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Wartime violence and authoritarian repression against civilians take various forms. Past research has explored the causes and consequences of violence, but no previous work simultaneously assessed the long-term effects of different types of violence on political identities. This paper contends that indiscriminate attacks can reinforce ingroup identity, whereas the role of civilian agency in selective violence may have a detrimental impact. Equipped with original data capturing municipality-level exposure to both selective and indiscriminate violence during the Spanish civil war (1936–1939) in Biscay (Basque Country), this study examines its legacy on voting behavior (1983–2015). Results indicate that fascist airstrikes increased Basque nationalism while selective violence diminished the popularity of Basque parties. Individual and community-level evidence suggests that airstrikes fostered the intergenerational transmission of political attitudes. Violence can boost national identities, but it can also erode them: it depends on the type. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most nuclear dyads are characterized by some degree of nuclear and conventional asymmetry. This paper argues that these asymmetries create an environment in which deliberate nuclear first use (DNFU) can be rational. This possibility has been discarded in the formal literature on nuclear escalation because of the common reliance on the assumption of mutually assured destruction (MAD). This paper develops a formal model that traces how and under what circumstances two types of DNFU are rational. First, nuclear imbalances and advancements in counterforce technologies create a damage limitation incentive for a strong actor. Second, conventional asymmetry creates an incentive for the coercive use of nuclear weapons by the weaker player. Moreover, this paper illustrates that these asymmetric conditions are a relevant characteristic in important and very different nuclear dyads: DPRK–US, Pakistan–India, and Russia–US. Thus, the model demonstrates the potential core drivers of DNFU in today's nuclear landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper exploits the sharp escalation of violence in Colombia in the 1980s associated with the emergence of drug cartels to provide novel evidence on the long-run effects of violence exposure throughout the life-course, on children's educational attainment and academic achievement using administrative data. I find that, a higher homicide rate in early-childhood is associated with a higher probability of school dropout and conditional on completing high school, lower scores on a national end-of-high school exam. Results are robust to several falsification tests, and analyses of potential sources of selection bias. I provide supportive evidence that changes in fetal, child, and adolescent health outcomes are important potential mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do childhood experiences of wartime violence affect individuals' preferences for nuclear proliferation? This paper argues that individuals who experienced severe war violence during childhood are more likely to value the security-enhancing aspects of nuclear weapons. These individuals are more concerned about being exposed to additional wartime violence, so they view nuclear weapons as a deterrent against large-scale invasions. By utilizing the geographic variation of violence intensity during the Korean War, this paper compares the pre-war and post-war cohorts who resided in severely damaged regions and relatively safe areas. Within the pre-war cohort, I find that individuals who resided in war-torn areas are more supportive of nuclear proliferation than those who were exposed to less violence. This regional difference, however, is not substantial in the post-war generation. The results suggest that direct exposure to wartime violence during childhood increases public demand for nuclear weapons when confronted with security threats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Battle of Mosul (2016–2017) was one of the most grueling urban warfare campaigns in recent memory. The fighting quickly concentrated in West Mosul, where civilians prevented by the Islamic State from leaving their homes experienced airstrikes and indiscriminate shelling by government forces. Utilizing the as-if-randomness of severe damage or destruction of people's homes, this paper examines the impact of war exposure on the endorsement of moral foundations among a large and diverse sample of Mosul residents (N = 1027). Home damage increased binding morality but had a larger impact on individualizing morality, heightening concerns about fairness and protection from harm. A survey experiment in which the sectarian identity of the target was randomly assigned further revealed a strong association between individualizing morality and parochial altruism. Challenging conventional wisdom, both individualizing and binding morality reinforce group cohesion in ways that are functionally adaptive and responsive to the damage wrought by war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper integrates the credit rating agency and domestic conflict literatures, investigating the effects of non-violent and violent domestic political unrest on sovereign bond ratings. Using up to 60 developing countries and 94 unrest cases from 1996-2018, we find that while countries under domestic unrest often receive bond downgrades, non-violent unrest appears not to be responsible. Further, we use mediation analysis and show that respect for the rule of law and economic stability seem to mediate the relationship between violent and non-violent unrest and bond ratings. Given developing countries' need to issue debt, and the critical role credit rating agencies play in rating sovereign bonds, our work suggests that countries should seek to avoid violent domestic political unrest if for no other reason than to acquire lower-cost capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the theoretical concept of perceived resource access security in order to assess the link between natural resource scarcity and interstate conflict. It develops the hypothesis that resource access through international trade is an important determinant for conflict behaviour of states arising from resource concerns, implying a shift in focus away from endowments and towards competition for access. The main analysis is conducted in the form of a unit fixed effects logistic regression covering country-dyads of the period 1962–2010 with military interstate dispute (MID) initiation as dependent variable. The empirical findings consistently demonstrate that a diversified position in resource supply networks mitigates the conflict propensity of states characterized by outside dependence for access to natural resources, and thereby help to determine conditions under which trade reduces conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several studies have found restrictions on minority faith-based communities to be related to the onset of violent religious hostilities. Absent from this work, though, is a consideration of the fact that minority religious discrimination can take different forms, and, consequently, may encourage violence in different ways. This paper seeks to fill this void by examining different forms of minority religious restrictions and their relationship to religious violence. Specifically, we analyze the comparative strength of three basic types of religious discrimination—restrictions on minority religious practices, restrictions on minority religious institutions, and restrictions on conversion and proselytizing —on violence carried out by both religious majority groups and religious minority groups. Interestingly, our analysis shows all three forms of restrictions encourage violence from religious majorities, but not from minorities. We supplement the statistical analysis with a case study of faith-based discrimination and violent religious hostilities in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emerging literature dealing with transnational repression has identified several strategies used by authoritarian states to control and coerce their populations abroad. This article builds on existing research by investigating the domestic determinants of transnational repression. It argues that an increase in domestic repression is likely to lead to a subsequent increase in transnational repression because crackdowns at home drive dissent abroad and incentivize the state to extend its repressive gaze beyond its borders. To evaluate its arguments, the article draws on a database of approximately 1200 cases in which authoritarian states around the world threatened, attacked, extradited, abducted, or assassinated their own citizens abroad between 1991 and 2019. Offering a first quantitative test of domestic drivers of transnational repression, using multivariate regression analysis, the paper finds that as repression intensifies domestically, the likelihood of that state subsequently escalating its transnational repression also increases substantively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Secret police are generally viewed as key institutions in autocrats' repression apparatus. However, we lack clear empirical evidence on the link between secret police and repression. Instead, recent studies indicate that the surveillance provided by secret police reduces physical human rights abuses. This paper re-examines the relationship between secret police and physical state repression. We identify four mechanisms linking these variables, deterrence, targeting, organizational practices, and institutional self-preservation. These mechanisms provide contrasting expectations for the overall relationship but also contextual expectations on when secret police may (not) increase repression. To test these expectations, we collect data on the global existence of secret police. Results indicate that secret police are associated with increased physical repression, particularly when they must develop a reputation to deter dissidents or when multiple rival security organizations exist. In contrast, older, more established secret police or ones without institutional rivals are not associated with physical repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that existing quantitative studies mistakenly assume that all nuclear states can impose nuclear destruction on opponents by simply distinguishing nuclear states from non-nuclear states. This practice, however, does not capture variation in 1) nuclear states' possession of delivery capabilities, 2) the range of deployed nuclear delivery systems, and 3) the geographic distance between nuclear states and their dyadic counterparts. Instead of this monadic nuclear statehood approach, I propose the dyadic nuclear reach approach, which uses a new dyad-specific measure of states' strategic nuclear delivery capabilities. It codes whether a nuclear state can launch a nuclear strike against a given opponent by using the information about the estimated range of each nuclear state's strategic nuclear delivery platforms, nuclear operation bases, and states' capital cities. An empirical application shows that using an appropriate measure of nuclear capabilities does significantly alter existing empirical knowledge of nuclear weapons and international conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While many scholars find that security cooperation increases the foreign aid that allies receive from a major power, other studies show that an alliance also has negative effect and its terms can change over time. This article argues that a donor's security environment impacts its participation in security cooperation and, subsequently, foreign aid allocation to allies. When the security environment is competitive, a donor will concentrate its resources on strengthening its ties with allies. In contrast, when the environment is favorable to a donor, it can use security cooperation as leverage to obtain policy concessions from allies, thus reducing its own foreign aid expenditures. This paper analyzes the aid allocation of three major power donors as well as 72 formal defense pacts and 70 bilateral defense cooperation agreements, and it finds that a favorable security environment allows a donor to reduce its economic contribution to its allies by 19 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prevailing accounts of alliance formation emphasize either external threats or domestic politics, without an explicit consideration of how the two factors might interact. Instead, this paper theorizes about a specific type of interaction: coup-prevention strategies in nondemocratic regimes and external threats. Through quantitative analyses using the Alliance Treaty Obligations and Provisions (ATOP) and the State Security Forces (SSF) data, we find that "coup-proofing" reduces the probability of alliance formation when potential allies are under high external threat and that this effect is driven by the coup-proofing regime's reduced capability to defend their allies, rather than the regime's increased vulnerability to aggression. Furthermore, we find evidence for the interactive relationship at the negotiation stage of alliance formation. Upon entering an alliance, a coup-proofing regime facing a higher level of external threat offers more policy concessions to the ally, whereas an ally under higher threat could make fewer concessions to the coup-proofing regime. Our study highlights the way nondemocratic domestic political institutions can interact with external threat to shape states' alliance behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The "rally 'round the flag" effect—a short-term boost in a political leader's popularity during an interstate political dispute—was first proposed by Mueller (1970) more than half a century ago. However, there is no scholarly consensus on its empirical validity and the circumstances under which the effect becomes most prominent. In this paper, based on a natural experimental design, we analyze large-scale worldwide surveys of 34,118 responses and causally identify the effects of 46 militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) on the approval ratings of political leaders in 27 countries. We find that MIDs, on average, decrease public support for national leaders. However, the public backlash could be attenuated depending on theoretically relevant contexts. Our finding implies that political leaders cannot rely on MIDs for public support increases, as they are generally penalized for such decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first introduces a theoretical formalization connecting a polity's income level to terrorism. Our framework can accommodate different underlying assumptions about individual- and society-level grievances, yielding competing hypotheses. We then construct a panel database to study terrorism for 1527 subnational regions in 75 countries between 1970 and 2014. Results consistently imply an inverted U-shape that remains robust to incorporating a comprehensive set of region-level covariates, region- and time-fixed effects, as well as estimating an array of alternative specifications. The threat of terrorism systematically rises as low-income polities become richer, peaking at GDP/capita levels of ≈ US$12,800 (in constant 2005 PPP US$), but then falls consistently above that level. This pattern emerges for domestic and transnational terrorism alike. While peaks differ by perpetrator ideology, the inverted U shape also prevails across ideology-specific subsamples. In sum, alleviating poverty may first exacerbate terrorism, contrary to much of the proposed recipes advocated since 9/11. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A purported advantage of secrecy in international politics is its ability to reduce pressures for conflict escalation by obscuring responsibility for hostile actions. Delegating these actions to proxies is one strategy states use to retain plausible deniability and limit escalation risks. Yet, proxies often have strong ties to sponsoring states, raising questions about their ability to influence blame and demands for retaliation. This paper tests these effects by analyzing American responses to hypothetical attacks by Chinese, Russian, and Iranian actors through experiments administered on three surveys. The results show that using proxies for these attacks modestly reduced how much Americans blamed the respective foreign governments, while also limiting demands that their senior leadership be sanctioned. However, the use of proxies did not affect Americans' attitudes toward more forceful responses by the US government. These findings contribute to understanding of how proxies shape plausible deniability and escalation risks in international conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing research portrays militant splinter groups as more violent than their parent organizations due to factors like more extreme preferences or capacity-building needs. Though widely held, the assumption that splinters are particularly violent has not been systematically tested. In this paper, we develop and test an alternative explanation for splinter behavior. We argue splinter groups often appear less violent than their parents due to an underlying selection effect. Splinters break away where there are large organizational barriers to internally address a faction's grievances. These barriers tend to exist in well-organized parents that are also capable of high levels of violence. Splinter groups lack this established organizational infrastructure, resulting in lower levels of relative violence. We test this logic with an original dataset on parent and splinter groups and a pair of comparative case studies. We find that splinters are less violent than parent organizations, challenging conventional wisdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contexts as diverse as civil war interventions, alliances, and military coalitions, states often militarily assist protégés to counteract unfavorable power shifts. Existing theoretical work finds that such assistance mitigates commitment problems and reduces the probability of war. We develop a model that captures this but also includes information asymmetries. In many cases, overcoming the commitment problem encourages the protégé to take greater risks in bargaining, thereby increasing the probability of war due to incomplete information. Using mechanism design, we show that in some cases, no feasible transfer can reduce the probability of war to zero. More broadly, our results indicate that encouraging policymakers to further expand military assistance can backfire despite empirical relationships that may appear otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about civil war settlements' effects on public opinion in countries emerging from conflict, cases in which beliefs in agreement fairness and trust in political authorities may influence acceptance of the peace process. We posit that settlements designed to redistribute power and resources will be perceived as fairer and produce larger improvements in trust in the national government for individuals from marginalized groups than for those from dominant groups. Employing original survey data collected in the Philippines, we test these propositions with reference to the country's 2014 peace agreement. We find that marginalized Muslim groups perceive a fairer peace agreement and report improved trust in comparison to the dominant Christian community. Using a survey experiment to analyze the influence of power-redistributing settlement measures, we find that trust in the government is not significantly affected by information regarding power sharing, a result that holds for members of both communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With global changes, large-scale natural hazards are more frequent and intense, posing a particular challenge for groups in conflict. Do these shared external threats influence group willingness to cooperate and assist the adversary, and how? The literature suggests inconsistent expectations, from increased intergroup cooperation, to exacerbated animosity, to no discernable impact. We explore this question in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict amid the COVID-19 pandemic, a joint exogenous threat for both sides. Using multiple surveys and a conjoint experiment, we examine whether and how COVID-19 threat perceptions affected Jewish-Israeli preferences for collaborating with the Palestinians against the pandemic, including a novel exploration of concrete policy priorities. We find that greater COVID-19 threat perceptions have little effect on collaborative policy preferences, corroborating politics-as-usual arguments: support for out-group assistance, cooperation, and cost-sharing is polarized by ideological orientation. Our findings outline both constraints and opportunities for intergroup collaboration policies in conflicts facing joint outside challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Career diplomats have expertise. Why, then, do U.S. presidents appoint relative novices to key diplomatic posts? Conventional wisdom points to patronage. Yet this explanation overlooks the benefits of a diplomat's familiarity with political superiors. Inherent in delegated diplomacy is uncertainty over diplomats' ability to "deliver" on understandings reached at the negotiating table. Non-career diplomats often speak more credibly for political superiors, creating an incentive for foreign counterparts to engage in diplomacy. I theorize a tradeoff between familiarity and expertise to generate empirically testable prediction. Counterintuitively, I expect that presidents often sacrifice professional expertise to delegate important diplomatic assignments to relative amateurs, even accounting for the patronage value of the post. I find empirical support for the argument using a novel dataset on U.S. ambassadorial appointments from the Reagan through Trump administrations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negative emotions toward outgroup members are primary factors in maintaining and escalating inter-group conflicts. Building on studies showing that highly creative individuals exhibit fewer negative emotions toward outgroup members, we examined whether training creativity by means of divergent thinking tasks would reduce negative emotions toward outgroup members in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Experiment 1 examined the effectiveness of a 2-week creativity training program that entailed executing divergent thinking tasks. The results show that individuals trained to think creatively exhibited fewer negative emotions toward the outgroup compared to the control group. Experiment 2 examined the effects of a short creativity intervention and found that the intensity of negative emotions did not change immediately after carrying out divergent thinking tasks. These findings suggest that extended, but not short, creativity intervention may regulate negative emotions toward outgroup members, indicating that emotional change in the context of conflicts is possible only after repeated creativity training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign policy scholars often assume that leaders pursue a national interest. However, states often spread their foreign policy authority thinly across bureaucracies and programs with overlapping or conflicting interests. This is especially pronounced in foreign aid, which serves a clear foreign policy purpose but is often mired in bureaucracy. Why is foreign aid often so fragmented? Focusing on the United States, I explain foreign aid fragmentation as a byproduct of domestic politics. When moderate legislators are ideologically diffuse, leadership must persuade them to support a foreign aid agenda by offering pet projects. This increases aid's fragmentation. In contrast, when moderates are relatively homogeneous, leaders can gather support through more traditional compromise, decreasing the need for fragmented pet projects. I test this theory using a mixed-methods approach, employing a novel agency-level dataset of US foreign aid appropriations and a case study of a 1992 act delivering aid to the former Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How is the electoral behavior of minorities shaped by past violence? Recent studies found that displacement increases hostility between perpetrators and displaced individuals, but there has been paltry research on members of surviving communities. We argue that the latter exhibit the opposite pattern because of their different condition. Violence will cause cross-generational vulnerability, fear and risk-aversion—leading the surviving communities to seek protection and avoid conflict by signalling loyalty and rejecting nationalist movements. In their situation as an excluded minority in the perpetrators' state, they will be more likely to vote for out-group parties. Exploiting exogenous battlefield dynamics that created inter-regional variation in the Palestinian exodus (1947–1949), microlevel measurements that capture the damage of violence, and an original longitudinal data set, we show that Palestinian villages in Israel more severely impacted by the 1948 war have a much higher vote share to Jewish parties even 70 years later. Survey evidence further supports our theory, revealing that this pattern exists only for members of the surviving communities, and not among displaced individuals. The findings shed new light on the complex social relations that guide political decision-making in post-war settings and divided societies that suffer from protracted conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the effects of religious participation on collective action such as protests? Until recently, conflict scholars have focused on the macro-level characteristics of religion, while assuming, but rarely analyzing, individual-level mechanisms. I fill in this gap by incorporating insights from the field of American Politics, which has long emphasized the roles of individual-level mechanisms such as attendance at religious gatherings. I hypothesize that attendance at religious gatherings can address problems of collective action and thus lead to protests. I test these hypotheses by exploiting exogenous variation in the attendance at Islamic religious gatherings: rain on the day of Friday Prayer. I apply the design both to macro-level event data and an individual-level survey. The analyses indicate that rainy Fridays decrease the frequency of Muslim religious attendance and lower the likelihood of Muslim protests in Africa. These results imply a core role of communal gatherings in religious mobilization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rationalist bargaining literature explains how public statements and military mobilizations can signal resolve. But recent political psychology scholarship shows how such actions can "provoke" targets, increasing their resolve by arousing emotions among their leaders and public. While rationalist models have largely omitted provocation, psychological approaches have neglected its strategic consequences. We model provocation in bargaining, assuming that a challenger's signals endogenously increase the target's resolve. Our model shows that introducing provocation can make signals of resolve more credible precisely because their provocative effects make them more costly to send. Moreover, against the prevailing intuition that provocation uniformly promotes conflict, the information from these signals can mitigate their provocative effects and elicit more generous offers than not signaling. Thus, in contrast to psychological accounts, we show that taking provocative actions can be rational and necessary for reaching peaceful bargains. We illustrate these findings with the 1911 Agadir Crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States often use market access as a bargaining chip in international politics. A state that requires simultaneous compliance in multiple issue areas before granting market access maximizes incentives to comply but also makes them brittle – any targeted states that cannot comply in one issue area have no incentive to comply in any. More generally, programs of economic coercion can achieve at most two of the following three objectives: 1) secure a broad coalition of domestic political support, 2) the association of meaningful trade value with each policy issue, and 3) assurance that enforcing one political issue will not reduce the target's incentives to comply with conditionality on others. Characteristics of the program's domestic constituency, of the issues themselves, and of the international economy are key determinants of how the state prioritizes the three objectives. The trilemma explains the number and types of issues that can be linked to economic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When do negotiations occur in civil war? How does military intervention alter this process? While the existing literature presents models of the onset of negotiations – both mediated and unassisted – they are incomplete if they do not consider third-party states involved in the conflict prior to negotiations. I argue that military intervention impacts negotiation onset by adjusting barriers to negotiation through three pathways: the likelihood of military victory, the risk of signaling weakness, and the presence of additional veto players. I examine these mechanisms using logistic random effects models on a dataset of African civil wars. An extension of the argument addresses how expectations of intervention shape conflict behavior. Rebel-supporting interventions, interventions with independent interests, and asymmetric interventions lead to an increase in the likelihood of negotiations occurring. Models controlling for expectations of intervention also suggest that third parties can impact belligerents' behavior through both expectations and follow-through. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media has become an outlet for extremists to fundraise and organize. While governments deliberate on how to regulate, some social media companies have removed creators of offensive content —deplatforming. I estimate the effects of deplatforming on revenue and viewership, using variation in the timing of removals across two video-streaming companies — YouTube, and its far-right competitor, Bitchute. Being deplatformed on Youtube results in a 30% increase in weekly Bitcoin revenue and a 50% increase in viewership on Bitchute. This increase in Bitchute activity is less than that on YouTube, meaning that deplatforming works in decreasing a content creator's overall views and revenue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Security concerns about immigration are on the rise. Many countries respond by fortifying their borders. Yet little is known about the influence of border security measures on perceived threat from immigration. Borders might facilitate group identities and spread fear of outsiders. In contrast, they might enhance citizens' sense of security and control over immigration. We test these claims using survey experiments run on a quota sample of over 1000 Americans. The findings show that allocating more government resources to border security increases desired levels of immigration. This effect is likely driven by a sense of control over immigration, induced by border security measures even when the number or characteristics of immigrants remain unchanged. Our findings suggest that border controls, which are widely considered as symbols of closure and isolation, can increase public support for immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many autocrats govern with an in-group, whose support must be secured, and an out-group, which is subject to repression. How do autocrats exploit in-group/out-group dynamics to secure their survival? One strategy, we argue, is to broadcast out-group repression to the in-group as a signal of the regime's capacity for violence. Empirically, we focus on China, where the government represses ethnic Uyghurs in Xinjiang. Drawing on 1 million articles from six propaganda newspapers, we show that the regime broadcasts out-group repression to urban elites on each anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, when 10% of Beijing residents joined anti-regime protests. To understand its effects, we conducted a survey experiment balanced on the national census during the June 2020 Tiananmen anniversary. Using a list experiment to mitigate preference falsification, we show that CCP propaganda about Uyghurs during the Tiananmen anniversary discourages protests among politically engaged urban elites because they fear repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does police militarization influence government use of repression? While comparative work examines police militarization, violence, human rights abuses, and torture, it does not integrate militarized police within existing theories of repression. Connecting police militarization and repression, this article argues that police militarization increases the police's perception of threat as well as their coercive capacity, thereby increasing their willingness to repress. As such, we hypothesize police militarization increases repression. To evaluate the theory, we conduct an international analysis using existing datasets covering 102 countries from 1994 to 2010. Employing several statistical models, the data supports the conclusion that police militarization increases the likelihood of government repression, specifically through extrajudicial killing and torture. Aside from highlighting a consequence of police militarization policy, the findings point to police militarization as an important omitted variable in cross-national models of repression and human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employing two alternative measures of state failure, we investigate how state weakness influences resident terrorist groups' survival. Theoretically, state failure favors resident terrorist groups' survival, while state territorial control fosters resident groups' termination until some control threshold. Empirically, we uncover a robust negative relationship between a country's weakness and its control of terrorism through the lens of the resident terrorist groups' survival prospects. The discovered relationship withstands a host of robustness tests – e.g., alternative estimates and samples. We apply an instrument designed to address endogeneity concerns. In particular, our novel instrument for failed states consists of the interaction between natural disasters and ethnic fractionalization. As a state's percentage of territorial control increases, resident terrorist groups are more prone to ending until some threshold control percent. Our analysis can guide counterterrorism policy by exploiting the nuanced theoretical determinants identified here that foster resident groups' termination in failing states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A critical element in civil wars is military fragmentation. Yet, we have a limited understanding of why military elites fight in civil wars and on what side. In this article I develop a theory of the economic and professional motivations of military elites. I test this theory using the case of West Point graduates in the American Civil War. I argue that in addition to home state, economic and professional interests were a major influence on West Pointers. Graduates with connections to Southern cash crops were less likely to fight for the Union and more likely to fight for the Confederacy. Higher ranking graduates were more likely to fight for both sides, as they were better positioned to compete for promotion. I test this argument using a new dataset of more than 1000 West Point graduates' wartime allegiances and antebellum careers and find strong evidence in support of my expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This present research explores a progressive repurposing of Virtual Reality technology, Virtual Immersive Contact (VIC), in a real-world setting to; explore viability to reduce prejudice and investigate the role of empathy in motivating prosocial behavior. The study employed a between-subjects repeated-measures experimental design of a randomized sample (n = 113) split into two conditions to reduce prejudice and discrimination in the active conflict area of the Central African Republic (CAR). In line with the study's hypotheses, VIC produced a significant increase in empathic concern for the Muslim outgroup and intentions to donate to a Muslim family, while also showing that the relationship between empathy and helping behaviours was mostly explained by confounding variables. This research provides both the first evidence of its kind that VIC could be a new form of fostering positive intergroup contact in an active conflict setting, crating a new facet of intergroup contact theory, and further evolving the literature on the empathy, prosocial behaviour relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite alarming predications about the Covid 19 pandemic that appear to fit the literature on the impact of natural disasters on civil wars, there are reasons to be suspicious that a rise in militant violence would likely occur quickly or uniformly. Although the COVID-19 pandemic is most definitely a disaster that caught the world by surprise, this "slow-rolling" shock differs in important ways from the more commonly studied acute onset natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis that often increase violent competition among groups for scarce resources. Instead, the effects of slow-rolling disasters unfold in phases that, at least in the short run, are likely to encourage a period of relative decline in violence, as actors try and assess the effects of COVID-19 on their organization and their opponents. Both statistical and qualitative evidence from the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic supports the initial phases of our theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains civilian victimization during civil war? Existing scholarship claims that violence against civilians is driven primarily by competition between armed actors. We argue that this explanation neglects a crucial cause of civilian victimization: in communities they rule, armed groups employ systematic violence against civilians to establish and sustain social order. Drawing on original microlevel quantitative data from Colombia, we show that areas controlled by a sole armed actor experience high levels of victimization, while places where multiple actors jointly govern exhibit significantly less violence. To explain this pattern, we draw on evidence from original interviews, focus groups, and secondary sources. We show that armed groups employ violence to govern areas they control and enact social order. But this violence is checked when multiple groups rule jointly: the factors that sustain pacted rule disincentivize victimization. These results have implications for theories of political order, violence, and governance by non-state actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do rebel organizations capitalize on transit migration? While numerous studies have examined the role of refugees, this article explores a broader yet significant category of mobile populations in civil conflict. Focusing on Mali, I argue that transit migration increases rebel capacity based on three causal mechanisms: Obstacles in transit, camping banditry, and dynamic recruitment. Obstacles are an enabling mechanism by facilitating the intersection between rebels and migrants. As camping bandits, rebels move between violent extortion and systematic exploitation depending on levels of competition. Finally, I argue that rebels recruit transit migrants using dynamic strategies, including coercive incentives and short-term contracts in which social and ideological requirements are relaxed. Combining quantitative analysis with original interview data, I find significant support for the causal argument and preliminary evidence for my conceptual framework. The findings improve our understanding of rebel organizations and the role of mobile populations in civil conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many international agreements, from routine trade deals to high-stakes nuclear agreements, are negotiated in secret. However, we have a limited understanding of how secrecy in a negotiation shapes attitudes towards the agreement. Public opinion matters because it informs government decisions about when to conceal or reveal information during a negotiation. In a survey experiment of U.S. adults, I first examine overall attitudes towards secrecy in security and economic agreements. I then randomize government justifications for negotiating in secret: improved success, protection of sensitive information, and anticipation of criticism from domestic and international opponents. I find that respondents are generally averse to secrecy in international negotiations, but there are justifications for its use that they perceive as more legitimate. Secrecy is more permissible when negotiations contain sensitive information or when it improves the likelihood that agreements are reached. It is less permissible when governments negotiate in secret to avoid domestic criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rebels that fight near or capture cities gain more concessions from the government than those that remain in the periphery. Yet, not all groups challenge urban centers. Previous scholarship expects rebel strength to explain this strategic decision. However, weak rebel groups challenge cities, too. Our approach focuses on the conflict process more broadly. We argue that as the network of rebels challenging the government increases, opposition groups become more likely to attack cities as either they become emboldened, given the government's disadvantage in multi-front wars, or they are propelled to strategic and resource centers in competition with the other groups. Statistical analysis of all African conflicts from 1989-2009 strongly supports this logic, while an exploration of most typical cases highlights each of these mechanisms in practice. This project thus links literature on civil war tactics and conflict contagion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What explains the emergence of al-Qaeda and the Islamic State as parties in civil wars? This study provides the first large-N analysis of this question, studying a sample of states in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, 2003–2020, contributing to ongoing debates among peace and conflict scholars about jihadist rebels in civil war. Theoretically, it is argued that higher levels of state repression and states' military capabilities should impact the preferences of local groups and increase the likelihood of a 'transnationalization'. On the other hand, it is hypothesized that increases in bureaucratic state capacity should reduce the risk of such transnationalization. A series of penalized logistic regressions yield support for the hypotheses regarding state repression and bureaucratic capacity, but not military state capacity. The findings point towards the importance of bureaucratic capacity building as well as the potentially adverse consequences of excessively repressive counterterrorism strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What determines the outcomes of civil wars? Existing literature highlights numerous factors at the systemic, state, and organizational levels of analysis. Yet there is little research on the attributes of rebel leaders in shaping war outcomes despite ample theories of their importance in steering their organizations. This article focuses on rebel leaders' age as one key driver of their behavior. Applying insights from developmental psychology to the context of armed rebellion, we argue that young rebel leaders are the most likely to suffer military defeats, middle-aged leaders to win military victories, and elderly ones to reach negotiated settlements. We use a mixed-methods strategy to substantiate our claims, combining case studies of George Washington and Yasser Arafat with new data from the Rebel Organization Leaders (ROLE) database. Our findings help advance the study of non-state violent leaders in world politics while illuminating neglected sources of risk and opportunity for peace practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In dyadic ultimatum bargaining proposers, who are privately informed about the pie size, can exploit their "moral wiggle room" by engaging in unfairness which is unobservable by responders. Our setup instead assumes better informed responders and, as a consequence, limits ultimatum power and questions conflict resolution via acceptance of ultimatum proposals. In addition to testing the game theoretic solution, based on common opportunism, we assess whether two different market framings boost benchmark behavior. Our results confirm nearly universal responder opportunism. Although the benchmark proposer demand is modal, proposer choices display substantial variation, even in later rounds and even in the range in which lower demands would let both parties expect to earn more. Nevertheless, such inefficiently large demands become less frequent across rounds. Our results also show that market framing is insignificant and more so in later rounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have shown that intergroup conflict may result from two distinct human motives: the desire to obtain personal retributions from conflict (egoism), and the desire to sacrifice for the benefit of the ingroup (parochial altruism). Yet, the relative strength of these motives is open to debate. In this study, we compare behaviors in two Intergroup Prisoner's Dilemmas (IPD), which respectively capture altruistic and egoistic motives to generate conflict. Egoistic motives result in about 40% more conflict than altruistic motives. Yet, parochial altruism generates more conflict when three conditions are gathered: i) other ingroup members are parochial altruists, ii) the outgroup is aggressive and iii) the outgroup is rich. Implications regarding the diverging structural causes of terrorism and civil wars are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does "shaming" work in NATO? More precisely, does publicly using negative language criticizing allies' defense spending improve burden-sharing, or is it counterproductive, leading to lower spending? We evaluate the effectiveness of public shaming language; specifically, whether it increases allies' defense spending or whether other considerations like external threat, domestic budgets, economic growth, or unemployment rates are better predictors of contributions. Using an original dataset of presidential statements and NATO defense spending data disaggregated across the four categories tracked by the alliance, we conclude that negative language toward allies' spending is at best ineffective and may even adversely affect burden-sharing in the long run. These findings have important implications for the political economy of alliances and both theories and policies on the use of rhetorical pressure to elicit compliance in asymmetric power relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defense policy makers have become increasingly concerned about conflict in the "gray zone" between peace and war. Such conflicts are often interpreted as cases of deterrence failures, as new technologies or tactics—from cyber operations to "little green men"—seem to increase the effectiveness of low-intensity aggression. However, gray zone conflict could also be a case of deterrence success, where challengers adopt a constrained form of aggression in response to a credible escalation threat. We develop a model that formalizes both scenarios and identifies distinct empirical patterns across the two cases. We use the model's findings to empirically analyze Russian gray zone activity since the 1990s, finding that Russian activity appears, in part, to be restrained by NATO's deterrent threat. Our model also shows that developing gray zone conflict capabilities can lead to more peace but could also backfire and provoke a challenger to escalate to war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do international naming and shaming campaigns reduce public support for repressive leaders? International advocacy can provide domestic audiences with new information about human rights abuses and shift perspectives about repression. When effective, these tactics reduce repression by marring a leader's reputation with the public. Recent research has begun to analyze this causal pathway but has yet to consider the impact of international advocacy on support for repressive leaders across different groups. I argue that the impact of advocacy on individual support for repressive leaders varies with individuals' relationship to repression victims, identification with repressive leaders, and trust in campaign sources. Using a representative survey experiment in the United States, I find that naming and shaming increases opposition to repressive leaders among those who view victims as non-threatening and those who do not share a party with the leader. Of concern, advocacy results in a backlash effect among other demographics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative research into the effectiveness of the UN human rights treaty bodies (UNTBs) in eliciting remedial responses from states is impeded by a lack of usable data on how states respond to their decisions. The new Treaty Body Views Dataset (TBVD) aims to fill this gap. It comprises details on all published decisions in individual complaints cases issued by the UNTBs between 1979 and 2019 and matches these with information on their state of compliance. The TBVD can be used for research on the activities of the treaty bodies, the nature of the decisions themselves, or state behavior following a decision. An empirical application illustrates how the TBVD can advance knowledge about the factors that correlate with compliance with adverse UNTB decisions. Results show that the likelihood of implementation hinges critically on decision-level characteristics, and reveal differences and similarities between compliance with UNTB decisions and regional human rights court judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many of the world's major cities have recently seen large episodes of social unrest. What is the relationship between the changes these cities have experienced, particularly in the form of gentrification, and urban riots? We address this question by examining how local gentrification affected participation in the 2011 London riots. We use an instrumental variable strategy that exploits exogenous variation in the amount of local destruction caused by the Blitz; this is a strong predictor of local gentrification in London in 2001–2011. We find that gentrifying neighborhoods had a lower participation rate than other areas; this was a result of changes in the type of resident (a composition effect) and in the context in which the residents made their participation decisions (a contextual effect). Our findings are consistent with qualitative evidence from the United Kingdom and the United States, and highlight the effect that urban change can have on social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why did some American citizens choose to travel to fight in Syria and Iraq rather than engage in Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS)-inspired terrorism in the United States? We conducted a social network analysis (SNA) on a sample (n = 224) of extremists who either plotted ISIS-inspired attacks within the United States or attempted to travel to Syria or Iraq to join the group between 2013-2020. We test how network size, network interconnectedness, and the importance of trusted network members impact the choice of American ISIS offenders to travel or plot terrorist attacks. Our results show that Americans were more likely to choose to travel to fight when they had access to large, dense networks that were embedded with trusted associates. Those without access to similar networks abandoned their preferences for foreign fighting and instead plotted attacks within the United States. The findings provide pertinent policy implications for countering violent extremism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]