LAUSR

In contrast, Stephanie Dornschneider’s book Whether to Kill offers a corrective to such trends by employing a cognitive mapping approach, which ‘explores the belief systems underlying human behavior’ and thus ‘bridges the gap between actors and structures’ (p. 3; emphasis in original), with the aim of investigating why different individuals enduring the same conditions may choose violent or nonviolent activism. After explaining the cognitive mapping approach, Dornschneider details her research design, a double-paired comparison of violent and non-violent individuals in Egypt and Germany. For her research, she interviewed representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Jihad, among others, in Egypt, while her German research focused upon such groups as the Red Army Faction and the Socialist German Student Union. Following a brief history of the groups whose members or former members she was able to interview, Dornschneider lays out in great detail how she went about constructing cognitive maps for each individual and abstracting the beliefs expressed into comparable categories. She also presents a counterfactual analysis, testing what interventions might have prevented the individuals analysed from taking up arms. Dornschneider develops a number of interesting conclusions: both violent and non-violent individuals react primarily to perceived state aggression; the adoption of violence can be linked neither to mental illness nor to religion; and violent individuals are not motivated by beliefs about economic deprivation or the groups to which they belong. In short, ‘the boundaries between violent and non-violent activism appear to be rather thin, much thinner than we think’ (p. 257). Through her use of the cognitive mapping approach, Dornschneider offers a complement and a corrective to many structural theories of political violence. Although it can occasionally prove a somewhat difficult read, Whether to Kill, by taking seriously individual belief, demands a reconsideration of our easy dichotomy of violence and nonviolence, which may well change how political activism is studied and conceptualised in the future. Guy Lancaster (Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture)