The transformation of armed political organizations: from violent to non-violent political participation

Abstract

By taking account of the increasing role of non-state actors in armed conflicts worldwide, this thesis explored the process of transformation of armed political organizations into political parties. The conversion of such actors from a modus operandi marked by violent means of action to one configured around non-violent forms of political participation has in most cases coincided with the official end of the conflict. Liberal peace-building most often considered such an evolution as a conflict resolution problem and interpreted it through a structural programmatic lens. In contrast, this study approached the phenomenon of rebel-to-party transformation from an integrated perspective. Through the inductive examination and accumulation of findings it identified degrees of agency both in the actor and the international-sponsored conditioning structure. In practice, by drawing on the comparative analysis between the gradual transformation of the Kosovo Liberation Army (in Kosovo) and Fatah (in the Occupied Palestinian Territories) into political parties, this thesis expanded the understanding on the one hand, on how and why such processes took place, while on the other, on how the interaction between exogenous and endogenous influencing factors drove the two processes forward. Through the use of a multiple levels-of-analysis framework the thesis identified the presence of influencing factors across both empirical cases, at the international, regional, national and organizational levels. This research illustrated how such factors and structures operated, with few exceptions, differently in terms of impact, conditioning one actor to a limited set of options and opening up opportunities for the other. Most notably, if the UN-sponsored interim state-type infrastructure in Kosovo provided PDK, the organizational successor of KLA, with an open polity, the international community in the case of the Fatah, practically restricted the Palestinian polity to a sole contender. In relation to the field of rebel-to-party transformation, the thesis brings a contribution in terms of empirical knowledge and conceptual understanding. If the former expanded the field with an in-depth analysis of two empirical cases, the latter furthered the understanding on the process by validating or nuancing the inner workings of influencing factors.