A Learning Theory of the American Anti-Vietnam War Movement

This paper is concerned with how individuals and groups become radicalized. While there has been considerable research on why individuals join radical groups and why different groups and individuals engage in violence there has been little attention devoted to why groups adopt nonviolent strategies and the relationship between these non-violent strategies and violence. This paper employs insights derived from learning theory to explain and predict what strategies will be adopted by radical groups and in what sequence they will be adopted given various environmental conditions. A formal model of radical social movements is presented and applied in detail to the American Anti-Vietnam War Movement. The case study lends considerable credence to numerous propositions in the model.