Description
The relationship between state’s conflict management strategies and the transformation of violence in intractable conflicts remains insufficiently theorised in conflict studies scholarship. While existing scholarship explains the rise and fall of armed violence and its various mobilisation strategies, they are unable to account for the transformation of armed violence to unarmed collective violence and civil resistance. This chapter fills this gap by arguing that the intensity of state repression and non-state actors' (militarised and civil) cohesion and fragmentation shapes the trajectory of their responses towards the state. By contrasting the histories of centre-periphery conflict in Pakistan's Balochistan and Indian-administered Kashmir, where armed insurgency exists with collective unarmed violence, this chapter provides the scope conditions under which armed insurgency dominates over unarmed violence and vice versa.
The chapter proceeds in three parts: First, it examines how state conflict management strategies reshape patterns of violence to identify similarities and differences between the two case studies. Second, it traces the emergence of unarmed collective violence and explains why they become popular during certain periods and not in others. Third, it shows how the coexistence of armed insurgency and unarmed collective violence has transformed the structure of conflict and the state’s response towards it.