How do social movement organizations adopt violence as a tactic? And how do they abandon violence as a tactic? These questions pertain to wide-ranging phenomena, from street protest to insurgency, which in our days are no less prevalent and important than in earlier historical periods. But posing "how questions" with respect to these phenomena leads to a particular kind of inquiry – a processual inquiry – that differs from the more commonplace inquiry that poses "why questions." This presentation will maintain that to offer systematic description of such phenomena is to explain such phenomena, and will argue that a conceptual framework that enables such description has lessons to offer to policy concerned with promoting deradicalization.
Chares Demetriou is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow. He holds a PhD degree in sociology (Columbia University 2005) and lower degrees in political science. His work covers social movement radicalization and deradicalization, political violence legitimization, transgressive politics of identity, and post-conflict state reconstruction, among other topics. He is co-author of Dynamics of Radicalization: A Relational and Comparative Perspective (Oxford University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Dynamics of Political Violence: A Process-Oriented Perspective on Radicalization and the Escalation of Conflict (Ashgate Press, 2014).