try to energize their base in response.

The fourth then is what we call redirect. So what perpetrators will do, we talked about if there’s an institutional process, they’ll basically try to make sure it’s closed, not independent. Technocratic. It takes a long time. It’s tricky because with political violence, sometimes government or other institutional processes can be helpful. Sometimes they’re done in good faith. Government is not necessarily the enemy here. And so if there’s a good faith institutional process, if you’re a community activist, maybe you want to participate in it. However, it’s important to remember that even a good faith community process can still inhibit public mobilization. It can still inhibit backfire because again, even when they’re done with the best of intentions, they take a long time, even when they’re done with the best of intentions, they can be technocratic even when they’re done with the best of intentions, abuse and injustice can be pardoned because of a technicality that had to do with process rather than substance.

And so you can engage in those kinds of institutional processes, but don’t rely on them for justice. To get justice, you also need to keep the heap, the issue alive in the public mind. You could provide, for example, a public running commentary of institutional processes to keep it so that they can run, but also keep the public mobilized. You could make demands of institutional processes. That’s another mobilizing opportunity. The key here again, is finding other tactics, other ways to exert pressure without just relying on institutions. And then the last, and I know this is a long answer, Jay, but

Jay Ulfelder:
No, go answer

Hardy Merriman:
The last, again, the last R is resist, right? We’ve got to resist more threats and resist rewards. And here there’s sort of two e tests that I want to emphasize that community activists will encounter. The first is the test of solidarity. What threat makers and purveyors of political violence will do is they’ll often try to single out a few groups or a few individuals and really target them to see if everyone else will stand by them or will get intimidated and back away. They will try to break solidarity because let’s be really clear, there are many, many more of us than there are of them. There are many more of us that are against political violence that are for, they’re only strong when they can separate us. So they will really try to single out a few and scare everyone off.
It’s really critical once you start trying to make political violence backfire to show solidarity, it’s really important to firm up your alliances and say, okay, we’re in this together all for one, one for all. We’re not going to back down. The second test is the test of nonviolent discipline. They will try to provoke, they will try to provoke you to say things that can discredit you, or they can allow them to portray you as a threat, or they will actually try to provoke you into physical violence, even if you feel it’s justified. That is also a test. Why are they trying to provoke you? Because they know that if they can get you, they can use it to their advantage and try to weaken what you’re doing. And that in the resist phase, it’s really critical to be prepared for that. One of the nice things about the backfire framework is because perpetrator behavior is so predictable, we can actually start to game out the things they’re going to say and the things they might try to do ahead of time and be prepared for ’em. So that’s the framework and that’s what we discuss in depth in the guide.

Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah. When you were talking about the reveal part, I was thinking about a dynamic. I often see social media around events where threats are being made or marches by white supremacist groups or that kind of thing, where some accounts have an incentive to blast this stuff out there and make it look really frightening and terrible. And there’s this kind of tension between this is important information to share, but you’re also really scaring people in ways that are kind of amplifying and doing the work of the folks engaged in the action. You’re spotlighting, and it’s a tricky tension to balance.

Hardy Merriman:
Absolutely. It’s so important to remember what a majority of Americans do not support political violence. And when I talk about 80 or 85% that oppose it, that doesn’t mean even the other 15% support it. There’s an interesting data I looked at that basically looks at surveyed the same population four times over a period of several years, and there they only found people who consistently supported political violence. The same people consistently supporting it across four surveys was about two and a half percent of those surveys. So it’s really about a small minority trying to get really loud, scare everyone and take over and circumvent the democratic process.

Jay Ulfelder:
There

Hardy Merriman:
Are so many more of us than there are of them, and that’s where our strength is. That’s where our power is.

Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah. Does it matter that some of the, or how does it matter that some of the organizations and individuals fomenting the kind of violence in the ways you’re describing and are very deep pocketed and powerful in this country lately? So I’m thinking of maybe it’s Fox News repeatedly playing B role of certain from protests in 2020 to make it seem like half the country’s on fire or a sitting president or a candidate for president making implicit or explicit threats of violence. Does the playbook work under those circumstances? How does that matter here?

Hardy Merriman:
It matters, and it’s hard, right? I mean, the thing is, is that those who are profiting from this have had years and years of getting pretty good at it.
And so no, they have some structural advantages. They understand human psychology, they understand their base. They’ve had years of priming their base for certain views or increasing their receptivity to certain views. So it is hard. It’s an uphill challenge. None of this is necessarily easy, and yet there are great examples that I think we can build from and highlight. First of all, there’s just the five step framework, which we found has worked in many, many parts of the world, and I see no reason why it can’t work here, but it does take work. It’s not just automatic. It takes strategizing and community organizing. But the second thing is we can look at cases and so for example, and bring more attention to them. So just yesterday I was looking at an article about how in light of the threats that have taken place against populations in Springfield, Ohio, more people are going to Haitian restaurants now intentionally to show support donations to organizations that support the Haitian community, and others are going up. So people are saying, we want to do something. This is important. This is exactly the kind of stuff that shows that political violence doesn’t need to have the last word.

There’s another case, we talk about it sometimes in Whitefish, Montana. In 2017 when you had businesses that were getting harassed, you had media portraying whitefish increasingly as a sort of a place where there was more white nationalism and extremism, which ran the risk of driving on tourism in the town among the many other problems with it. So businesses weren’t happy about that. And then what did people do? People started, again, frequenting the businesses that were targeted. They would, whether it was buying more or whether it was writing positive reviews about them online after trolls would knock them down. Then they had businesses put messages of tolerance on their windows to show that as one of the entities that was active in Whitefish was called Love lives here. And so they love lives here would organize actions showing welcome actions, showing the community working together, actions showing inclusivity.

When a march was called for armed groups to be in Whitefish in 2017, the march was supposed to take place on Martin Luther King Day, and you had labor groups, you had indigenous groups, you had local groups, you had grocery from out of town and others who all came together to say, no, this is not happening here. And when the march was supposed to happen, the marchers didn’t even show up. The community was so organized. So we have examples. There’s examples from Germany too, of people countering Nazi marches in one, well-known example, organizers who had tried to stop Nazi marches in their town for years by protesting, split the script and then said, you know what? We know your exact route. We’re going to paint a starting line, an ending line, a midway point, and we’re going to turn your march into a walk-a-thon, where we’re going to pledge more money to deradicalizing organizations for every meter you walk. We’re even going to cheer you on because the more you walk, the more we’re going to donate. And that worked. So communities have power here. They can do things, and so yet there are plenty who are not going to cover that. It’s up to us to elevate those examples and show communities that they hold more cards than they think they do if they choose to use them.

Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah. Well, you essentially anticipated the next question I was going to ask you, which was about recent examples, and I think that’s really important for people to get a feel for what this looks like in practice, how people get themselves organized to do these things. I also wanted to ask in the guide, you mentioned or observed that democracy depends on several institutional pillars, including the right to free expression and assembly. I wonder about people who feel like these rights are under attack, not by non-state actors, but by the state itself. So let’s say by police who aggressively or selectively repress certain kinds of protests or by elected officials who are stoking fear or threatening violence in their area. Do you think the same principles apply for folks in those situations? If can’t appeal to the state, you see them as part of the problem? Or does that require different solutions?

Hardy Merriman:
I think these principles absolutely apply. I mean, these principles have been used to counter brutality by state security forces in other parts of the world. They could work against police brutality here.
And the thing about the five principles, I mean, I went on for a long time about them, but the thing is that once you hear them, you’re like, yeah, right, that makes sense. Of course, you’re putting words to something I’ve observed before. They’re not actually that they’re not difficult to understand. They’re not excessively scholarly. Yes, scholars identified them and name them, but basically this is stuff that anyone can grasp and start to game plan against. I think we need people with more of a mindset of being first responders or human rights first responders, where when they see an injustice, they can start thinking, okay, what are the five principles? If I’m on the scene, how can I start thinking about how to frame? And along these five principles, how can I start thinking about what the other side might do so that we’re not playing catch up a week later when the other side inevitably uses the same playbook to try to inhibit outrage?

Jay Ulfelder:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, this has been really enlightening. I enjoyed reading through and learning from this guide. Again, I’ll let people know this is freely downloadable@endpoliticalviolence.org. Anything else you want to tell us about the guide or other things you’re working on right now, Hardy?

Hardy Merriman:
No, thank you so much, Jay. And I would just add that I really, nothing exists in a vacuum. I was privileged to be able to be supported in writing this guide, but the partners with whom I’ve worked, again, Horizon’s Project 22nd Century Initiative and other allies have been fantastic. They’re really leading sort of an organizing component of this now, including offering trainings, which you can request on end political violence.org. So download the guide. There should be hopefully video soon, other learning resources, trainings are already on offer. We’re serious about this. We want to take this to the next level, and we would love to meet any or all who hear this and want to join. So thank you.

Jay Ulfelder:
Terrific. Alright. Thanks so much, Hardy.

Hardy Merriman:
Alright, thanks.

Jay Ulfelder:
Bye-Bye bye. Thank you for listening to the Nonviolent Action Lab podcast, hosted by me Jay Felder and produced at the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. Please rate and review us. Wherever you listen. You can find more information about the Nonviolent Action Lab and links to our work in the show notes below. See you next time.