Authors Meet Critics: Aditi Malik and Michael Wahman

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Despite their central place in democratic life, political parties are routinely responsible for violence, which often accompanies elections. Party-based and election-related violence vitally shape electoral competition and pose a great threat to human security and electoral integrity, not least in newer democracies in the Global South. In two newly published books, Malik and Wahman advance new theories and proffer novel data on the drivers of party-based and electoral violence in Africa and India. This author-meets-critics panel explores the lessons learned from these books, contrasts their findings and theoretical approaches, and explores avenues for future research.

In her book, Playing with Fire: Parties and Political Violence in Kenya and India (CUP, 2024), Malik draws on a rare cross-regional comparison of Kenya and India to develop a new explanation about ethnic party violence. Combining rich historical, qualitative, and quantitative data, the book demonstrates how levels of party instability can crucially inform the decisions of political elites to organize or support violence. Centrally, the book shows that settings marked by unstable parties are more vulnerable to experiencing recurring and major episodes of party violence than those populated by durable parties. This is because transient parties enable politicians to disregard voters’ future negative reactions to conflict. By contrast, stable party organizations compel politicians to take such costs into account, thereby dampening the potential for recurring and severe party violence. By centering political parties as key actors in the production of conflict, and bringing together evidence from both Africa and South Asia, Playing with Fire contributes new insights to the study of political violence.

In his book, Controlling Territory, Controlling Voters: The Electoral Geography of African Campaign Violence (OUP, 2023), Wahman focuses on the political geography of election violence in Africa, building on one important observation: elections in many African countries are highly regional and the support for political parties are rarely nationalized. He argues that in such environments, campaign violence becomes an important tool used by parties to control and regulate access to space. Building on a wealth of data and extensive fieldwork in Zambia and Malawi, Wahman uses a combination of electoral geography analysis, constituency-level election violence data collected from local election monitors, focus group interviews, archival material, and individual-level survey data to show how campaign violence in both countries is used as a territorial tool, predominantly within party strongholds.

The panel will bring together some of the leading scholars in the field of electoral competition and political violence, as well as African and South Asian politics to discuss the two books. Critics will include Sarah Birch (King’s College London), Yonatan Morse (University of Connecticut), Irfan Nooruddin (Georgetown University), and Anne Pitcher (University of Michigan).

Sub Unit

• Division 12: Comparative Politics of Developing Countries

Chairs

• Michael Wahman Michigan State University

• Aditi Malik College of the Holy Cross

Presenters

• Sarah Birch King's College London

• Yonatan L. Morse University of Connecticut

• Irfan Nooruddin Georgetown University

• M. Anne Pitcher University of Michigan, Ann Arbor