Joseph Young, Associate Professor and Department Chair of Justice, Law and Criminology at American University
"'If Torture is Wrong, What About 24?':Torture and the Hollywood Effect"
May 19, 2016
12:00pm, Sie Complex 1150
How do dramatic depictions of counterterrorism practices impact public opinion and policy? Since 9/11, media depictions of these practices have also grown precipitously. Do media depictions impact how the public views torture? This study is a randomized control trial that examines how the framing of torture in pop culture impacts support for this practice. Using a mixed within-subjects and between-subjects design, participants (n = 150) were randomly assigned to a condition for dramatic depictions showing (1) torture as effective, (2) torture is ineffective, or (3) a neutral (control) condition. Participants who saw torture as being effective increased their stated support for it. We also found that participants who saw torture – regardless of whether or not it was effective – were more likely to sign a petition in line with their stated beliefs on torture. These findings may indicate people are more likely to take action about aggressive policies after seeing violence.
Michael Kalin, PhD Candidate at Yale University and Sié Center Visiting Scholar
"Social Identity and Non-Material Payoffs: A Review"
May 12, 2016
12:00pm, Sie Complex 1150 (formerly Sié 150)
What is the existing evidence for non-material payoffs driven by group attachments that we call social identity? When do these matter and for what sorts of behaviors? We highlight findings across political science, ranging from voting and redistribution to violence and conflict, that focus on the non-material, identity-based, motivations for behavior in these domains. Doing so allows us to draw out commonalities across research areas often held in isolation from one another and which frequently employ overlapping terminology. We attempt to summarize important findings, and identify open questions; these include the role played by elites in shaping mass mobilization around identities and the relationship between social identities and social norms.
Evan Perkoski, Research Fellow, International Security Program, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
"The Survival of Militant Splinter Groups"
April 28, 2016
12:00pm, Sie Complex 1150 (formerly Sié 150)
When militant groups fragment, why do some emerging organizations survive while others quickly collapse? I argue that characteristics of group breakdown drive the convergence or divergence of preferences within these new organizations, leading to the observed variation in rates of survival. Splinters forming factionally around a shared disagreement or worldview attract a relatively homogeneous core of recruits both from their parent organization and the broader community. On the other hand, splinters forming multidimensionally --absent a clear, shared vision of their organizational trajectory -- attract a more diverse membership base. Militants with strongly aligned preferences for their organizational future are less likely to experience defection, infiltration, and internal feuds, while their cohesion facilitates structural decentralization that further bolsters their resilience. Analyzing a new data set of militant fragmentation, I find strong evidence to support this intuition. In particular, schisms over strategic differences produce new groups that are especially long-lived. The ramifications of this research are significant: while existing studies attest to the influence of internal group preferences, I demonstrate that how militants form|itself a surprisingly understudied topic|strongly shapes their long-term trajectory including the odds that preferences diverge or converge. This research also refocuses the study of conflict fragmentation on individual groups (and particular schisms), showing that how conflicts become fragmented is an important consideration. Finally, and to the potential benefit of policymakers, this project sheds light on a particularly threatening subset of militant groups. However, the results do call into question the utility, and indeed the conventional wisdom, of fragmentation as a counterinsurgency strategy.
Christopher Fariss, Jeffrey L. Hyde and Sharon D. Hyde and Political Science Board of Visitors Early Career Professor in Political Science, Penn State University
"Truth Replaced by Silence: A Field Experiment on Private Censorship in Russia"
April 21, 2016
12:00pm, Sie Complex 1150
This seminar presentation was co-sponsored with the Human Trafficking Center.
Through highly visible acts of repression, authoritarian regimes can send informative signals to private actors about what types of speech are off-limits and might draw the punitive attention of the state. These acts not only encourage private actors to censor themselves but also to censor other private actors, a behavior we refer to as regime-induced private censorship. Our paper is the first to provide systematic empirical evidence on the extent and targets of such censorship behavior. We use a field experiment conducted throughout the Russian Federation in September 2014 to investigate the private censorship behavior of private media firms. The results suggest that private actors censor the messages of other private actors when those messages include anti-regime language, calls for collective action, or both. These results are partially consistent with previous empirical findings in that they show that private actors censor content with a collective action appeal even when the message itself is non-political. Our results, however, build upon previous work by showing that anti-regime messages that do not contain a call for collective action are still censored under some authoritarian regimes. Our results highlight the importance of forms of censorship other than state censorship when discussing repression, dissent, and public opinion formation in authoritarian regimes.
Eli Berman, Professor of Economics, University of California San Diego
"Expanding Governance as Development: Evidence on Child Nutrition in the Philippines"
April 7, 2016
12:00pm, Sie Complex 1150 (formerly Sié 150)
Worldwide, extreme poverty is often concentrated in spaces where people and property are not safe enough to sustain effective markets, and where development assistance is dangerous – and might even induce violence. Expanding governance by coercively taking control of territory may enable markets and development programs, but costs to local residents may exceed benefits, especially if that expansion is violent. We estimate for the first time whether a large counterinsurgency program improves welfare. We exploit the staggered roll-out of the Philippine "Peace and Development Teams" counterinsurgency program, which treated 12% of the population between 2002 and 2010. Though treatment temporarily increased violence, the program progressively reduced child malnutrition: by 10% in the first year, and by 30% from year three onwards. Improved nutritional status was not due to increased health and welfare expenditures, but instead to improved governance. Treatment effects are comparable to those of conventional child health interventions, though conventional programs are likely infeasible in this setting. Rebels apparently react to treatment by shifting to neighboring municipalities, as malnutrition worsens there – with statistically significant 'treatment' effects of similar size. Thus overall program effects are close to zero. These findings invite an evidence-based discussion of governance expansion, an extensive margin of development.
Wendy Wong, Associate Professor of Political Science; Director, Trudeau Center for Peace, Conflict, and Justice; Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto
"With Friends like These: Strategic Interactions among INGOs"
March 31, 2016
12:00pm, Sie Complex 3110 (formerly Cherrington room 301 - please note location)
This paper is an offshoot of a bigger book project, where we measure differences in INGO authority using indicators of deference before four audiences: states, corporations, other INGOs, and "the public." In the book, we argue that INGOs working on global advocacy are caught in an "authority trap," which shapes their strategic choices. INGOs with authority across all of these different audiences, those we call "leading INGOs," are are more moderate in their asks and strategies because of a need to balance the needs of all of the audiences to whom they are speaking and therefore, are equally (if not more) concerned with maintaining their status as leading INGOs. INGOs that do not have authority can be as radical as they would like in their asks, but because they have no authority, their demands are bypassed.
Jack Donnelly, Andrew Mellon Professor, John Evans Professor, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
"THE STRUCTURES OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIETIES: FORMAL DIFFERENTIATION"
March 10, 2016
12:00pm, Sié 150
This paper is a chapter from a book ms. that develops a radically new multidimensional conception of the structures of international societies. In the three preceding chapters I argue that the Waltzian tripartite (ordering principle, functional differentiation, distribution of capabilities) conception of structure fails to accurately depict the structure of any international system. This chapter begins to develop and apply an alternative account -- a multidimensional structural framework -- by looking at differences of form in social positions and their relations. Because the formal arrangement of the parts of a system is often especially well expressed in visual models, I use them extensively.
The chapter is divided into four principal parts. Sections 5.1 and 5.2 identify two types of polities ("states" and "empires") and four types of international systems ("states systems," "empires," "world states," and "heterarchies"). Sections 5.3-5.7 consider the structural dimensions of centralization, functional differentiation, stratification, and spatio-political organization. Sections 5.8 and 5.9 examine states systems and heterarchies, the two types of international systems with the most immediate contemporary relevance. Sections 5.10-5.13 then step back and reflect on the general character and some of the implications of these models.
Phil Potter, Assistant Professor of Politics, University of Virginia
"Tactical Diversity in Militant Violence"
February 25, 2016
12:00pm, Sié 150
Militant groups, like all organizations, carefully consider the tactics and strategies that they employ. In this article, we assess why some militant organizations diversify into multiple tactics while others limit themselves to just one or a few. This is an important puzzle because militant organizations that employ multiple approaches to violence are more likely to stretch state defenses, achieve tactical success, and threaten state security. We theorize that militant organizations respond to external pressure by diversifying their tactics in order to ensure their survival and continued relevance, and that the primary sources of such pressure are government repression and inter-organizational competition. We find consistent support for these propositions in tests of both the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior (MAROB) datasets. To address the possible endogeneity of repression and diversification we then confirm these findings in a more fully identified specification that employs ethnic fractionalization as an instrument in a multi-process recursive model. Finally, we demonstrate that organizations that diversify under pressure adopt more disruptive tactics such as hijacking and suicide bombing, rather than devolving into less threatening approaches such as isolated shootings and kidnappings. The policy implication is that while countries cannot anticipate the character of future tactical innovations, they may be able to anticipate which groups will most readily adopt them.
Laia Balcells, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Duke University
"Rivalry and Revenge: the Politics of Violence in Civil War"
February 18, 2016
12:00pm, Sié 150
What explains violence against civilians in civil wars? Why do armed groups use violence in some places but not in neighboring places with similar characteristics? Why do they kill more civilians in some places than in others? More specifically, why do groups kill civilians in areas where they have full military control and their rivals have no military presence? The theoretical argument is that armed groups target civilians who have been politically mobilized by the enemy group, as they perceive threats behind the frontlines. I propose a distinction between indirect and direct violence against civilians, and I argue that the distribution of political loyalties relates differently with respect to each of these types. These differences emanate from their diverging form of production: indirect violence is perpetrated with heavy weapons is unilaterally carried out by the armed group. In contrast, direct violence is perpetrated with small weapons and is produced by armed groups in collaboration with local civilians. Direct (or face-to-face) violence occurs when enemy supporters are located in zones controlled by the armed group, whereas indirect violence occurs when enemy supporters are located in zones controlled by the adversary. When targeting enemy supporters behind enemy lines, the armed group aims to kill as many of them as possible, hence they target locations with high concentrations of enemy supporters. In territory the armed group controls, in contrast, the group must take into account the preferences of its own supporters, whose collaboration is crucial. Group supporters are likely to collaborate in the killing of their neighbors if and only if it is in their own interest to do so, which is the case when eliminating enemy supporters can decisively shift the demographic balance and help them gain or consolidate political control of the locality. Because of the latter, direct violence is likely to occur where the balance between group supporters and enemy supporters is relatively even. Thus, the main prediction in the book is that indirect violence increases with rival supporters' domination of a locality whereas direct violence increases with parity between supporters of the two rival groups.
The hypotheses are tested with a multi-method empirical strategy. The research design consists of exploring intra-country variation (with large-n sub-national data) of violence during the Spanish civil war (1936-1939) and the Ivorian civil wars (2002-2011), and combining it with additional secondary evidence from other cases in order to provide external validity. For the case studies, I draw on archival and historiographic sources to construct a set of novel databases of victims of lethal violence, pre-war elections results, and geographical and socioeconomic variables. I also us qualitative evidence collected from oral sources and from over a hundred published sources, including general history books, as well as regional and local studies.
Jeff Colgan, Richard Holbrooke Assistant Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs, Watson Institute at Brown University
"The Political Economy of Territorial Ambitions"
February 4, 2016
12:00pm, Sié 150
The 20th century witnessed a remarkable change in the territorial preferences of powerful states. Empires declined, and advanced states rarely sought to annex or permanently occupy foreign territory, even after overseas military victories. One part of the story is surely the rise of colonial nationalism, but another part of the explanation, less well understood, has to do with changing interests within the advanced states. I argue that two factors help account for this change in territorial preferences: energy modernity and regime type. High energy consumption per capita, relative to 19th century standards, signifies an underlying economic transition that changes the political balance of power away from those who benefit economically from imperialism and toward groups who are more sensitive to its costs. Regime type affects the ease with which domestic groups that would benefit from aggressive imperialism can engage in state capture. When a state is both democratic and energy modern, its preferences for imperialism (long-‐term occupation of foreign territories) are likely to be low. When a state is energy traditional, however, a state is likely to have strong territorial preferences even when it is democratic. This theory is tested with a broad historical analysis over the period of 1850-‐2000, focusing on the six major combatants of World War II: Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Russia, and the United States. Each of these states started with strong imperial preferences, but there is significant variation in the timing of the subsequent change in each state's preferences.
Lee Ann Fujii, Associate Professor and Associate Chair, University of Toronto Mississauga
"Sideshows," a book chapter from the manuscript Show Time: The Logic and Power of Violent Display
January 28, 2016
12:00pm, Sié 150
This book asks what explains violent display. To answer this question, I examine various displays that occurred in three different settings: the Bosnian war, Jim Crow Maryland, and the Rwandan genocide. Not all displays involved what I call "extra-lethal" violence but this chapter focuses exclusively on such displays. The chapter also references two lynching cases that I discuss in previous chapters. One is the lynching of black factory worker, Matthew Williams, that took place in December 1931 in Salisbury, Maryland and the other was the lynching of black farmhand, George Armwood, that took place in October 1933 in Princess Anne, a neighboring town.
Ben Appel and Jakana Thomas, Assistant Professors of Political Science, Michigan State University
"The Effectiveness of Sanctioning Foreign Terrorist Organizations"
January 14, 2016
12:00pm, Sié 150
Both the UN and the U.S. have sought to disrupt the activity of terrorist groups by enacting economic sanctions against them. While both have devoted significant resources to their sanctions program, very little is known about how this counterterrorism strategy actually influences the activities of targeted terrorist groups. In this study, we examine systematically the impact of U.S. and UN sanctions on both the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks in a cross-national study from 1989-2014. Focusing on a broad array of economic/diplomatic policy tools that may fall under the broad umbrella of sanctions (i.e., seizing/freezing assets, embargos [arms, goods, services], travel bans), we expect that sanctions will curtail terrorist activity. We test our argument on a new data including information on both U.S. and UN sanctions. Using difference-in-differences estimation to account for concerns related to selection effects, we find consistent support for our argument, UN and U.S sanctions reduce both the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks.
Holly Porter, Lead Researcher for Northern Uganda, Justice and Security Research Programme, London School of Economics
"Moral Spaces and Sexual Transgression: the 'Event,' the 'Ordinary,' and 'Logics' of Sexual Violence in Northern Uganda"
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
9:30am, Ben Cherrington Hall 141
When it comes to rape in the context of war, evocative language describing rape as a "weapon of war" and the female body as a battlefield is now commonplace. Yet scholars also note the similarities with violence before, during and after conflict, with a key issue being the relationship between rape in war and "normal" male-female relationships -- in other words, between "the event" and "the ordinary." This paper explores these relationships by considering sexual violence in Acholi, northern Uganda. Building on research focusing on forced sex from over seven years of fieldwork, the paper foregrounds the ways sexual violence variously works to continue, exaggerate and/or rupture ³normal² social and gender orderings of Acholi society. However, examining rape and its aftermath solely through the prism of "the event" and "the ordinary" leaves the picture blurry: people carve out moral spaces of agency to assert moral probity, as modes of governance, and as ways of making sense of the choices and actions of themselves and others. Deliberate distinction of space works to separate events from essence and actions from morality. In Acholi, these moral spaces are delineated by temporalities (olden times, the time of war, these days, and a continuous frozen ideal of Acholi life), in turn associated with specific physical localities (the village, the camp, the bush, town, home). By mapping ideas of what constitutes sex and sexual transgression onto these moral spaces, this paper sheds light on the relationship between event and ordinary, rape and war.
Luke Abbs, Visiting Scholar
"Better the Devil You Know: Why Incumbents Delegate Violence to Ethnic Militias"
Tuesday, November 3, 2015
12:00pm, Sié 150
The traditional "Weberian" conception of statehood suggests that elites should rely on official state agents to suppress potential challengers (Ahram 2011), as irregular militia groups dilute the state's monopoly over force. For pro-government militias are organized armed actors that support the government, but operate outside of conventional security structures (Carey et al, 2013). In principle, the usage of militia should be particularly unnecessary for elites that maintain executive power, as they have exclusive control over the conventional state forces. Maintaining a monopoly of force depends on concentrating power at the center, and therefore we should not expect to see elites delegate state violence to irregular militia groups. However, between 1981 and 2007, forty-two states have relied on the support of ethnic militias, which are a unique form of pro-government militia that are exclusively recruited along ethnic lines. This is puzzling, since ethnic leaders with access to conventional forces still delegate security roles to militia groups that operate outside of their direct control. This article builds on this puzzle, focusing on the research question: why do ruling ethnic elites delegate state violence to ethnic militias?
Ana Arjona, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
"Non-state territorial armed groups and state capacity"
October 22, 2015
12:00pm, Sié 150
Different kinds of non-state armed groups are behind the most violent conflicts of today: the FARC in Colombia, ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and drug traffickers in Mexico. While we often study these groups separately, policy recommendations to counter their expansion often point to the same solution: improving state capacity. Yet, what state capacity entails, and which specific components are more crucial, is seldom theorized. This ambiguity has led to policy recommendations that are too broad and ambitious, as they call for interventions that bring security, public goods provision, institutions, and development. In this paper I propose the concept of "non-state territorial armed groups", and develop a theoretical framework to assess the relative importance of different components of state capacity in preventing these groups from ruling civilian populations. I argue that improving local justice institutions should be a priority—more so than providing public goods and implementing projects for local development, which seems the dominant policy. Justice institutions are an essential building block of social order, and they also provide the cement for civilian resistance to armed group rule. I test the main implications of the argument with original data on conflict zones throughout Colombia, where different kinds of non-state armed groups have operated for decades.
Amy Grubb, Assistant Professor of Social Sciences
Department of Security Studies and International Affairs, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
"Collusion at the Grassroots in Kenya’s 2007-08 Post-Election Violence"
September 17, 2015
12:00pm, Sié 150
Human security challenges such as Kenya’s post-election violence in 2007-08 necessitate research on geographical levels below the state and the particular local actors and processes crucial in providing or threatening that security. The factors most indicated as causes of Kenya’s violence, namely neopatrimonialism, elite fragmentation, and ethnicity, can be manifested in actor behaviors differently across communities. This study examines two districts in the Rift Valley where I find distinct dynamics in relationships between perpetrators and grassroots state officials. The paper shows that where state officials collude with perpetrators, the effect can be deleterious on the state goal of reducing a threat. Instead, this behavior can lead to a cycle of continuous violence. Consequently, the containment of conflict, and thereby the provision of human security, depends on impartial state officials at the grassroots level able and willing to offer protection to targeted groups.
Karen Ruth Adams, Associate Professor, International Relations, University of Montana
Steve Zech, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security & Diplomacy, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
Cassy Dorff, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security & Diplomacy, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
Chris Blattman, Associate Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
Jason Lyall, Associate Professor of Political Science, Yale University
Devin Finn, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security & Diplomacy, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
Zakia Shiraz, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Warwick
