Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies: Threshold of Violence (ARIS)

Threshold of Violence is the shortest volume in the ARIS series and one of the most directly useful. It asks how much force a resistance movement can use before the population it depends on turns against it, and what movements do to move that limit. This page records what the document is, what it contains, where it came from, and links the full text hosted by The Resistance Hub.

What this document is

Violence is a double-edged instrument for any movement fighting an asymmetric conflict against a stronger government while both sides compete for the sympathies of the same population. Force is needed to fight the opponent and to deter the population from supporting him. Too much of it, or the wrong kind, turns that population against the source. This study is about the upper limit, what determines it, and what movements do to raise it.

The analytical frame is the equivalent response model developed by Dr Gordon McCormick at the Naval Postgraduate School and elaborated by Eric P. Wendt. In that model a movement operates within a band of tolerable violence, bounded below by a level too small to have any effect and above by the point at which a supporting population withdraws its consent. The report calls the upper bound the threshold of violence and treats it as a moving target rather than a fixed property of a society.

Two cases in the opening pages show what crossing the line costs. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam assassinated Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991, which proved deeply unpopular in Tamil Nadu, a foreign audience of roughly fifty million people whose sympathy had until then constrained Indian policy. Support fell sharply. The group survived until 2009, so the penalty was slow. In Sri Lanka in August 1989 the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna threatened the families of armed forces personnel by radio. A proregime paramilitary answered with a threat to the families of suspected JVP members, the armed forces escalated an existing unconventional campaign, and the group was effectively destroyed within the year. The same error, two very different timescales.

The central chapter sets out five strategic uses of violence, following Kydd and Walter, each aimed at a different audience and each carrying a different risk of overshooting the threshold. Attrition raises the opponent’s costs. Intimidation targets the population itself. Provocation deliberately invites an indiscriminate government response, on the reasoning that a population attacked without regard to what it did will convert fear into anger and move toward the movement offering protection. Outbidding is used where a population already prefers escalation, and the report tracks Palestinian support for suicide operations rising from under 30 percent between 1997 and 1999 to over 60 percent between December 2000 and October 2003. Spoiling is aimed at wrecking a settlement.

The final section is about deliberately moving the threshold upward. Three methods recur. Provoking indiscriminate state violence, as above. Providing public goods and social welfare, so that the movement is owed something. And using narrative to define what counts as a legitimate target. The IRA is the worked example: between 1970 and 1989 the Sinn Fein paper An Phoblacht published 218 references to legitimate targets, most of them economic, and the group issued advance justifications for attacks it expected to be contentious. The conclusion is honest about the limits of the field. No formal model exists that can identify the optimal level of violence for a given situation, and the report argues that econometric work on micro-level data is the more promising route, citing the finding that punitive house demolitions in Israel reduced suicide attacks from an average district by 11.7 percent while precautionary demolitions unrelated to the owner’s actions increased them by 48.7 percent.

Contents

Five sections, a bibliography and an index. The document uses numbered sections rather than chapters. Descriptions follow the headings printed in its own table of contents and internal bookmarks.

Two figures. Figure 1, the equivalent response model, is credited to Dr Gordon McCormick of the Naval Postgraduate School as published in Eric P. Wendt, “Strategic Counterinsurgency Modeling,” Special Warfare 18, no. 2 (2005). Figure 2, a provocation strategy decision tree, is adapted from Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Provenance and lineage

This is original ARIS work and not a revision of a Special Operations Research Office study. It belongs to the later phase of the series, the one that sits under the heading Assessing Revolutionary and Insurgent Strategies proper rather than under the Casebook and Undergrounds reissues, and its copyright page reflects that: supervision has moved from the USASOC Special Programs Division to the Sensitive Activities Division, and the point of contact is G-3X, Sensitive Activities Division, 2929 Desert Storm Drive, Fort Bragg, NC 28310.

Named staff: Paul J. Tompkins Jr. as USASOC project lead across the series, Guillermo Pinczuk as lead author and editor, Chris Kurowski as contributing author. Pinczuk also worked on the ARIS Sri Lanka case study, which is why the LTTE and JVP material here is unusually detailed.

The document prints no date anywhere, and the hosted filename gives none either. Two indirect indications exist and neither comes from the document’s own front matter. The PDF file carries an embedded creation timestamp of 30 August 2018. The series catalogue printed inside The Science of Resistance lists Threshold of Violence as 2019. Both are recorded here as external evidence rather than as a publication date, because this page does not infer bibliographic fields the document declines to state.

The copyright page carries the standard ARIS disclaimer that the analysis and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the US Army or the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

How The Resistance Hub uses it

This study is why our coverage treats target selection as a political decision rather than a tactical one. When we analyse a campaign of infrastructure attack or assassination, the question of which audience the attack is addressed to, and whether it sits inside or outside that audience’s tolerance, comes from here. It informs how we read sustained sabotage campaigns such as Russia’s use of criminal networks for sabotage in Europe, where the choice of targets is calibrated to stay below a response threshold rather than to maximise damage.

The provocation strategy is the mechanism behind a pattern we return to often, in which a state’s indiscriminate response does more recruiting for a movement than the movement can do for itself. For the tactical vocabulary see sabotage and guerrilla ambush, for the nonviolent end of the same range see what non-violent resistance is, and for definitions see the irregular warfare and resistance glossary. The rest of the series is in the ARIS archive.

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