Can the Ideology of an Armed Group Change? : A Discourse Analysis of Ideology

Sammanfattning: This thesis tries to fill in the research gap on whether the ideologies of armed groups can change. Tokdemir et al. (2021) discovered that an increase in the number of competitors leads to a polarisation of an armed group’s ideology, I theorise that a decrease in the number of competitors will lead to depolarisation of an armed group’s ideology, because then the armed group gains more access to the finite resource pool. I conducted a structured, focused within-case comparison over time using discourse analysis. Discourse analysis allows for a detailed and complex operationalisation of ideology. The case study focuses on the People’s War Group/Communist Party of India-Maoist, a communist group part of the Naxalite movement in India. For the independent variable, I use multiple secondary sources to establish the number of competitors in 1991 and 2008. For the dependent variable, I analyse multiple magazine publications from 1991 and 2008 written by the PWG/CPI-Maoist to establish their ideology. The findings of this research do not support the hypothesis. There is limited change over time in the ideology of the PWG/CPI-Maoist even though the number of competitors changed between 1991 and 2008. Suggestions for future research are given at the end.