Violent vs. Non-Violent Struggle: Investigating the Impact of Frames on Movement Strategies in Yemen

Why do some opposition movements escalate into armed conflict while others abide non-violently under very similar conditions? In order to account for this variance, the article proposes to transcend the limitations of existing structural theories within civil war studies by including a framing perspective. It accentuates and elucidates the agency component and the interactive dynamics of the construction and negotiation of meaning, which remain a ‘black box’ in current models. In a comparative study of two movements in Yemen, the article identifies and describes the respective collective action frames, establishes why and how strategic movement actors construct them in their specific particularity, and relates this to the question of why constituents take certain forms of action. The findings assert the theoretical contribution of an integrative approach.