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Terror As A Social Movement Tactic: Applying The Multi-Institutional Politics Approach To The Case Of The Abu Sayyaf Group, Erika Mae Lorenzana Del Villar

Master's Theses

Solely equating terrorism with criminality discounts the social, political, cultural, and historical motivations that drive people to employ violence as a strategy for collective action. Using the multi-institutional politics approach to social movements (Armstrong and Bernstein 2008), this study explores the choice of the Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) in the Philippines to employ terror and violence as the primary social movement tactic to pursue their Islamic separatist cause. Analysis of archival and open-source data, together with original interviews, reveal that the problem is multi-institutional – developmental, cultural, historical, social and political all at the same time. The choice of violence …