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

Elizabeth Levy Paluck, Psychology, Princeton University

Research Grant, 2009

---

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.

Diaspora and Conflict: The Liberians of Staten Island

Jonny Steinberg, Institute for Security Studies, Pretoria

Research Grant, 2008, 2009

---

This is a study of a community of Liberian refugees and economic migrants in a housing project in the New York City borough of Staten Island. The purpose was to examine the ways in which a diaspora takes conflict from home with it, and, in particular, the ways in which diasporas, frozen in the moment of their flight and caught up in old resentments, might transmit conflict back to the home country.

The research results were published in two forms. The first was a book titled Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City. It documented and analyzed a conflict that raged in Staten Island’s Liberian community from 2003 to 2008. I argued that the community had erected a stage on which it had played out, in miniature, so to speak, its deep fears about the nature of the postwar settlement taking shape back home. The very distance from home is what gave the theater its credibility; in the mutual anonymity of exile, people invented horrendous histories for their neighbors, such that it appeared that the most horrendous of the characters who had prosecuted the war back home were living on Staten Island. The conflict was thus incubated in exile. It was not, though, to the best of my knowledge, transmitted back home inasmuch as I saw no evidence of Staten Islanders funding conflict in Liberia.

The conflict was thus incubated in exile.

The second research product was an article published in the journal African Affairs; it documented and interpreted the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) work among the Liberian diaspora in the United States. The TRC undertook this work on the grounds that the diaspora was intimately involved in Liberia’s civil war and that no process of reconciliation would be complete without its involvement. I argued that the TRC’s diaspora project failed, in large part because the body’s work was seen as a substitute for an endeavor to bring to justice those who had prosecuted the war.

Bibliography

1. Jonny Steinberg, Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York, London and Johannesburg, 2011.

2. Jonny Steinberg, "A Truth Commission Goes Abroad: Liberian Transitional Justice in New York," African Affairs, 110 (2011), pp. 35-53

Ethnic Violence vs. Imperial Segregations: Multinational Criminality in the Russian Imperial City as a Space of Conflict and Cooperation

Ilya V. Gerasimov, Center for the Study of Nationalism and Empire

Research Grant, 2011

---

For over two decades, I’ve been studying a variety of topics in the history of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. As I see now, all of them have one thing in common: they address different aspects of the phenomenon of societal self-organization, involving various social groups in diverse historical circumstances. The research project that resulted in the writing up of the book manuscript with the support by the foundation began in the late 1990s, and was conducted in archives and libraries in five countries. Focusing on case studies of four Russian imperial cities (Vilna [Vilnius], Odessa, Kazan, and Nizhny Novgorod), I was trying to reconstruct the peculiar worldview of the majority (close to 90 percent) of the urban population in Imperial Russia that can be cautiously identified as plebeian society: i.e., all those who did not belong to the fairly well-studied privileged and middle classes. The collected materials revealed a paradoxical situation: in the early twentieth century, when the population of urban centers was swelling at an astonishing pace (mainly due to migrants from the countryside), both the outdated legal norms and the modern hegemonic public discourses failed to regulate the bulk of the urban society. The imperial legislation did not fit the realities of the rising mass society, while the majority could not culturally, socially, and even technically (e.g. in terms of availability of the produced print runs of newspapers) belong to any public sphere. And yet, this rising mass plebeian society displayed a surprisingly high coherence and even standardization that can be seen in all four very different and distant cities that were used as case studies in my research. How was this coherence achieved in a society in flux, contrary to the inertia of social institutions and traditions, in violation of the legal norms of the well-ordered police state, and beyond the reach of public discourses?

Ethnically marked criminal violence emerged not only as a socially menacing phenomenon but also as an important indicator of intergroup boundary realignments.

I argue that there was in fact a common language of communication within that society, and self-representation of that society, only it was nontextual (nondiscursive). Social practices can be viewed as such a distinctive language of social self-description and self-representation. I identify three such main social practices: patriarchality (that helped people to sustain stability by pretending to be unaware of the competing projects of political or national mobilization); the middle ground (a peculiar mechanism of creative mutual misunderstanding); and criminal violence. In particular, ethnically marked criminal violence emerged not only as a socially menacing phenomenon but also as an important indicator of intergroup boundary realignments, and a side-effect of new patterns of emerging social solidarity. Violence can be senseless but is never meaningless, and my study elaborates on discovering those context-sensitive meanings of violence used by plebeian social groups that had no means or skills to express their interests and concerns through any elaborated public discourse and therefore relied on direct action.

Beijing-Seoul Families and Neighborhoods Study

Clifton R. Emery, School of Social Welfare, Yonsei University

Research Grant, 2011, 2012

---

What do neighbors, friends, and extended family members do in response to domestic violence and child abuse, and does it make a difference? Are there cultural differences in this informal social control of family violence, and do such differences explain cultural differences in the prevalence and severity of domestic violence and child maltreatment? These are the principal questions the Families and Neighborhoods Study (FNS) attempts to answer, using newly developed measures of informal social control on random probability samples of cities. The FNS also tests propositions developed from Emery’s (2011) theoretical typology of domestic violence. The principal investigator (PI) received funding from HFG in 2011 and 2012 to carry out the FNS survey in Beijing, China, and Seoul, South Korea. In 2011 the study team interviewed 506 adults in a representative random probability sample of 506 families in Beijing. In 2012 the study team followed up with 541 interviews of adults in a representative random probability sample of families in Seoul. The findings from both cities suggest that whether your neighbors do anything, and especially what they do, may matter. The findings also suggest that the neighborhood collective efficacy measure may not be the best way to capture informal social control of family violence, as the data do not show the expected relationships between collective efficacy and family violence, but do show relationships between the PI’s informal social control measures and family violence.

Based on the promising findings from the HFG-funded study, the FNS has now expanded to include data from representative samples from Beijing, Seoul, Hanoi, Ulaan Baatar, Kathmandu (collected and currently under analysis or review), Philadelphia (collection in progress) and Madrid (planned for summer 2014). In one of the twists of fate that so frequently baffle academics, the findings from the first two cities (Seoul and Beijing) remain in the peer review process while findings from later waves of data collection have already been published. This fact frustratingly prevents a detailed discussion of the Beijing-Seoul findings here. It is hoped that this omission can be corrected soon as the Seoul findings are presently under revision for the Journal of Interpersonal Violence.

The findings from both cities suggest that whether your neighbors do anything, and especially what they do, may matter.

In Hanoi, the FNS found that acts of informal social control by neighbors that try to protect the child are associated with less very severe abuse of the child (Emery, Trung & Wu, 2013). The same study found that when very severe abuse did occur, abuse-related externalizing behavior problems were lower when parents reported protective informal social control by neighbors (ibid). The goals of current data collection include making possible East-West comparisons of informal social control and the assessment of causal relationships via experimental techniques on population-based surveys.

The FNS has also found important relationships between variables suggested by Emery’s (2011) typology and intimate partner violence in Kathmandu and Ulaan Baatar.

Bibliography

1. Emery, C.R., Trung, H. & Wu, S. Neighborhood Informal Social Control of Child Maltreatment: A Comparison of Protective and Punitive Approaches. Child Abuse & Neglect, June, 2013. DOI: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2013.05.002.

2. Emery, C.R. Disorder or Deviant Order? Re-Theorizing Domestic Violence in Terms of Order, Power and Legitimacy. A Typology. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 16(6): 525-540, November-December, 2011.

Longitudinal and Contextual Analyses of Violent Crime in the European Union

Patricia L. McCall, Sociology, North Carolina State University

Research Grant, 2009, 2010

---

The purpose of this research is to explore the extent to which retrenchment in welfare support is related to homicide trends across European countries between 1994 and 2010. Using a longitudinal decomposition design that allows for stronger causal inferences compared to typical cross-sectional designs, we examine these potential linkages between social support spending and homicide with data collected from a heterogeneous sample of European nations, including twenty Western nations and nine less frequently analyzed East-Central nations, during recent years in which European nations generally witnessed substantial changes in homicide rates as well as both economic prosperity and fiscal crisis. Results suggest that even incremental, short-term changes in welfare support spending are associated with short-term reductions in homicide specifically, impacting homicide rates within two to three years for this sample of European nations.

Results suggest that even incremental, short-term changes in welfare support spending are associated with short-term reductions in homicide.

Toward a Transnational History of the Origins of World War I

Michael S. Neiberg, History, University of Southern Mississippi

Research Grant, 2009, 2010

---

This project examines the outbreak of war in 1914 from a transnational perspective. Rather than see Europe in this era as a set of homogenous and hermetically sealed nation-states, it begins with the proposition that a series of transnational forces (including socialism, pacifism, and international diplomacy) mitigated against nationalism as a cause of war. While this study does not deny the importance of nationalism to Europeans in 1914, it assumes that nationalism was but one among many identities. Among its conclusions are that while nationalism certainly existed in Europe it was far from sufficient to cause the outbreak of war. Indeed, the vast majority of Europeans greeted the outbreak with surprise and confusion rather than relief or joy that supposed slights to national honor could be at long last avenged. Europeans neither wanted nor welcomed this war. They consented to war based on the shared idea in all of the great powers that their war was both defensive in nature and just. They continued to consent to the war within an atmosphere of limited information due to government control, censorship, and propaganda. Atrocities, the desire for revenge, and the totality of the rhetoric of 1914 created a situation that made any notion of compromise peace impossible. Regardless of their nationality, Europeans experienced the war in remarkably similar ways. This study is an examination of how a war with a small cause developed into a total world war by its first Christmas. Images of a Christmas truce and the horrors of 1915 to 1918 should not blind us to the reality that the disillusion, bitterness, and totality of this war was well in place before its first year was over.

Europeans neither wanted nor welcomed this war.

Bibliography

1. Neiberg, Michael S. Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of War in 1914 (Harvard University Press, 2011).

Local Government Violence and Rights Struggles in Contemporary Rural China

Lianjiang Li, Political Science, Hong Kong Baptist University

Research Grant, 2004, 2005

---

This project examines why local government authorities in China often use violence against rural protesters and explore in what ways organized struggles for rights or rightful resistance may contribute to breaking the cycle of protest and violent repression. Its main findings are as follows. First, individuals who have stronger trust in the Chinese central government are more likely to organize and lead popular protest against malfeasant local authorities. Second, protest leaders lead the charge, shape collective claims, recruit activists and mobilize the public, devise and orchestrate acts of contention and organize cross-community efforts. Third, local authorities usually turn to repression and often use violence against protest leaders because they face strong pressure from their superiors and they lack necessary political and financial resources to co-opt or buy off protest leaders. Fourth, local government violence may inhibit further contention, but at other times it firms up the determination of protest leaders and makes them more prone to adopt confrontational tactics, partly by enhancing their popular support, partly by increasing the costs of withdrawal. Fifth, protest leaders who have suffered local government violence tend to lose confidence about the central leadership’s ability to control local authorities as well as about its commitment to serve the public interests. Lastly, individuals who have doubts about central leaders’ commitment to protect the rights and interests of ordinary people tend to develop stronger demand for leadership change and stronger preference for popular election as the mechanism of making leadership change.

Individuals who have stronger trust in the Chinese central government are more likely to organize and lead popular protest against malfeasant local authorities.

Bibliography

1. Li, Lianjiang. Rightful Resistance in Rural China (with Kevin OBrien), New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

2. Li, Lianjiang. "Political Trust and Petitioning in the Chinese Countryside," Comparative Politics, Vol.40, No.2 (January 2008), pp.209-26.

3. Li, Lianjiang. "Protest leadership in Rural China" (with Kevin O'Brien), China Quarterly, No.193 (March 2008), pp.1-23.

War and Economic Development in Vietnam and Sierra Leone

Edward Miguel, Economics, University of California, Berkeley

Research Grant, 2006

---

The negative consequences of war on society are severe. Armed conflict displaces populations, destroys capital and infrastructure, damages the social fabric of communities, endangers civil liberties, and can create health and famine crises. There is currently a large literature on the conditions that lead to the outbreak of armed violence, but the long-term economic impacts of war remain relatively understudied empirically. The goal of this research project was to investigate both the short- and long-run legacies of armed conflict resulting from the U.S. bombing of Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s and from the 1991–1992 civil war in Sierra Leone.

One publication that resulted from this project is “The Long Run Impact of Bombing Vietnam” (co-author Gerard Roland), forthcoming in the Journal of Development Economics. Many poverty trap models of economic growth predict that sufficiently severe war damage to the capital stock could lead to a “conflict trap” that condemns an economy to long-term underdevelopment. Despite this prediction, results from our research suggest that this is not necessarily always the case. We find no long-run impacts of U.S. bombing on local Vietnamese poverty rates, consumption levels, or population density over twenty-five years after the end of wartime bombing. Vietnam was able to recover largely due to the central government’s heavy postwar investment in both physical and human capital and reallocation of resources toward the most heavily bombed regions.

We find no long-run impacts of U.S. bombing on local Vietnamese poverty rates, consumption levels, or population density over twenty-five years after the end of wartime bombing.

A second publication, “War and Local Collective Action in Sierra Leone” (co-author John Bellows), in the Journal of Public Economics in 2009, carries out statistical analysis in Sierra Leone and similarly shows that despite war’s horrific humanitarian costs, the legacies of civil conflict are not always catastrophic. We find that individual exposure to the brutal civil war in Sierra Leone has lead to increased political participation, community activism, and local public good provision. This political mobilization has been coupled with, and may partially explain, the economic expansion Sierra Leone has experienced in early postwar years. These results run counter to the claims that civil war’s legacies are always major long-run impediments to African economic and political development. Moreover, since Sub-Saharan Africa is the most conflict-prone region today, these results offer some hope that even the poorest and most violent African nations can avoid the persistent negative economic and social consequences that civil conflict can potentially lead to.

However, caution must be called for in drawing broad lessons from this research regarding war’s impacts on economic growth in general. Unlike many other poor countries, postwar Vietnam benefited from relatively strong and centralized political institutions with the power to mobilize human and material resources in the reconstruction effort. Sierra Leone may be a special case of civil conflict as well; the war there was not fought along ethnic or religious lines. Though our findings may help make sense of the rapid economic growth and political consolidation that some countries have experienced following protracted armed conflict, more empirical evidence is needed before general claims about the effects of war on long-run economic performance can be made with confidence.

The research that resulted from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation grant also provided key material for two books that I have written in recent years, Economic Gangsters (Princeton University Press, 2008, co-author Raymond Fisman) and Africa’s Turn? (MIT Press, 2009). Both books emphasize the important role that violence and war have played in shaping contemporary economic and political development patterns around the world. I also recently wrote a literature survey article entitled “Civil War” (co-author Chris Blattman), for the Journal of Economic Literature in 2010.

The Farm Killings

Jonny Steinberg , Political Science, Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation

Research Grant, 2000

---

Shortly after South Africa’s first democratic elections were held in 1994, white agricultural associations raised the cry that their members were being killed in increasing numbers by predatory criminals. A moral panic followed. The killings were dubbed “farm murders” and were said to be orchestrated by shadowy forces, possibly connected to the new government, and aimed at driving white people off the land.

I spent eighteen months conducting intensive ethnographic work in several farming districts around the country. My research findings were presented in two forms. The first was a research monograph (published by the Institute for Security Studies) as well as a string of newspaper and magazine articles. The idea that there was an epidemic of “farm murders,” I argued, was mostly manufactured by the creation of the category “farm murder” as a specific recordable crime. When the murder of farmers is placed back in its proper context and compared to other rural murders, it becomes apparent that middle class rural people in general, and not just white farmers, became highly vulnerable to predatory crime during the transition to democracy. The idea that white farmers were targeted in particular had no empirical basis.

When the murder of farmers is placed back in its proper context and compared to other rural murders, it becomes apparent that middle class rural people in general, and not just white farmers, became highly vulnerable to predatory crime during the transition to democracy.

The second research product was a book titled Midlands, which won South Africa’s premier nonfiction award, the Sunday Times‘s Alan Paton Prize. It documented a single killing of a white farmer and analyzed the motives of the killers. I argued that a series of unwritten rules governing the relationship between the landed and their tenants was being renegotiated by a combination of cunning, wits, and violence, and that the murder was an extreme and tragic moment in this process of renegotiation.

Bibliography

1. Jonny Steinberg, Midlands, Johannesburg, 2002.

2. Martin Schönteich and Jonny Steinberg, Attacks on Farms and Smallholdings: An Evaluation of the Rural Protection Plan, Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 2000.

Seeing Like a Peacebuilder: An Ethnography of International Intervention

Séverine Autesserre, Political Science, Barnard College

Research Grant, 2010, 2011

---

Why do international peace interventions so often fail to reach their full potential? To answer this question, I conducted several years of research in conflict zones around the world, including in Burundi, Congo, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, South Sudan, and Timor-Leste. My main finding is that everyday elements such as the expatriates’ social habits, standard security procedures, and habitual approaches to collecting information on violence strongly impact the effectiveness of intervention efforts.

A number of interveners challenge the dominant modes of thinking and acting.

The publications based on this research demonstrate that individuals from all parts of the world and all walks of life, who would have little in common outside of the peacebuilding arena, share a number of practices, habits, and narratives when they serve as interveners in conflict zones. These shared modes of operation enable foreign peacebuilders to function in the field, but they often have unintended consequences that decrease the effectiveness of international efforts. The way that interveners construct knowledge of their areas of deployment prevents them from fully grasping the contexts in which they work. Consequently, they tend to rely on overly simplistic narratives that obscure the complex causes of and potential solutions to violence. The foreign peacebuilders’ everyday practices also create and perpetuate firm boundaries and a wide power disparity between themselves and local people. These dynamics create numerous obstacles to the peace efforts and frequently prompt local counterparts to evade, resist, or reject international initiatives.

A number of interveners challenge the dominant modes of thinking and acting. Their peacebuilding efforts are usually more effective than those of their peers who follow the prevailing practices. However, these individuals often end up either forced to conform or so frustrated that they change careers and leave the peacebuilding field. Despite their marginalization, these dissenters are tremendously important: By looking at their alternative modes of operation, we can begin to specify the conditions under which peace interventions can be more effective.

Bibliography

1. Peaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Publisher's webpage for the book

2. "Dangerous Tales: Dominant Narratives on the Congo and their Unintended Consequences," African Affairs 111 (443), pp. 202-222, Spring 2012.