Political Actors, Political Violence, and Leadership Change

In many contexts, leader removal occurs according to institutionally mandated rules of succession. Where such rules are absent, leader removal may occur through irregular means. Such means tend to involve force and may include mechanisms such as coups, revolutions, or assassination. One approach to the study of leader removal has been to group these various mechanisms into an undifferentiated classification (e.g., as ‘political violence’). Another approach involves studying each of these mechanisms (or types of violence) in isolation. Neither approach necessarily draws attention to the perpetrators of that violence, their motivations, or their unique interests or access. Despite this, the broader literature on contentious politics supports an understanding that elite-level threats operate through a different logic than mass mobilization. When applied to leader removal, it becomes clear that conflating distinct types of threats into a single category obscures sources of leader vulnerability, especially where there is no accounting for the relevance of the actors responsible for those threats. The proposed panel will bring together scholars of political violence whose work explores one or more of the irregular mechanisms by which leaders may be removed and the roles of one or more types of actors in orchestrating this removal. Relevant areas of research include scholarship on assassinations, coups and coup-proofing, revolutionary onset, and leader survival. Papers on this panel may employ diverse research methodologies and approaches. In combination, this scholarship will facilitate a discussion of which actors (e.g., elite factions within the state or mobilized publics in the street) drive violent forms of leader removal and whether these relationships hold across regime types and historical periods. This discussion remains relevant in an era dominated by democratic uncertainty and regime vulnerability, where considerations of how and by whom leaders are removed may inform understandings of the requirements for regime stability and governance.