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| 1 |
ID:
114677
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article offers an intellectual history of theoretical work devoted to explaining asymmetric conflict outcomes since World War II. Three factors are critical to understanding how the literature has evolved. First, the concept of "asymmetric conflict" encompasses a number of overlapping literatures, including insurgency, terrorism, counterinsurgency, and most recently, civil wars. Second, and interrelated, the field of inquiry has been unproductively divided between military and academic thinkers, with insufficient engagement between the two communities. Third, the popularity of the field of inquiry following the events of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent American-led military operations in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003) have resulted in analyses that are empirically rich, but have provided little in the way of theoretical advances. The conclusion offers an overall assessment of the field of inquiry into asymmetric conflict outcomes, suggested directions for future research, and a table of major contributors to the literature, their key questions, case universes, intended contributions, and theoretical limitations.
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| 2 |
ID:
114672
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2012.
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Based on an analytic review of recent scholarly advances in genocide studies, this article investigates the causes, concept, and logic of genocide while suggesting a set of theoretical propositions and avenues for future research. Two emerging theoretical streams of literature on causes-strategic and ideological-highlight different dimensions of genocide and should be thought of as compatible. The study of genocide should be embedded in a broader study of political violence; the two literatures have been strangely cloistered from each other. To that end, genocide should be conceptualized as group-selective, large-scale violence whose purpose is group destruction. This stands in contrast to violence that is individually selective or indiscriminate; small-scale and not sustained across time and space; and whose purpose is repression, communication, or some other outcome short of group destruction. To develop existing theory and to bring the study of genocide closer to the literature on violence, studying variation in outcomes is essential; that is, students of genocide should ask why genocide and not another outcome occurs, rather than only studying common patterns among genocide cases. Similarly, rather than study primarily sources of escalation and accelerators of violence, scholars should also theorize restraint and decelerators of violence. Further, scholars of genocide should focus attention on the interaction between national and sub-national actors as well as periods of escalation or de-escalation. In these ways and others proposed in the essay, genocide studies can build on recent gains and develop a broader and more coherent field of theoretical inquiry.
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| 3 |
ID:
114673
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2012.
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This article examines developments in the analysis of communal conflict over the past twenty years, exploring insights regarding the relationships of economic structure, conceptions of deprivation, and the constructions of narratives making sense of civil strife. The piece compares analyses from differing paradigms and disciplines, including terrorism studies, the sociology of violence and war, and the anthropology of violence. The article explores how shifting emphases from both participants and analysts cast incidents of violence in a different light, proscribing differing potential intervention strategies and interpretations of outcomes. Highlighting these shifts provides new space for analyses and greater understanding of the potential costs and consequences of intervention.
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| 4 |
ID:
114675
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Two significant changes in the research on international conflict have occurred in the last couple of decades. First, the realist perspective has been challenged by a large body of research that investigates the impacts of domestic institutions and other liberal factors on international conflict. Second, the emphasis on international conflict has moved from a focus on war to lower levels of conflict such as threats, displays, or uses of force by one nation-state against another. This article will review the effect these recent developments have had on the study of democratic peace theory, trade and conflict, and cultural theories of war.
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| 5 |
ID:
114678
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The article reviews recent advances in the study of violence in civil wars. It provides a brief description of the baseline "control-collaboration" model, discusses alternatives to it, and reviews recent empirical studies that supply additions, corrections, extensions, and refinements to the baseline model. It highlights some of the assumptions that can be relaxed based on this new research, including the following ones: that in civil war context information is produced exclusively or even primarily by civilian denunciations at the local level; that violence is only used to deter civilian defection; that conflict is always locally dyadic; and that rival factions are organizationally indistinct from each other and resort to similar repertoires of violence. These refinements and extensions have the potential to produce a novel set of predictions that can be tested against both existing and new data. The essay notes the dynamism of this research program and recommends two steps for future research. First, it recommends moving to a higher-level, empirical and theoretical synthesis, by relying on the growing corpus of empirical studies and exploring scope conditions in a much more systematic way than was possible previously. Second, it recommends scaling up the findings of micro-level, subnational studies to the meso and macro-levels, by deriving novel empirical implications and testing them.
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| 6 |
ID:
114671
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The study of political violence has undergone dramatic changes in its orientation, scope, and empirical approach over the last twenty years. The increasing availability of micro-level data and the growing methodological sophistication of researchers have led to a proliferation of high quality studies on different types of political violence, such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, inter-state war, insurgency, civil war, and repression. However, the cost of this increased sophistication has been fragmentation of the field into highly specialized studies of types of political violence, themselves often divided by theoretical assumptions and methodological approaches. As a way of encouraging the cross-pollination of ideas across the study of political violence, this special edition has asked leading scholars in the field to produce "state of the field" survey pieces on each type of political violence and to identify directions for future research. This introduction lays out the rationale for this special edition, highlights some of the key themes and findings in the included articles, and identifies several insights from this literature that will also be applicable to the study of terrorism.
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| 7 |
ID:
114674
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
The end of the Cold War led to the creation of almost two dozen new states, resulting from groups that advanced claims based on the legitimacy of national self-determination. These claims ranged from modestly increased autonomy to secession and independent statehood. As a result, and because a number of these claims escalated to violence, scholarly research into self-determination and secession has increased tremendously over the past two decades, with scholars examining the fate of these movements and associated violence and wars, from onset to the termination of associated violence and wars. This article assesses the state of the academic literature as it relates to the links between self-determination, secession, and civil wars. It begins with a discussion of what exactly is understood by such key concepts as ethnicity, self-determination, secession, and secessionist war. It then turns to the conditions and factors that have been identified in the literature to explain the emergence of self-determination and secession and why violence and war become potential outcomes.
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| 8 |
ID:
114676
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Researchers have been exploring government repressive behavior for decades, but the greatest improvements have come in the last two. For example, greater theoretical specification has allowed us to determine a great deal about what repression is and why it occurs, while greater methodological sophistication has allowed us to test these theories rigorously. Despite or rather because of these advancements, however, we know comparatively little about what impact repression has on other social, economic, and political phenomena. This article reviews our general knowledge of the topic and attempts to improve our understanding of how repressive action influences behavioral challenges to governments.
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