All too frequently, governments kill social movement leaders in an attempt to halt challenges to state power. Sometimes such repression yields its intended effect; other times it produces a powerful backlash, strengthening mass commitment and bolstering protest. In this article, the authors propose hypotheses accounting for these divergent outcomes. Comparing El Salvador's liberation movement with Nigeria's Ogoni autonomy movement, they hypothesize that in addition to a movement's political opportunity structure, four factors internal to the movement matter: the type of leader, the movement's ideology of martyrdom, the leader's embodiment of a shared group identity, and the movement's preexisting unity.
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