How do political actors mobilize support for and participation in violent movements and causes? Traditional collective action approaches have largely downplayed or ignored the significant moral-emotional barriers to participation, particularly in the context of high-risk, violent movements. Dr. Javed argues that political actors can eliminate these barriers to participation in violence by leveraging popular morality to: 1) delineate new social boundaries within communities that separate the "virtuous" public from a "morally degenerate" minority; and 2) provoke popular outrage against members of this targeted group through the theatrical display of their alleged moral transgressions--violations of shared norms of right and wrong behavior. He will demonstrate this process of moral mobilization using the case of the Chinese Communist Party's mass mobilization of violence against so-called "landlords" and "counterrevolutionaries" during the first several years of the Maoist period (1949-1953).

Jeffrey Javed is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on the intersection of social mobilization and political violence, with a secondary focus on moral governance and memory politics. His current book project explores the process by which the nascent Chinese state mobilized popular participation in state repression during the mass campaigns of the early 1950s. He received his Ph.D. in 2017 from the Department of Government at Harvard University, and his B.A. in Sociology and East Asian Studies from Cornell University in 2009.