International recognition and support for violence among nonpartisans
| Published date | 01 July 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00223433221088034 |
| Date | 01 July 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Regular Articles |
International recognition and support
for violence among nonpartisans
Nadav G Shelef
Department of Political Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Yael Zeira
Department of Political Science, Syracuse University
Abstract
What reduces individual support for the use of violence among groups seeking self-determination? This article
advances a new explanation for changes in popular support for violence – international recognition – and evaluates
this explanation using a survey experiment of Palestinians priming the 2012 UNGA recognition of Palestine. The
analysis shows that priming recognition reduces support for violence among a key segment of the population,
nonpartisans, who have weaker and more fluid prior beliefs about the use of violence than partisans. The article
argues that recognition reduces support for violence among nonpartisans by conveying new information that shifts
the expected payoffs of violent and nonviolent strategies. This article deepens the incorporation of party politics into
the study of conflict and demonstrates that international diplomatic engagement can reduce popular support for
violence in an ongoing conflict. This is important because most previously identified determinants of support for
violence are either very difficult to change or change very slowly.
Keywords
international recognition, Israeli–Palestinian conflict, partisanship, public opinion, self-determination, violence
Introduction
What reduces individual support for the use of violence
among groups seeking self-determination? This question
matters because militant groups require the support of at
least some people in their society. As Mao noted, losing
this support compromises militant groups’ ability to
carry out violence and even threatens their organizational
survival (Mao, 1961). Changes in popular support for
the use of violence are also likely to shape militant
groups’ strategic behavior. As Hamas leader Ismail
Haniyeh candidly remarked soon after the group’s first
suicide bombings, ‘the scale of the attacks will be deter-
mined by the level of popular support for such a strategy’
(Andoni, 1994).
This article advances a new explanation for changes
in popular support for violence – international recogni-
tion, which is one of the primary political goals of
self-determination movements (Coggins, 2011, 2015;
Cunningham, 2014; Huang, 2016; Roeder, 2018). Our
main argument is that international recognition reduces
support for violence among groups seeking self-
determination, but that it does so only among nonparti-
sans – that is, among individuals who do not identify
with any political party. We argue that international
recognition reduces support for violence because it con-
veys new information that shifts the expected payoffs of
violent and non-violent strategies. Recognition provides
groups seeking self-determination with new information
about their international political support and bargaining
power (Shelef & Zeira, 2017), thereby raising the
expected payoffs of nonviolent strategies of diplomacy
and negotiation. When recognition results from diplo-
macy or other nonviolent strategies, it can also provide
Corresponding author:
shelef@wisc.edu
Journal of Peace Research
2023, Vol. 60(4) 588–603
ªThe Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/00223433221088034
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information about the efficacy of such strategies.
Although all group members receive this information,
we argue that, where parties are divided over the use of
violence, only nonpartisans will reduce their support for
violence in response. This is because, consistent with a
large body of research in electoral politics, they have
weaker and less stable prior beliefs about the use of vio-
lence than partisans.
We test our argument using a survey experiment
increasing the salience of the United Nations General
Assembly’s (UNGA) recognition of Palestine as a ‘non-
member observer state’. While only the United Nations
Security Council (UNSC) can confer full sovereign rec-
ognition, the UNGA resolution upgrading Palestine’s
status in the organization explicitly spoke of ‘recognition’
and was widely understood as reflecting member-states’
support for full recognition.
1
While this recognition
took place in 2012, the Palestinian Authority (PA)
continues to pursue international recognition as its main
strategy. For example, in response to the Trump admin-
istration’s Middle East plan, the Palestinian leadership
doubled down on recognition, calling on European
states to recognize Palestine in order to preserve the
two-state solution and counter potential Israeli plans to
annex parts of the West Bank.
This article makes two main contributions. First, it
introduces a novel explanation into the rapidly growing
body of scholarship on the determinants of popular sup-
port for violence. These determinants include individual
characteristics such as gender, socio-economic status,
birth cohort, politicized religion, personal history, and
prospective attitudes as well as the behavior of the other
side in a conflict (see, e.g. Nachtwey & Tessler, 2002;
Krueger & Malec
ˇkova
´, 2003; Victoroff, 2005; Shamir &
Shikaki, 2010; Fair, Malhotra & Shapiro, 2012; Jaeger
et al., 2012; Longo, Canetti & Hite-Rubin, 2014).
Building on this work, we show that international rec-
ognition also shapes mass attitudes towards violence. In
doing so, we also extend the growing literature on the
causes and consequences of international recognition
(e.g. Fabry, 2010; Coggins, 2011; Shelef & Zeira,
2017; Mirilovic & Siroky, 2017; Landau-Wells, 2018;
Muro, Vidal & Vlaskamp, 2019; Visoka, Doyle & New-
man, 2019) to consider its impact on support for vio-
lence. This is important because many factors previously
identified as influencing popular support for violence are
individual-level variables that are either very difficult or
slow to change. In contra st, international reco gnition
provides states with a policy tool that could shape public
attitudes during conflict, opening up a potential window
for conflict resolution. As we discuss in the conclusion,
the long-term durability of such changes in public
opinion depends on continued, meaningful progress
towards conflict resolution. Additional research is
needed to explore such long-term changes within self-
determination movements, as well as the determinants of
popular support for violence in the states they challenge.
Second, this article deepens the integration of party
politics into the study of conflict by examining how
partisanship – in the sense of closeness to any political
party rather than allegiance to a particular party – affects
conflict dynamics. This intervention builds on recent
scholarship showing that self-determination movements
typically consist of multiple, often competing parties or
factions (Shelef, 2010; Pearlman, 2010; Christia, 2012;
Staniland, 2012; Pearlman & Cunningham, 2012;
Mylonas & Shelef, 2014; Cunningham, 2013; Krause,
2017; Cunningham, Dahl & Fruge
´, 2017). This
literature, however, has been more concerned with
understanding the causes and consequences of this fac-
tionalization than with the impact of party attachments
(or the lack thereof) on conflict dynamics. Similarly,
while they usefully ‘bring the government back in’
(Lacina, 2014), party-based explanations in the broader
conflict literature primarily focus on how ethnic
groups’ representation within, or electoral importance
to, political parties affects patterns of violence, rather
than on how partisanship itself mediates conflict
dynamics (e.g. Wilkinson, 2006; Lacina, 2014; Chandra
& Garcia-Ponce, 2019). Finally, new research on public
opinion has persuasively shown that political ideology
and corresponding party identification both shape and
are shaped by conflict dynamics (Jaeger et al., 2012,
2015; Getmansky & Zeitzoff, 2014; Grossman, Mane-
kin & Margalit, 2018), but it too has paid less attention
to how partisanship, per se, shapes attitudes towards
violence.
Yet, as ‘the central organizing principle of mass poli-
tics’ (Brader & Tucker, 2008: 3), partisanship is likely to
shape conflict as well. Indeed, as Jaeger et al. (2012,
2015) show in the Palestinian case, individuals unaffi-
liated with any particular party are a large group with
distinct policy preferences that lie between those of par-
tisans of the major parties. Building on this observation
and situating it within the broader literature on partisan-
ship, we argue that, in this and other cases where parties
1
Full UNSC recognition provides a stronger signal of international
support and bargaining power than UNGA recognition and thus,
according to our argument, is likely to have an even greater short-
term impact on support for violence.
Shelef & Zeira 589
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