On Monday 23 January 2023, the ACRPS held a Strategic Studies Unit panel discussion on Bullets to Ballots: Collective De-Radicalisation of Armed Movements, by multiple authors and edited by Omar Ashour, a contributing author. The discussion was held in person with remote attendance and moderated by Ahmed Hussein, Arab Center Researcher and Managing Editor of the periodical Siyasat Arabiya. The panel featured specialists on the topic and contributing authors, including: Omar Ashour, Head of the ACRPS Strategic Studies Unit and the Critical Security Studies Programme at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies; Haider Saeed, Head of the ACRPS Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies Unit and Editor-in-Chief of Siyasat Arabiya; Hamzeh Almoustafa, General Director of Syria TV and a researcher specialized in Political Science and International Relations; Osama Rushdi, Director of the Najda Human Rights Foundation; and Ronnie Kasrils, a founder of Spear of the Nation, the armed wing of the African National Congress (ANC) party, and former South African Minister of Intelligence.
Ashour began by making note of the book’s context and general theoretical framework, designed to answer a central question: when, how, and why do armed groups that once used armed action as a means to social and political change decide to renounce violence and frame this ideologically to legitimize reform? The volume addresses 20 cases of armed groups that transformed into political parties or nonviolent social movements in 15 countries: Afghanistan, Algeria, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Iraq, Libya, South Africa, Spain, Syria, the United Kingdom, and Uruguay.
Next, Ashour presented the book’s main conclusions. First, the leadership – whether represented by a single charismatic leader or a central leadership structure – remains a decisive factor in the success or failure of collective transformation and de-radicalization processes. Second, the costs and pressures of combat cause behavioural, ideological, constitutional, and organizational (whether institutional or legal) changes for the state and for nonstate actors, regardless of the outcome of the uprising (i.e., defeat, stalemate, or victory). Third, external interactions with differently minded organizations and individuals, and within the internal strata of organizations, have a decisive effect in shaping updated ideologies and discursive, behavioural, and organizational transformations. Fourth, incentives offered by the ruling authorities or by the international community strengthen the position of leaders who support the renouncement of collective armed action relative to those within an armed group who oppose the process. If these incentives persist, they also serve to prevent a relapse into violence. Fifth, democratization generally has a positive effect on the initiation and durability of processes of transformation from bullets to ballots. Sixth, international and regional support (or the lack thereof) for processes of peaceful transition is a key variable at the macro-level, either reinforcing the launch and durability of collective de-radicalization processes or undermining them.
Haider Saeed made the second contribution, explaining that the armed factions the book studies fall into two categories: pure militias that are founded as armed forces and proceed as such, and armed divisions of political organizations that are established after their parent organizations through a conscious decision by the latter, to whom they are structurally linked. Although the book’s theoretical framework that Ashour presents in the first chapter does not distinguish between an armed faction emerging as an armed organization or as an armed division of a political organization, Saeed mentioned that he employs this distinction in his chapter on the Mahdi Army in Iraq (the armed division of the Sadrist Movement, as he put it) because, in the historical experience of Arab parties, armed factions were primarily the armed divisions of political organizations and carried out partisan functions: they were the parties’ tool for coming to power in light of a dominant revolutionary imaginary. Saeed argued that the case of the Mahdi Army substantiates the theoretical assumptions Ashour proposes, including that defeat leads armed factions to embrace the option of gradual, non-violent reform from within the regime; this is what happened to the Sadrist Movement whose commitment to the political process, despite running for election in 2005 and participating in Nouri al-Maliki’s first government in 2006, became clearer after the Battle of Basra in the spring of 2008. In early 2009, the movement competed in the provincial council elections and won, marking an important point in its entrance into state administration before taking on a larger role in the second Nouri al-Maliki government in 2010.
The third contribution was from Hamzeh Almoustafa, who suggested that the Syrian case can contribute to the subject of the transformations of armed Islamist movements due to the generalizable theoretical conclusions it offers. Almoustafa clarified that this area of study is relatively new and saw an influx of studies following the engagement of Islamist movements in politics in several Arab countries – particularly the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidacy in Syrian parliamentary elections, then the political entrance of Hamas. Research on the topic began by focusing on explaining the radicalism of some of these movements, then shifted to comparatively addressing processes of moderation and de-radicalization. Almoustafa concluded by emphasizing the scholarly value of the book for Arab research on the subject, as the normative connotations of concepts such as radicalism and de-radicalization do not suit the particularities of the Arab context, and out of the need to understand the dynamics of the transformation of Islamist movements, not simply the outcomes of that transition.
During the fourth intervention, Osama Rushdi addressed the transition into politics of El Gama’a El Islamiyya in Egypt. He clarified that the cessation of violence initiative was less an admission of defeat, as some argue, than a reflection of a strategic Islamist political vision that had become fully convinced that violence served only to entrench authoritarianism, triggering a breakdown at the political, economic, and humanitarian levels, and that violence is not an objective in itself. Rushdi indicated that the Hosni Mubarak regime’s handling of the initiative fell short until the events of September 2001, when Washington transformed into a party that gave orders and expected obedience from all. The Mubarak regime was labelled responsible for the export of terrorism, originating from despotism-induced outrage, which drove it to fixate in the media on the success of the initiative and frame it as one of the regime’s accomplishments. A new approach to the initiative emerged, which saw transformations in the policies of the Interior Ministry and the Gama’a leadership being granted permission to visit various prisons to explain and cultivate popular support for the initiative.
Within the same context, Ronnie Kasrils shifted to the transition of the African National Congress and Spear of the Nation, its armed wing, into peaceful political activism in South Africa and described how the South African conflict provides lessons on the efficacy of armed and unarmed struggle: the art of negotiation, the role of leaders, reconciliation, the transformation of the army’s attitude, crafting a comprehensive constitution, mass political activism, and the need for interaction with foreign states without allowing them to manage the conflict’s issues. Kasrils drew attention to the fact that the transition toward disarmament is not positive in some cases, as with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Moreover, it cannot be overlooked that the support Africa received in the struggle against colonialism from the Organisation of African Unity cannot be compared to the case of the Arab states, many of which have betrayed the Palestinian cause.
The five contributions were followed by a discussion on part of Arab Center researchers and Doha Institute faculty, concluding with a commentary from the volume’s editor, Omar Ashour, who fielded an array of questions.
