Graduation Year

2026

Date of Submission

4-2026

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

International Relations

Reader 1

Jennifer Taw

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2026 Tom Y Inouye

Abstract

This thesis examines the ways in which violent non-state actors (VNSAs), specifically revisionist political coalitions (RPCs), emerge from a state-centric international system that denies them access to formal avenues of political advocacy, legitimacy, and recognition. Challenging dominant portraits in international security that cast non-state-perpetrated violence as irrational or deviant, I argue that RPCs turn to brutality as a strategic response to exclusion produced by the Westphalian paradigm. Queer theory, particularly the concepts of legibility and strategic disidentification, is central to the reconceptualization of RPCs as “queered” political objects whose existence falls outside the normative boundaries of sovereignty and legitimacy.

To illustrate this framework of exclusion, I introduce the concept of violence transmission, referring to the process by which violence experienced via structural exclusion, hierarchy, and political marginalization at the domestic and international levels is internalized and then redeployed by RPCs against populations underneath their control—namely, women, queer people, and “deviant men.” I examine Boko Haram in Nigeria and the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement in Perú, finding that these groups reproduce systems of domination through coercive force against marginalized populations.

Ultimately, this thesis contends that terrorism and other forms of RPC violence often mirror and intensify the hierarchical logics of exclusion from which it emerges. In doing so, I develop a new framework to understand the cyclical nature of violence between formal institutions like international organizations, states, and RPCs.

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