Leftist Insurgency in Democracies

• Author: Paul Staniland
• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Date: 01 March 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0010414020938096
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414020938096

Comparative Political Studies

2021, Vol. 54(3-4) 518 –552

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414020938096

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Article

Leftist Insurgency in

Democracies

Paul Staniland1

Abstract

Leftist insurgency has been a major form of civil war since 1945. Existing

research on revolution has linked leftist rebellions to authoritarianism

or blocked democratization. This research overlooks the onset of leftist

insurgencies in a number of democracies. This paper theorizes the roots of

this distinctive form of civil war, arguing that democracy shapes how these

insurgencies begin, acting as a double-edged sword that simultaneously blocks

the emergence of a revolutionary coalition and triggers intra-left splits that

breed radical splinters. Leftist revolts can thus emerge during “incorporation

windows” that trigger disputes within a divided left over electoral co-

optation. Empirically, the paper studies all cases of leftist insurgency in

southern Asia since 1945, under both autocracy and democracy, as well as a

set of non-onset cases. It offers a new direction for understanding varieties

of revolutionary mobilization, highlighting ideology, intra-left debate, and the

multi-faceted effects of democracy on conflict.

Keywords

Civil war, democratization and regime change, political regimes, qualitative

methods, terrorism

Introduction

In April 1971, revolutionary violence swept across much of Sri Lanka as the

Maoist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) sought to seize power in a leftist

uprising. Thousands of deaths later, the revolt was quashed. This war presents

1University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

Corresponding Author:

Paul Staniland, University of Chicago, 5828 South University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

Email: paul@uchicago.edu

938096CPSXXX10.1177/0010414020938096Comparative Political StudiesStaniland

research-article2020

Staniland 519

a puzzle: the United Front ruling government in 1971 had been supported by

the JVP in the 1970 election, was ideologically socialist and moving policy to

the left, and had not repressed or targeted the JVP until the revolt was about

to break out. Indeed, the hotbeds of the JVP’s revolution were precisely those

that had voted for the United Front less than a year prior.

The JVP’s rebellion challenges the expectations of important research like

Huntington (1968) and Acemoglu and Robinson (2006): it was a leftist insur-

gency in a full-suffrage democracy under a center-left government, during a

period of open political contestation and mobilization. The redistributive tilt

of the ruling United Front (UF) government did not placate the JVP, which

instead saw the UF as following a fruitless path to neutralized co-optation.

Rather than democracy and political participation acting as a brake on revo-

lutionary violence, violence surged precisely at a moment of mainstream left-

ist breakthrough.1

1971 Sri Lanka is not unique: in Colombia (1964), India (1967), Burma

(1948), the Philippines (1946 and 1968), Nepal (1996), Peru (1982), Laos

(1958–9), and Bangladesh (1972), among others (such as Sri Lanka again in

1987), leftist insurgencies have emerged in periods of electoral democracy.

These movements left a huge toll in blood and dislocation, some lasted for

decades, and many had profound political consequences for the societies in

which they arose.

This paper first uses medium-N data from South and Southeast Asia to

show that existing claims about the relationship between democracy and left-

ist rebellion are open to empirical question. Rather than such rebellions pri-

marily occurring against right-wing authoritarian governments or in response

to repression, we see a number of wars that erupt under relatively open, full-

suffrage democratic competition.

The paper then uses the 1971 JVP revolt in Sri Lanka as a theory-building

case to outline a new mechanism of revolutionary insurgency under democ-

racy. When internally-divided leftist movements face “incorporation win-

dows” that force a hard choice between co-optation into mainstream electoral

politics or rebelling against the political system itself, radical splinters are

likely to break off in opposition to mainstream co-optation. This fragmenta-

tion can emerge from international diffusion, prior state efforts at division,

and contingent organizational strategies adopted by leftist leaders. When an

incorporation window emerges, radical left factions in fragmented environ-

ments both fear being frozen out by the mainstream left and see an opportu-

nity to push pro-left momentum toward a seizure of power. This helps explain

why a number of leftist revolts have been launched against democratic social-

ist and center-left elected government: indeed, some of the most loathed foes

of communist revolutionaries have not been right-wing land-owners or

520 Comparative Political Studies 54(3-4)

oligarchs, but instead center-left parliamentary socialists, whether in 1919

Germany (McAdams, 2017), late 1960s West Bengal, or 1980s Peru (Ron,

2001). Material class alignments can collapse in the face of byzantine ideo-

logical and coalitional rivalries.

Drawing on the methodological approach pioneered in Haggard and

Kaufman (2012), the paper examines the cases of leftist insurgency onset

under democracy in post-1945 southern Asia to compare competing theories,

allowing an assessment of which mechanisms provide insight into the actors,

sequence, and political context of leftist revolts. Several of the cases provide

clear support for the existing claim in the literature that democracies trigger

revolt when they block political participation by the left. But a cluster of left-

ist insurgencies under democracy in southern Asia instead occurred during

moments of leftward tilts in the polity, driven by feuding between factions of

divided leftist movements over whether to accept mainstream incorporation

in moments of electoral opportunity. These revolts emerged from tensions

within the left over the prospects and perils of electoral politics. The research

design more briefly explores two cases in which leftist revolt did not break

out in democratic periods in southern Asia, and points to related dynamics in

Latin America.

Why should we study these cases? First, revolutionary revolts in demo-

cratic systems directly contribute to broader debates in political science around

redistribution, democracy, and revolution, since these debates often hinge on

implicit or explicit theories of when redistributive revolts begin. By examin-

ing the actual conditions under which we see such insurgencies, this article

shows the importance of giving greater analytical importance to revolutionary

forces, in a corrective to the top-down, regime- and elite-centric accounts that

currently dominate. “The masses” or “the poor” are analytical categories of

limited use: instead, in many cases we see deep intra-class divisions along

ideological lines.

Second, democratization and political incorporation put enormous pres-

sure on political movements that must grapple with the perceived advantages

and dangers of electoralism; the strategic dilemmas faced by leftist move-

ments have far broader echoes, including in ethnic and separatist movements

(Cunningham, 2014; Horowitz, 1985; Snyder, 2000). The findings here con-

tribute to our understanding of when and how democracy co-opts potential

insurgents, triggers their revolt, or does both simultaneously.

Finally, in a world of increasing inequality and political instability, con-

flicts driven by actors seeking to fundamentally reshape the foundations of

political systems may remain relevant. Kalyvas (2015) has argued that

Islamist rebels are the ideological successors of the Marxist-Leninist chal-

lenge to the Western order of the Cold War. The challenge of spiraling