Last week on Deep Dive, we examined some of the structural factors that predict violence in the runup to elections. This week, we’ll look at recent research on what happens after a ruling party tries to gain an electoral advantage by assaulting opposition voters.

University of California, Davis political scientist Lauren Young applied a psychological lens to that question in an article in the Journal of Peace Research. Young noticed that responses to violent state repression during electoral campaigns in Zimbabwe varied widely among Zimbabweans. Violence cowed some people who might otherwise have engaged in opposition politics, but the same violence emboldened others, pushing them to work harder to unseat the ruling ZANU-PF party.

Reasoning that the difference between people who were intimidated by electoral violence and people who were primarily angered by it was something about the mindset of the people themselves, Young interviewed 41 opposition sympathizers in Zimbabwe, who did varying levels of work for opposition political parties. Opposition activists in Zimbabwe face extensive state violence, from public beatings and torture to killings. When Young asked opposition sympathizers how they responded to state threats, she found that one way their answers differed was in the amount of confidence they had in their abilities to deal with violent situations. Some respondents spoke with fear about a range of past atrocities committed against prominent opposition activists, but others chose to showcase their own cool under fire. One opposition organizer said that dealing with violence was just part of the job for “people of [his] caliber,” and an opposition candidate said that they managed risk using their “defensive instincts” to be “able to talk to aggressive people, police or all that sort of thing, and [know] how far you can push.”

To Young, that confidence sounded like a personality trait psychologists call “self-efficacy,” which is a belief in the ability to control your environment even in difficult situations. People with more self-efficacy, she hypothesized, were likely to be more energized by the threat of violence than cowed by it. To test that theory, she ran an experiment. She asked a mix of opposition supporters and activists to predict their responses to a randomized selection of violent state actions, from threats to killings. She also tested participants’ levels of self-efficacy using a set of questions long established in psychology. 

Her experimental data matched her qualitative observations: People with higher levels of self-efficacy were both more likely to say they would attend opposition rallies in the face of violence and were more likely to be made angry by state attacks. People with lower self-efficacy, however, were much less willing to consider attending opposition rallies after state violence and tended to respond to that violence with fear rather than anger.

The distinction, Young argues, is important because the kinds of people who are driven to engage in political activism by violent state repression are crucial to creating political change. Without those first movers, it is nearly impossible to build a collective movement that may one day have the strength to protect people who sympathize with the opposition but are too afraid to join. If we know that self-efficacy can produce those first movers, the question for political organizers then becomes: How can we generate self-efficacy in repressive environments?

Shirin Jaafari profiled Kataib Hezbollah, the Iraqi Shiite militia that attacked the US Embassy in Baghdad early last week. The group has a very close relationship with Iran, and Kataib Hezbollah founder Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis was killed alongside the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Qasem Soleimani, in an American air strike last week. The US government designated Kataib Hezbollah a terrorist organization in 2009 following repeated attacks against US forces in Iraq.

Alex Spire described the state of US-Iran relations before Soleimani’s assassination. The return of American sanctions on Iran as part of the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign has  meant economic disaster for Iran and sometimes life-threatening hardship for Iranian civilians. The sanctions are a violation of US commitments from the Iran nuclear deal and Iran has responded with increased aggression in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.

Priti Salian spoke to journalists involved in Amal, Berlin!, a Berlin-based online news outlet that publishes in Arabic, Farsi, and Dari. Amal, founded by German journalists Cornelia and Julia Gerlach, employs refugee reporters who have a hard time finding news jobs in Germany and covers news relevant to refugees in Germany. Germany currently hosts 1.4 million refugees, many of whom read in the languages Amal publishes.

Turns out you can use it for literally anything.

The only things more darkly humorous than the logos of state organizations dedicated to violence are the logos of state organizations that apparently wish they were dedicated to violence.

Last week’s largest internet mood was teens posting about trying to avoid a World War  III in which they would do the lion’s share of the killing and dying. If you need a guide to the memes of the draftable (those registered for sLOLective service, the generation who all have one draft number and it’s 69, etc. etc.), Jamie Withorne has you covered over at Inkstick.

For the nerdier teens, the last couple weeks have also brought the advent of “Nuclear Memes for Atomic Teens,” one of the truly great Twitter accounts of our time. It’s got the memes you know, the nuclear history you may not, and the self-awareness to bring it all together.

The Canadian Armed Forces used “Adapt to a fad they don’t really understand.” It’s… actually somewhat effective? If nothing else, it gave us this email for the ages.