A Protest-Cycle Resolution of the Repression/Popular-Protest Paradox

Abstract

Many people [in Guatemala] did begin to join the guerrillas, while many more were sympathetic or quietly supportive. The guerrillas are the only remaining source of defense left to a community or family. I know of villages that experienced actual massacres against innocentcampesinos, who were not even members of coops. The survivors of these massacres would often turn to the guerrillas. With all their anger about the murders of their kin and neighbors, there was nowhere else to turn. —quoted in S. Davis and J. Hodson,Witnesses to Political Violence in Guatemala Central american events of recent decades show human behavior at both its most courageous and its most barbaric. The opposing phenomena of popular mobilization and state terrorism pose some of the most profound questions that can be asked by social science. How can we explain the willingness of political elites and their agents to slay thousands—tens of thousands—of their fellow human beings, even when their victims are unarmed? Conversely, how do we account for ordinary people undertaking collective action under circumstances so dangerous that even their lives are at risk?

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