International Studies Review (2017) 19, 543–545

BOOK REVIEW

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Why Resist? The Sources of Violent and
Nonviolent Political Action
REVIEW BY ROSS JAMES GILDEA
University of Oxford

Stephanie Dornschneider. 2016. Whether to Kill: The Cognitive Maps of Violent and Non-
violent Individuals. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 328 pp., $79.95
paperback (ISBN: 978-0-8122-4770-1).

Identifying the determinants of political violence among nonstate actors constitutes

one of the most pressing problems in contemporary policy and scholarly debates.
Why is it that some individuals make the decision to take up arms while others, of-
ten with markedly similar background characteristics, choose not to do so? What is
the role of commonly cited factors—such as religious belief; psychopathology; and
environmental conditions, including economic deprivation and access to violent
groups—in motivating violent and nonviolent activity? In her new book Whether to
Kill: The Cognitive Maps of Violent and Nonviolent Individuals, Stephanie Dornschnei-
der addresses precisely these questions.
Contrary to conventional understanding, those who engage in political violence
and those who choose the route of peaceful resistance may not be that differ-
ent. Their reasoning processes appear remarkably similar (160). According to
Dornschneider’s theory, both violent and nonviolent individuals act in response
to a belief that the state is aggressive. In light of her empirical analysis she advances
the bold claim that, in the absence of beliefs about state aggression, “no individuals
would have decided to take up arms, and significantly fewer individuals would have
decided to engage in nonviolent activism” (2). Ten micro-mechanisms (five each)
are highlighted pertaining to the choice to pursue violent or nonviolent activities.
These mechanisms may act in isolation or in combination with each other and are
underpinned by individuals’ perceptions of state threat (187). Dornschneider also
finds that religious belief, such as adherence to Islam, is not a significant factor in
determining which form of political activism an individual decides upon. Further,
while environmental factors such as economic deprivation may motivate nonviolent
resistance, they are not a causal driver of the use of violence. Nor does psychopathol-
ogy or access to violent groups explain variation in violent and nonviolent behavior
among individuals.
How does the author arrive at these conclusions? Dornschneider employs a
bottom-up cognitive mapping approach (CMA), taking the explanations proffered
by the actors of interest as the starting point for her analysis. Cognitive mapping
is a tool that allows for the examination of complex patterns of beliefs that un-
derlie human behavior (Axelrod 1976). To create these maps, the author carries
out ethnographic interviews with twenty-seven individuals from seven violent and
nonviolent groups in Egypt and Germany. The German groups included the Red

Gildea, Ross James. (2017) Why Resist? The Sources of Violent and Nonviolent Political Action. International Studies Review,
doi: 10.1093/isr/vix052
© The Author (2017). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Studies Association.
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544 Why Resist? The Sources of Violent and Nonviolent Political Action

Army Faction and Bewegung 2. Juni (violent) and the Socialist German Student
Union and Kommune 1 (nonviolent). The Egyptian groups were al-Jama’at al-
Islamiyya and al-Jihad (violent) and the Muslim Brotherhood (nonviolent). Re-
sponses from participants were organized into comparable categories, and the re-
sulting cognitive maps were entered into a purpose-built computational model to

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analyze patterns of belief connections among violent and nonviolent individuals.
The central contributions of Whether to Kill lie in its theoretical sophistication
and methodological innovation. Dornschneider advances an elegant and general-
izable theory of why people with similar ideological convictions and background
characteristics choose to engage in violent and nonviolent activity. She posits that
the behavior of both violent and nonviolent actors results from a belief that the
state is aggressive. This explanation emanates from a comprehensive empirical en-
gagement with, and analytical synthesis of, factors such as religion, economic de-
privation, group access, and psychopathology, which individual competing theories
typically highlight (Victoroff 2005; Piazza 2011; Krieger and Meierrieks 2011). Uti-
lizing CMA, the author systematically tests the relative causal role of these factors.
Engaging with and testing the complex associations of these factors within a single
unified analytical framework, and advancing a parsimonious theory with the poten-
tial to transfer it across temporal and spatial contexts, reflects admirable ambition
and is a striking achievement.
Dornschneider also makes a notable methodological contribution beyond her
substantive interest in political violence. In adopting a computation model to com-
plement her use of CMA, the author enhances the transparency and rigor of her
work. The study offers a practical demonstration of how complex belief combina-
tions can be rigorously analyzed and related to decision-making processes. This ap-
proach not only enhances the credibility of the conclusions drawn in the text but
is instructive for qualitative researchers investigating the role of ideas in behavioral
outcomes. Heretofore political scientists have been reluctant to employ CMA due to
difficulties in analyzing the highly complex data that is produced. Dornschneider’s
work provides a practical resource for political scientists of various hues who wish
to utilize CMA in their own research program.
A number of potential weaknesses of the book require noting. One issue with
Dornschneider’s work is her operationalization of political violence as an outcome
variable, which she restricts to violent actions targeted against the state (17). This
narrow delimitation neglects a large spectrum of political violence aimed at non-
state actors and has important implications for her theoretical and empirical con-
clusions. It seems axiomatic that those actors that target the state will justify their
actions by relaying a perception of state threat. Choosing to operationalize polit-
ical violence exclusively in terms of state targets, while it may enhance the ease
of comparison of her cases, raises questions about the validity of Dornschneider’s
theory.
On the matter of theory, despite the insightful argument advanced in
Dornschneider’s work, the reader may be left wondering about and returning to
the book’s central question. Her theory that violent and nonviolent individuals ex-
hibit similar reasoning processes in relation to the state, as well as the associated
mechanisms that the author cites, leave us in little better position to discern what
drives some actors to choose political violence over peaceful forms of activism. This
question, which will be of most interest to readers of the book, remains largely open.
A further potential problem is the limited sample size of twenty-seven individuals
on which the study relies. Taken among seven different political groups, her sample
size is modest and potentially unrepresentative. Dornschneider acknowledges that
dozens of potential participants contacted declined to take part (6). The respon-
dents who did agree to participate may well possess characteristics that differentiate
them from typical violent and nonviolent group members. For instance, partici-
pants may have a singular grievance or political agenda against the state which they
 ROSS JAMES GILDEA 545

wish to advance, leading to sampling bias and an overestimated effect concerning

the author’s main findings. The problem of a small sample size is compounded
when we consider that the author proposes ten mechanisms leading to violent and
nonviolent behavior. The empirical basis for ten distinct mechanisms, derived from
interviews with just twenty-seven participants, appears tenuous.

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A final ostensible weakness lies in the author’s premature rejection of ideology as
a causal driver of violent and nonviolent political behavior. Selecting groups within
Egypt and Germany along ideological parameters means variation in ideology is
absent from the research design, thus precluding inferential leverage vis-à-vis ide-
ology as an explanatory variable. While it may be true that both violent and nonvi-
olent actors perceive a threat from the state, it seems likely that this perception is
informed by ideological inclinations. What constitutes the state across German and
Egyptian contexts, and according to Marxist and Islamist doctrines, may mean quite
different things to the political actors involved. Ideology may then stand as a prior
and integral determinant of violent and nonviolent behavior, a proposition that
Dornschneider’s research design is not conducive to testing and which she may be
underplaying in her findings.
Despite these criticisms, Dornschneider’s text is an impressive contribution to a
question that animates much present scholarly debate and policy discussion. It is
an ambitious and theoretically sophisticated work, proposing an elegant theoretical
framework that contravenes conventional explanations and aids our understand-
ing of the motivations of violent and nonviolent individual political actors. The
author’s methodological contribution is also noteworthy. It provides an insightful
demonstration of CMA and computational tools for the rigorous analysis of qual-
itative data in political science, and the text will be of use to scholars whose work
concerns the relationship between patterns of belief and political decision-making.

References
AXELROD, ROBERT, ed. 1976. Structure of Decision: The Cognitive Maps of Political Elites. Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press.
KRIEGER, TIM, AND DANIEL MEIERRIEKS. 2011. “What Causes Terrorism?” Public Choice 147 (1): 3–27.
PIAZZA, JAMES A. 2011. “Poverty, Minority Economic Discrimination, and Domestic Terrorism.” Journal of
Peace Research 48 (3): 339–53.
VICTOROFF, JEFF. 2005. “The Mind of the Terrorist: A Review and Critique of Psychological Approaches.”
Journal of Conflict Resolution 49 (3): 3–42.