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| Srl | Item |
| 1 |
ID:
190845
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| Summary/Abstract |
Existing literature on civil wars relies predominantly on state- and organization-level variables to understand conflict dynamics and outcomes. In this article, we propose that rebel leaders’ personal backgrounds and experiences are also key to explaining the behavior of the organizations they lead. Just as scholars have long highlighted the importance of state leaders’ biographical characteristics in interstate war and diplomacy, we argue that the attributes of rebel leaders affect their organizations’ decisions and actions in civil war. To substantiate our claims, we introduce the Rebel Organization Leaders (ROLE) database, which contains a wide range of biographical information on all top rebel leaders in civil wars ongoing between 1980 and 2011. We first describe the contents of the database and present a number of novel descriptive findings about rebel leaders. To illustrate its utility, we then examine the influence of rebel leaders’ attributes on their organizations’ use of terrorism in civil war. Ultimately, our work encourages – and enables – a new research agenda that goes beyond rebel organizations and campaigns as units of analysis and brings individual leaders more fully into modern conflict and peace studies.
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| 2 |
ID:
183692
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| Summary/Abstract |
An American’s yearly chance of being killed by a terrorist attack sits at roughly 1 in 3.5 million. Yet, over 40 percent of Americans consistently believe that they or their family members are likely to be a terror victim. Can these inflated estimates of the risks of terrorism be brought closer to reality? With trillions of dollars spent on the “War on Terror,” this question is not just theoretically but practically important. In order to investigate, we use an experimental approach assessing whether people update their beliefs about terrorism when given factual information about the relative risks it presents. We find that public fear of terrorism and demand for countering it can be sharply reduced with better information, dropping essentially to pre-9/11 levels after the treatment and staying that way two weeks later. These results suggest that countering the indirect costs of terrorism may largely require providing more context and perspective.
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| 3 |
ID:
175819
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| Summary/Abstract |
A key piece of conventional wisdom among scholars of modern armed conflict is that collateral damage is often strategically costly in war. Yet most combatants already know this and take actions after mistakes—most prominently, the distribution of “condolence payments” to civilian victims—in order to mitigate these costs. Do these payments work? This question is important not only for policymakers but also for deeper theoretical debates about how civilians respond to combatant signals in war. To examine these issues, I use micro-level conflict event data on 4,046 condolence payments made by Coalition forces to civilian victims during the Iraq War from 2004 to 2008, matching it with corresponding data on collateral damage and insurgent violence. The results of this analysis reveal that post-harm compensation does significantly diminish local rates of insurgent violence, and that this is true across different types of payments (cash handouts or in-kind assistance). Ultimately, these patterns can be best explained by a rationalist mechanism in which civilians update their beliefs about violent events based on new information about combatants’ wartime intentions. The results thus provide a compelling strategic rationale for combatants to compensate their victims in war, and suggest that civilians are not blinded to new information about conflict dynamics by their preexisting biases.
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| 4 |
ID:
167371
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| Summary/Abstract |
Why do civilians in warzones often hold widely divergent beliefs about what is happening in the fighting? While there is a burgeoning literature on the micro-dynamics of armed conflict, variation in civilians’ factual beliefs has received scant attention. Yet such beliefs are critical, as they form the basis for wartime opinion and action. I argue that—particularly for civilians outside the direct “line of fire”—this variation comes not chiefly from an event’s empirical nature, but from civilians’ prior political orientations in the dispute. In order to investigate these dynamics, I fielded a survey experiment in Pakistan in which I manipulated the features of a reported counterinsurgent air strike and then measured civilians’ ensuing beliefs about it. The results show that these beliefs are most driven by the perpetrator’s identity and civilians’ own preexisting attachments. While actual casualty levels matter too, these findings suggest that civilians’ beliefs about conflict events are often deeply biased in nature.
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