The Internal Brakes on Violent Escalation

Why do some radical actors or radical groups choose not to engage in violence, or only in particular forms of low-level violence? Why is it that even in deeply violent groups there are often thresholds of violence that members rarely if ever cross, even if they apparently have the capability to do so?

Part of the answer is likely to lie in the counter-measures put in place by state and non-state actors that seek to inhibit the activities of such groups, but in most cases this is only part of the answer. Detailed empirical accounts of such groups indicate that there are also often pressures within the groups themselves that inhibit the adoption or diffusion of greater violence – the limits on violence are to some extent self-imposed – yet to date there has been scant systematic analysis of these ‘internal brakes’ on violent escalation.

In this paper we develop an initial typology of the internal brakes on violent escalation. The typology is based on an extensive interdisciplinary literature review and the development of three case studies of very different sets of radical actors: the extreme Islamist/Jihadist scene; the British extreme right in the 1990s and radical animal rights activism.