Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

MAU MAU • 419and norms of liberal democracy at the same time that they would beginto have their own political demands. However, empirical studiesby Lynn Lees and Charles Tilley and others indicate that those peoplewho are securely members of primary and secondary social groupsare more likely to become actively recruited into organized politicalactivism than those who are socially isolated, a view known as the socialnetwork recruitment theory. The empirical studies of SydneyVerba and Norman Nie also indicate that political participation tendsto be correlated more with higher than with lower socioeconomic status,so one would expect that political extremism would be less likelyto be found in the social underclasses of “mass society.”Another implication of mass society theory that appears to beempirically false is the notion, best articulated by Samuel P. Huntington,that institutions and organizations having modern attributesof adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence would effectivelychannel the growing demands of increasingly politically mobilizedmasses into constructive engagement with civil society ratherthan violent confrontation. Yet if one considers such organizationsas the Irish Republican Army (IRA) or the Palestine LiberationOrganization (PLO), they have many of these attributes of modernpolitical organizations but have nonetheless carried out campaigns ofpolitical violence and terrorism targeting the civil societies in whichtheir followers live. In these cases it is not an inchoate mass societybut rather highly closed, hierarchically organized, and ideologicallymotivated organizations that have been responsible for civil unrestand violence.MAU MAU. The Mau Mau were gangs originally deployed by theKikuyu Central Association of tribesmen in Kenya to drive Britishsettlers off Kikuyu lands but which became part of the overall anticolonialKenyan independence movement. The Mau Mau were activefrom September 1952 to October 1956, attacking and killing Britishsettlers as well as burning their crops, slaughtering their cattle, anddestroying the huts of African tenants on British farms. Remnants ofthe Mau Mau continued sporadic attacks as late as 1962.Following the first attacks, the British administration declared astate of emergency on 22 October 1952 and imprisoned Jomo Kenyatta(1889–1978) in 1953 as the suspected leader of the Mau Mau.By the end of 1953, more than 3,000 rebels had been killed, and by