Entertaining, Informing, Discussing: How do Media Spread Messages of Peace and Violence?

Elizabeth Levy Paluck, Psychology, Princeton University

Research Grant, 2009

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We test the causal effects of a democracy promotion radio intervention launched by an international nongovernmental organization (INGO) in South Sudan. The serial radio episodes addressed topics that are relatively new to listeners, regarding democratic institutions and procedures such as anticorruption law and elections. Other radio episodes addressed topics about which listeners likely have pre-existing positions, such as the role of women in politics and the meaning of citizenship.

The INGO augmented the radio intervention with face-to-face, formally moderated listener group discussions regarding the program content. We randomly assigned these different aspects of the radio intervention (“treatments”) in a hybrid lab-field study. Specifically, we randomly selected small groups of neighbors and friends in the capital city Juba, and randomly assigned these groups to experience one or more treatment (different radio episode topics, moderated discussion) over the course of a full day. We measure learning, attitude and behavioral shifts by comparing listening groups to no-treatment controls and to one another.

Explanations for the influence of this radio-inspired discussion are suggested by psychological theories regarding the social influence of listening partners.

We find that encouraging discussion about the radio program has substantively and statistically significant effects on learning about the meaning of new democratic concepts and institutions. Discussion, and particularly discussion of the relevant radio episodes on democracy, improves attitudes toward democratic issues, but discussion of women’s involvement in politics causes more negative attitudes toward these issues. We also find substantively and statistically significant behavioral shifts caused by discussion in terms of donating money to civil society organizations (CSOs) and actual reporting of corruption and volunteering with CSOs up to one month following the experiment.

Explanations for the influence of this radio-inspired discussion are suggested by psychological theories regarding the social influence of listening partners. However, listeners’ perceived partner agreement with the radio program has mixed effects; we only find an association between treatment effects and perceived partner agreement with respect to attitudinal persuasion.

Finally, the gender of participants and the gender composition of listening groups conditions our average treatment effects in significant and relatively patterned ways. Women respond more positively to messages about women in politics and citizenship, and are less likely to be negatively affected by discussion about these topics. Listening to radio content about women in politics and citizenship also motivates greater behavioral responses among women and among listening groups that include women, in terms of donating money and requesting the contact information for CSOs. However, women are not more likely than the overall sample to donate to women’s causes.

Two Ways Out: Christianity, Security, and Mara Salvatrucha

Kevin Lewis O'Neill, Diaspora and Transnational Studies, University of Toronto

Research Grant, 2010, 2012

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This project, based on fieldwork in Guatemala, tracked the growing world of transnational street gangs from the perspective of gang ministry. These criminal organizations originated among Central American immigrants in Los Angeles, California, during the gang wars of the 1980s. Since then, United States deportation policies have transported (and, in turn, expanded) these gangs back to Central America, with one of the strongest networks forming in postwar Guatemala. Tens of thousands of men and women now smuggle drugs, participate in human trafficking, and control prison systems.

Religion is a social fact deeply bound to the practice and to the construction of security.

While much research focuses on why young men and women join these gangs, this project looked instead at one of the only ways out: Christian conversion. This curious loophole in gang membership raised a guiding research question: How and to what extent does gang ministry exemplify Christianity’s growing entanglement with the geopolitics of Central American security? The answer to this question proved significant, with an array of Christian-inflected research sites contributing to efforts at Central American security. These included prison chaplaincy programs that target active gang members as well as back-to-work programs for ex–gang members. One overall observation proved critical. A range of scholars (in several disciplines) understand religion and security as distinct: religion as a threat to security or religion as a solution to insecurity. Yet, my fieldwork makes it clear that religion, observed here through various manifestations of Christianity, is neither the enemy nor the antidote. Rather, religion is a social fact deeply bound to the practice and to the construction of security, to the very idea of what it means to be secure.

Bibliography

1. 2015. Secure the Soul: Christian Piety and Gang Prevention in Guatemala. University of California Press.

The Neural Circuitry of Aggression, Sex and Sexual Aggression

David J. Anderson, Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience, California Institute of Technology

Research Grant, 2014

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Mating and aggression are innate (or instinctive) behaviors that are performed without training. Interestingly, among animals, these two seemingly different behaviors appear to be inextricably intertwined: aggressive encounters are often associated with mating, when males exhibit their dominance for sexual opportunities. However, male-female interactions are primarily sexual (mating) and male-male interactions tend to be aggressive, while aggression toward females is more often the exception than the norm. What brain mechanisms are responsible for separating sexual behavior toward females, and violent aggression toward males, under normal conditions?

To investigate the brain mechanisms, we used a technique called microendoscopy that allowed us to image deep-brain (hypothalamic) neuronal activity in male mice engaged in social behaviors. We recorded over two hundred neurons on average in each mouse (total 25 mice), and the mice had no trouble fighting or mating because of the microendoscope neural implant.

In sexually and socially experienced adult male mice, neurons were strongly active during interactions with conspecifics, but not with a toy. It was immediately clear that characteristic, yet separate, ensembles of neurons were active during interactions with male or female conspecifics. But surprisingly, in inexperienced adult males, common populations of neurons were activated by both male and female conspecifics. The sex-specific ensembles gradually emerged as the mice acquired social and sexual experience. These observations indicated that interactions with males and females was required for the distinct representations of males and females in the adult mouse brain.

These observations reveal an unexpected requirement of experience for behaviors that were traditionally viewed as "hard-wired" or innate.

We performed another set of experiments where adult male mice were permitted to investigate (touch, smell, etc.) but not mount or attack other female or male mice. In this case, we did not observe female- or male-specific ensembles or divergent representations in the brain, suggesting that sensory exposure itself was insufficient. However, providing male mice with brief sexual experience was sufficient to generate neuronal ensembles that were specific to males and females, divergent neural representations of conspecific sex and aggression towards males. This experiment demonstrated that social interactions are necessary for the formation of male and female specific neuronal ensembles.

These observations reveal an unexpected requirement of experience for behaviors that were traditionally viewed as “hard-wired” or innate. Social experience was required for the formation of neuronal ensembles that themselves control social behavior.

Bibliography

1. Remedios R, Kennedy A, Zelikowsky M, Grewe BF, Schnitzer MJ, Anderson DJ. (2017) Social Behaviour Shapes Hypothalamic Neural Ensemble Representations Of Conspecific Sex. Nature. In Press.

2. Kennedy A, Asahina K, Hoopfer E, Inagaki H, Jung Y, Lee H, Remedios R, Anderson DJ. (2015) Internal States and Behavioral Decision-Making: Toward an Integration of Emotion and Cognition. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol. 79:199-210.

Troubled Peace: Explaining Political Violence in Post-Conflict Settings

Francesca Grandi, Political Science, Yale University

Dissertation Fellowship, 2013

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My research is about violence after war. Contrary to received wisdom, violent societies are not a natural outcome of war. Violence is not ubiquitous in post-war countries. It does not emerge everywhere all the time; its distribution varies significantly across time and space. Explaining where violence occurs allows us to understand why it does–which is the objective of my dissertation, a history-grounded investigation in the nature and impact of post-conflict violence and the dynamics of its variation.

My project explains why the winners of a war kill their former enemies after the hostilities have officially ended. They do so to convert their military advantage into political dominance. The winners cleanse the territories under their control as a way to consolidate their military victory and sanction their political power. Post-conflict targeted assassinations are therefore a strategy to establish political hegemony and, as such, they occur in the areas where the winners’ influence concentrates. In other words, my explanation centers on the forward-looking, strategic dimension of postwar violence, which most existing accounts overlook by privileging past dynamics, i.e., revenge, justice demands, or the conflict’s “root-causes.”

The end of a war, no matter how decisive its military settlement, does not automatically lead to a definitive political solution. Most often, a transitional period begins, during which the question of who governs and how to distribute power ought to be solved. In other words, the winners have to transform their military advantage into a political victory. This process happens during the time lag between the official end of the hostilities and the return of “normal” politics. It is during this time that the foundations of a new political system are laid and so are the bases for durable peace or renewed conflict. Violence plays a crucial role in this transition from civil war to peaceful democratic politics. It intertwines with the emerging electoral competition. It becomes an integral part of the political contestation process and a strategy to influence the post-war allocation of power.

The fast-changing political system at war’s end creates a sense of urgency, which is the underlying condition for targeted extra-judicial assassinations of former enemies. But violence emerges only under specific conditions. The war experience and its military resolution forge the winning actors’ preferences, particularly in regards to how political power should be distributed and attained. The wartime legacies combine with forward-looking expectations to create a series of mismatches, which give the winners incentives to kill, and organization, which gives them the capacity to do so. The mismatches create a more complicated net of incentives than the dichotomies of winner-loser or military vs. political actors would predict. Instead, the causes of post-war targeted killings during transitions rest in the relative strength of the parties within the winning coalition and the relative position of party affiliates within these parties.

My empirical strategy focuses on a structured, sub-national comparison of post-WWII Italy. I generalize these findings to contemporary settings, by developing a topology of post-conflict violence, by mapping cases of post-conflict violence across the world since 1945, and by testing my theoretical findings in a contemporary case study–post-Qadhafi Libya. My research bridges academia and practice by providing a basis for more suited data collecting strategies and more tailored intervention policies in post-conflict settings, with the ultimate goal of increasing international peacebuilding and conflict prevention capacity.

Dynamics of Violence in Conventional Civil Wars

Laia Balcells, Institut d’Analisi Economia, CSIC

Research Grant, 2011

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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? This research project explores the determinants of violence against civilians in the context of conventional civil wars, which are fought between armies, as opposed to civil wars fought between a state and irregular armed groups. Conventional civil wars are much more common than thought and display markedly different characteristics than insurgencies or guerrilla wars.

The theoretical argument in this project incorporates political factors in a strategic explanation of violence. I contend that armed groups target civilians who are strong supporters of the enemy, either to strengthen control over territory they already occupy or to weaken the enemy in territory the enemy occupies. Violence takes two forms, direct or indirect, depending on the location of civilian supporters of the enemy. While direct violence occurs when enemy supporters are located in zones controlled by the armed group, indirect violence occurs when enemy supporters are located in zones controlled by the adversary (provided the armed group possesses the military technology to carry out attacks in these areas). The key difference between the two forms of violence is that the armed group’s own supporters can constrain direct violence in zones of control, whereas they cannot do so in zones of enemy control.

Direct and indirect violence imply different strategies. 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 their own supporters, who know the identity of the rival’s supporters and can choose whether or not to collaborate with the group’s militants. Group supporters are likely to collaborate with the armed group and identify enemy supporters 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 local demographic balance and help them gain or consolidate political control of the locality. Thus, direct violence is likely to occur where the balance between group supporters and enemy supporters is relatively even. Indeed, in places where the group’s supporters are already predominant, violence is unnecessary, whereas in places where enemy supporters dominate, violence would have to be massive (hence too costly) to make a difference. The prediction is thus that indirect violence increases with rival supporters’ domination of a locality whereas direct violence increases with parity between supporters of the two rival groups.

Conventional civil wars without meaningful prewar mobilization should not be the sites of mass violence against civilians.

Violence against civilians is only likely to occur, however, where there have been high levels of prewar mobilization along the cleavage line that divides the two groups, whether being ethnicity, religion, or ideology. This mobilization is what leads people to identify as strong supporters of one side or the other. Put differently, conventional civil wars without meaningful prewar mobilization should not be the sites of mass violence against civilians.

The empirical strategy of this project is multimethod: I use quantitative methods in combination with qualitative analyses. Following a recent trend in political science, the research design consists of systematically exploring intracountry variation (with large-n subnational data) and combining it with additional secondary evidence from other cases in order to provide external validity. I combine insights from two novel subnational datasets (i.e., Spain and Côte d’Ivoire) with a crossnational test of implications and secondary evidence from other cases (e.g. Bosnia, Northern Ireland). In addition, for the case of Spain, I use evidence collected from oral sources (i.e., sixty civil war testimonies) and from over a hundred published sources, including general history books, as well as regional and local studies.

The Spanish Civil War is the main case study of the book; this is, together with the US Civil War, a paradigmatic case of a conventional civil war. Using this civil war constitutes a dispute to the neglect of historical cases in the study of civil war violence, which risks generating wrong conceptualizations of the phenomenon. The Spanish Civil War has a special relevance on its own because it was a crucial conflict in the West European interwar period and it was a particularly severe conflict. The case of the recent Ivorian civil war permits us to test the observable implications of the theory with a recent civil war that was fought along ethnic lines. Thanks to the HFG research grant, I was able to build a provincial level dataset on violence during the armed conflict in Côte d’Ivoire (2002–2011), which also includes data on electoral results, ethnic composition, natural resources, and geographical characteristics of the provinces. I also gathered data on violence across the neighborhoods of the capital of the country, Abidjan. The results for the Ivorian Civil War are broadly consistent with those obtained for the Spanish Civil War, showing that direct violence increases with levels of parity between rival groups. Although the Spanish and the Ivorian civil wars are very dissimilar, the comparison of the two cases yields valuable insights. Importantly, the combination of evidence from an old and ideological civil war (Spain) and a new and ethnic civil war (Côte d’Ivoire) adds external validity to the theory put forward in this project.

Bibliography

1. Balcells, Laia. 2017. Rivalry and Revenge: the Politics of Violence during Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press (Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics).

2. Balcells, Laia and Abbey Steele. 2016. “Warfare, Political Identities, and Displacement in Spain and Colombia.” Political Geography 51: 15-29.

3. Balcells, Laia, Lesley-Ann Daniels, and Abel Escribà-Folch. 2016. “The Determinants of Low-intensity Intergroup Violence. The Case of Northern Ireland.”  Journal of Peace Research 53: 33-48.

4. Balcells, Laia and Stathis Kalyvas. 2014. “Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil Wars.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 58(8):  1390-1418.

Organization and Community: The Determinants of Insurgent Military Effectiveness

Alec Worsnop, School of Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park

Dissertation Fellowship, 2014

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The United States and other members of the international community have lost thousands of lives and expended significant resources confronting insurgent organizations across the world. Strikingly, however, there has been little systematic analysis of how some insurgents have developed the military capacity to challenge superior forces. This puzzle has played out in Afghanistan, where the Taliban’s success has continually confounded analysts; in Syria and Mali, where insurgents pose significant challenges to stability; and most recently in Iraq, where the Islamic State operated with military prowess. In response, this research project studies the development and military capacity of insurgent groups.

First, the project constructs a novel conception of military effectiveness fitting for the types of combat common in civil war, including the (in)ability to keep ceasefires, to control who is targeted by violence, or to employ increasingly complex guerrilla or conventional tactics. Next, it develops a theory arguing that it is not the structural conditions in which organizations operate—such as access to material resources or strong social networks—that determine effectiveness, but how well insurgents’ organizational composition allows them to leverage those conditions.  It is what insurgents do with what they have that matters. Like in all militaries, insurgent organizations must deliberately generate esprit de corps and military skill through training, indoctrination, well-designed command and control systems, and the formation of a competent set of lower-level officers.

While social and material factors must be taken into account, some organizations become militarily effective without these endowments while some well-endowed organizations fail despite these advantages.

To test the theory and isolate the importance of organizational versus structural factors, the project adopts a two-stage approach. First, I use a set of statistical models to demonstrate that structural variables are poor predictors of insurgent organizational composition. Second, I conduct in-depth case studies of ten organizations in Vietnam (1940–1975) and fifteen organizations in Iraq (2003–present). These two countries represent promising areas of study because there is a high degree of variation in structural and organizational factors as well as in military effectiveness. To evaluate the detailed hypotheses generated by the theory, I collected precise information about the internal dynamics of insurgents through archival research, interviews with ex-combatants, and secondary sources. For example, during nearly five months at the National Archives II in HÓ Chí Minh City, Vietnam, I reviewed thousands of documents including internal memoranda from rebel organizations along with French interrogations and intelligence reporting.

By demonstrating the centrality of organizational processes to insurgent military effectiveness, the project underscores that insurgent forces are not sui generis, but fit within the broader spectrum of military organizations attempting to use violence in a calibrated manner. Thus, the project highlights the importance for policymakers of explicitly assessing organizational capacity rather than treating all insurgent or terrorist groups as like entities or overvaluing the effect of social networks and material resources. While some insurgent groups can only be defeated with involved and costly tactics—including major ground combat—the project also shows that many seemingly weaker groups are still able to reliably maintain ceasefires. As a result, rather than risk escalating violence by militarily destroying such groups, conflict mediators can work to craft peace agreements by identifying the actors that can be brought to the negotiating table. Similarly, while social and material factors must be taken into account, some organizations become militarily effective without these endowments while some well-endowed organizations fail despite these advantages.

Social Order and the Genesis of Rebellion: A Study of Mutiny in the Royal Navy, 1740–1820

Michael Hechter, Sociology, Arizona State University

Steven Pfaff, Sociology, University of Washington

Research Grant, 2009

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Mutinies are part of broader class of rebellion and insurgencies and understanding them sheds light on contentious politics generally. Although there have been many studies of mutiny, for those seeking to understand the causes of naval insurrections, these studies are disappointing. Studies of rebellion are frequently undermined by the tendency to compare instances of rebellion only to one another rather to other cases in which rebellion was possible but did not take place. Unlike every previous study of naval mutiny, ours includes both cases in which documented episodes of mutiny did occur and a larger set of non-mutinous cases randomly selected from the population of all ships at risk during the period 1740 to 1820, the high point of the sailing navy. In addition, our data include observations on thousands of individual seamen who took part in a dozen mutinies, which allow us to assess the individual as well as group-level determinants of mutiny. This design allows us to pinpoint the general causes of mutiny. Some of our findings have been surprising.

Although grievances have largely been disregarded in studies of rebellion, structural grievances—anticipated deprivations imposed on individuals due to their position in the social structure—must be distinguished from incidental ones that arise unexpectedly. In our study, the most important determinant of mutiny was the rate of sickness—an incidental grievance that the crew attributed to poor governance by the ship’s officers.

We show that the failure of governance is the single largest factor that explains the incidence of mutiny in the Royal Navy.

What holds a rebellion together after the situation begins to sour? We find that the rebels’ control over information about the possibility of an amnesty was a critical cause of the resilience of the Nore mass mutiny. Violence was used to maintain order through corporal punishment but only moderate levels of flogging helped to maintain order. At specific thresholds, the frequency and severity of flogging increased the odds of mutiny. Ironically, when commanders perceived insecurity, they punished more harshly. But this harshness provoked resistance.

Finally, social scientists have long debated the role of revolutionary climates as determinants of rebellion. We find that the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror led to a generalized fear on the part of British elites—a group that includes Royal Navy officers—which led to more stringent punishment of sailors for so-called “moral” offenses, rather than those related to performance.

All told, this project has important implications for the study of social order and rebellion in many other settings. We show that the failure of governance is the single largest factor that explains the incidence of mutiny in the Royal Navy. This has a resonance beyond naval history to help us understand why rebellion occurs today in our prisons, in our neighborhoods, and in the outbreak of the radical insurgencies that we face.

Bibliography

1. “Grievances and the Genesis of Rebellion: Mutiny in the Royal Navy, 1740- 1820,” American Sociological Review 81: 1 (2016): 165-189 (Michael Hechter, Steven Pfaff, and Patrick Underwood).

2. "The Problem of Solidarity in Insurgent Collective Action: The Nore Mutiny of 1797,” Social Science History 40: 2 (2016): 247-270 (Steven Pfaff, Michael Hechter, and Katie Corcoran).

An Education in Violence: Teaching and Learning to Kill in Central Texas

Harel Shapira, Department of Sociology, University of Texas at Austin

Research Grant, 2015

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This research examined a relatively new and growing population: people who have obtained concealed handgun licenses and carry their guns with them on a regular basis. Drawing on field work at gun schools and in-depth interviews with concealed handgun license holders, the research examined two aspects of gun ownership that have been given insufficient attention in existing scholarship: first, the process by which people are socialized into gun ownership; and second, the embodied, everyday practice of gun ownership.

The research showed that becoming a gun owner involves a learning process in which both the mind and body are trained to feel comfortable with, and need, guns. Cognitively, it means developing interpretative frames for thinking about guns, safety, and violence. Specifically, one must learn to think that they need guns, that guns are safe, and that killing another human being can sometimes be a moral action.

Gun owners train their bodies to feel comfortable with guns through habit formation, making the experience of holding, shooting, and carrying a gun so normal that the violence contained within the gun is rendered banal.

While one must become ideologically comfortable with guns, a person must also learn to be physically comfortable with guns, and ultimately have positive experiences holding, shooting, and carrying guns. Although such embodied experiences are enabled by the above interpretative frames, they are not directly produced by them and require physical training. Gun owners train their bodies to feel comfortable with guns through habit formation, making the experience of holding, shooting, and carrying a gun so normal that the violence contained within the gun is rendered banal. These learned interpretive frames and the embodied pleasures that gun owners experience with guns are co-constitutive, so that the interpretive frames enable and are simultaneously enabled by a set of embodied experiences, and vice-versa.

Bibliography

1. Shapira, H. and Simon, S.J. (2018) “Learning to Need a Gun.” Qualitative Sociology 41(1): 1-20.

A Sea of Blood and Tears: Ethnicity, Identity and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Volhynia, Ukraine 1941-44

Jared McBride, University of California, Los Angeles

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Dissertation Fellowship, 2013

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My dissertation, “A Sea of Blood and Tears”: Ethnic Diversity and Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Volhynia, Ukraine 1941-1944, examines the region of Volhynia in western Ukraine under Nazi occupation. Volhynia was one of the most violent regions during World War II in all of Eastern Europe, as it was home to Soviet partisan warfare, a Ukrainian nationalist uprising, brutal Nazi occupation policies, the genocide of Jews, and widespread inter-ethnic violence. What once was a mosaic of ethno-religious communities living in relative stability until the 20th century had dissolved into civil war by 1941. By 1944, roughly one quarter of its population was dead and many others displaced.

My project explains how individuals who once peacefully co-existed as neighbors became involved in political violence during the Nazi occupation. In short, it asks how an average Volhynian who has never harmed anyone in his or her life prior to the war becomes an ethnic cleanser or genocidaire. Drawing on ten years of research in five countries, the study employs a “bottom-up” view of this time period by using newly available archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, to recreate the biographies of various Volhynian participants and dissect the membership of local political groups involved in violence.

In researching Ukrainian or Polish nationalist formations, Soviet partisan groups, collaborators in the Nazi auxiliary police, or peasants involved in ethnic cleansing, I consider participants’ social and political background as well as their actions during the occupation, in order to uncover their motivations for participation in violence. Additionally, the project questions the role of ideologies, whether ethno-nationalism or Soviet communism, in influencing the actions of average Volhynians.

The findings of this research challenge static conceptualizations of political and social groups during times of war and unrest, as well as the analytical triad of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders found in research on ethnic violence. Historically, these studies have tended to essentialize identities and conceive of group formation as pre-determined. In contrast, I show that although ideologies such as nationalism and communism influenced the decision-making processes of some Volhynians, many more became involved in violence as a result of social upheaval, material needs, forms of coercion, and pre-war social networks. Moreover, as a result of my biographical tracing, I demonstrate how Volhynians often shifted their identities and group associations, as well as their stances toward violence, throughout the occupation. These findings move the onus from purely cultural (tribal or ethnic hatreds) or ideological (people are programmed to kill) motivations for violence to a more nuanced understanding that takes social interaction into account and understands subjects as dynamic individuals. As such, A Sea of Blood and Tears can inform future studies of ethnic and political violence in borderland regions beyond Ukraine as well as contribute to discussions in genocide studies and social scientific research on political violence.

Killing Campaigns: The Origins and Dynamics of Mass Violence in Africa

Scott Straus, Political Science, University of Wisconsin, Madison

Research Grant, 2008

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I received a grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation at the early stages of what became an eight-year-long inquiry into the causes of mass violence against civilians, in particular genocide. The project’s methodological premise was that scholars (and policymakers) should seek to learn from “negative cases,” that is, situations where theory would predict genocide to occur but where it did not. The early stages of my research, which HFG funded, focused on intensive study of Côte d’Ivoire in West Africa as well as on understanding the range of variation in violence across sub-Saharan Africa since independence.

The initial research in Côte d’Ivoire prompted two developments. One was a set of new hypotheses about the determinants and dynamics of mass violence. Second was some expertise on the country. In turn, when an electoral crisis broke in 2010 in Côte d’Ivoire, I became engaged in public commentary on the country via the Huffington Post, and I published accessible academic articles in Foreign Affairs and African Affairs. In the former, Tom Bassett and I argued for the central importance of regional organizations in the management of the Ivorian violent crisis. In the latter, I demonstrated patterns of violence in the electoral crisis and distinguished the logic of electoral violence from that of exterminatory and civil war violence.

The intensity of war—specifically threat perception—shapes leaders’ willingness to use mass violence and the public’s acceptance of it.

The Ivoirian crisis, as well as my survey of violence in postindependence Africa, led to an inquiry into the dynamics of electoral violence more broadly. With Charlie Taylor, I assembled a dataset on electoral violence in Africa since the transition to multipartyism in the early 1990s. The dataset, the African Electoral Violence Dataset, uncovered a set of patterns that were unexpected given our prior assumptions. We found, for example, that about one in five African elections resulted in serious violence; that violence after war was less common than if a country had not experienced war; that income level was not correlated to electoral violence; that incumbents committed the majority of electoral violence; and that the dynamics of prevote violence differed from postvote violence. Those findings were published in an influential volume edited by Dorina Bekoe of the United States Institute for Peace. Charlie, Jon Pevehouse, and I also published an article in the Journal of Peace Research, in which we show through a battery of regression analyses that incumbent running is the strongest predictor of significant African elections.

The HFG research also launched the broader, longer project examining why genocide took place in some conflicts but not others. That project culminated in a book published by Cornell University Press in 2015, entitled Making and Unmaking Nations: War, Leadership, and Genocide in Modern Africa. Three findings stand out and all relate to the initial findings from the HFG-funded research in Côte d’Ivoire. First, the intensity of war—specifically threat perception—shapes leaders’ willingness to use mass violence and the public’s acceptance of it.  Second, ideological constructs—what I label “founding narratives”—influence the ways in which political and military leaders devise strategies of violence in war. Third, other sources of restraint—such as certain kinds of economic structures—can create incentives to moderate violence. I extend the empirical analysis to Senegal, Mali, Rwanda, and Sudan, each occupying case study chapters in the book. The book has won four awards, including the 2018 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.