Stress Reactivity to Provocation and Aggression in Early Adulthood: Do Early Victimization and Regulation Processes Matter?Isabelle Ouellet-Morin, Criminology, Université de MontrealResearch Grant, 2013 There is a relative consensus about the detrimental impact of childhood maltreatment on mental health and behavioral problems later in life, including aggression behavior. Prior research suggests that this association may, in part, be explained by neurophysiological stress mechanisms designed to support adaptation to changing environments. Moreover, very little is known on the reasons why individuals from the general population aggress others in comparison to those who do not (e.g., dating violence, bullying, public shootings, road rage, and violent encounters with strangers). To this end, we invited 160 participants to come to our laboratory, of which 60 had reported having been maltreated as children, whereas the remaining participants did not. A wide range of neurophysiological measures was measured in the context of a laboratory-based stress paradigm and in response to provocation, including the stress hormone cortisol, cardiac measures, testosterone and DNA methylation (i.e., modifications in the chemistry of the DNA that have the potential to alter genetic expression without changing the DNA sequence). In a paper recently accepted in Development and Psychopathology, we reported that maltreated participants had higher cortisol responses to stress in comparison to controls, but this association was more complex than previously thought. Indeed, a shift from lower-to-higher cortisol responses was noted as the severity of maltreatment experiences increased, providing further empirical support for the idea that persistent dysregulation of the cortisol response to stress may arise in the context of past exposure to maltreatment. These findings invite practitioners to consider coping strategies and stress regulation as potential targets for preventing or reducing mental health and behavioral difficulties. Our research team has also brought light on findings suggesting a synergic effect between maltreatment and cortisol response to stress, whereby these early adverse experiences were associated with more depressive symptoms, aggression, and anger rumination in adulthood among participants with moderate-to-higher cortisol response to stress. Conversely, childhood maltreatment was not associated with these negative outcomes for those who exhibited a lower pattern of reactivity. Also, being interested to generate knowledge that could be mobilized to support the well-being of individuals who were maltreated during childhood, we offered preliminary evidence suggesting that maltreatment was associated with a more frequent use of emotion-oriented coping strategies (e.g., become very frustrated when faced with difficult situations), although the opposite was found for task-oriented coping strategies (e.g., trying to change their behavior to solve the problem). Importantly, these strategies have generally been hypothesized to signal more and less mental health and behavioral difficulties, respectively. Altogether, these findings invite practitioners to consider coping strategies and stress regulation as potential targets for preventing or reducing mental health and behavioral difficulties, including aggression, among young male adults with a history of childhood maltreatment. BibliographyOuellet-Morin I, Robitaille MP, Langevin S, Cantave C, Brendgen M, & Lupien S. (accepted). Enduring effect of childhood maltreatment on cortisol and heart rate responses to stress: The moderating role of severity of experiences. Development and Psychopathology.
Private Gun Ownership in Modern China, 1912–1949Lei Duan, History, Syracuse UniversityDissertation Fellowship, 2015 This dissertation examines private gun ownership and its sociocultural and political implications in modern China from 1860 to 1949, a period characterized by foreign invasion, constant military conflicts, and political decentralization. During this period, foreign guns, along with their Chinese imitations, flooded society. In response to the social disorder, many Chinese civilians turned to this new class of weaponry for self-defense. While historians have understood the gun in China in terms of military modernization, this dissertation sets the privately owned gun in its social and political context, and studies why Chinese civilians chose to arm themselves with guns and how governments of different periods responded to their armed civilians. This study argues that growing social violence and the state’s inability to respond to it led Chinese men and women to seek to obtain their own weapons. This demand was fueled by the gun’s powerful symbolism in public culture and social life, and by beliefs that guns were a source of social status and self-empowerment. Civilian ownership of guns contributed to persistent social violence, and also transformed power structures in local society and accelerated local militarization, impacting the balance between state and society. Both late Qing and Republican governments’ regulation and control over armed civilians was a dynamic and contingent process, hovering between two practices: the state’s resolute maintenance of its monopoly on the uses of guns, and its reliance on armed civilians in local defense. This study chronicles both the state efforts to deal with armed civilians and the reactions from the bottom. This study argues that the state’s dilemma over whether to control private guns or rely on them prevented the formation of an effective and consistent gun policy. In contrast, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adopted a different policy towards private gun ownership, by making the mobilization of an armed populace part of its mass line policy. The CCP’s private gun policy played an important role in strengthening the CCP’s presence and authority in wartime China. Drawing from a variety of sources such as government documents, legal cases, social survey reports, and popular writings, this study chronicles both the state efforts to deal with armed civilians and the reactions from the bottom. This dissertation engages with and complements wider research on modern Chinese history in examining violence, social life, and the dynamic state-society relationship.
From Coltan to Cattle: Unearthing Violence in the Eastern Democratic Republic of CongoAnn A. Laudati, Environment and Society, Utah State UniversityResearch Grant, 2012 The aim of my research program was to understand the linkages between natural resources and violent conflict, using Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo as a case study. In particular, there exists extensive research that looks at whether there are links and what those links are. There is very little scholarship, however, about the mechanisms connecting violent conflict and natural resources. My project aimed to address this scholarly gap through a micro level qualitative investigation that asked how and in what ways does the use of natural resources in the DRC shape instances of violence. The DRC is a particularly relevant case study given the multiple natural resources at play in past and current “wars” and the significance particular resources have held within scholarly and media narratives surrounding the violence. My earliest trips to the field focused on investigating the wider portfolio of resources that were linked to the region’s fighting. My paper published in 2013 entitled “Beyond Minerals” in the Review of African Political Economy highlights the findings from these earlier investigations. The paper illustrates the diversity of resources drawn upon by different conflict actors. In addition to well-known conflict resources such as minerals and timber, more mundane commodities, such as marijuana and palm oil, were found to be significant valuables in the region’s rebel economy. I thus seek to understand how the use of different natural resources by armed actors leads to differentiated forms of violence against civilians. Such findings raise important questions about the scholarly attention devoted to “conflict minerals,” as such a narrow focus overlooks non-mineral economies with important implications for peace in the region. Later research in the area, which continues today thanks to continued financial support through multiple other grants, focuses on the micro dynamics through which engagement in these various natural resource economies contributes to violence in the region. It thus moves away from a general understanding of which natural resources play a role in the conflict to an analysis of how their use contributes to particular violent outcomes. In other words, what are the mechanisms through which these natural resources contribute to different forms of violence. BibliographyLaudati, AA, 2013, “Beyond minerals: broadening 'economies of violence' in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.” Review of African Political Economy, vol 40., pp. 32-50.
Shoot the State: Guns, Freedom, and Domination in the Americas, 1774-1934Brian DeLay, History, University of California, BerkeleyResearch Grant, 2013 Funding from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation enabled me to spend 2013–2014 in London, Seville, and Madrid doing archival research for my second monograph. Now under contract with W.W. Norton, Shoot the State will use the arms trade to explore the history of freedom and domination in the Western Hemisphere from the American Revolution to the eve of World War II. During this era, most of the western hemisphere’s emerging states underwent a similar series of trials: bloody anticolonial rebellion, clashes with foreign powers, wars with independent Indians and other rival internal polities, and fratricidal struggles over internal order and the nature of capitalist development. Almost always, these trials involved collective violence with firearms. Yet across the Americas, guns were made in quantity only in a few cities in the eastern United States. That meant that everyone in the hemisphere looking to force or resist a change in relations of power—not only the architects of new states, but also indigenous leaders, imperial administrators, rebel slaves, secessionists, strongmen, radical labor organizers, and conspirators of all descriptions — had to find a way to engage with the international arms market. Firearms reveal the painful degree to which freedom and domination coproduced each other in the modern era. The arms trade thus serves as an ideal subject for integrating histories that are almost always told separately. Indeed, more than any other object of study, firearms reveal the painful degree to which freedom and domination coproduced each other in the modern era. Yet historians of the Americas have only ever explored the arms trade episodically, rather than as a coherent topic that transcends any particular conflict or country. Shoot the State will tell a largely unknown story of how unequal access to the means of destruction conditioned power relations within and between emerging states during the long nineteenth century.
“There is Still No Justice Here!”: Theorizing Women’s Movements’ Influence on Postwar African States Enforcement of Gender-Based Violence LawsPeace Medie, Legon Centre for International Affairs and Diplomacy, University of GhanaResearch Grant, 2014 African countries have begun to create specialized criminal justice sector mechanisms, such as specialized courts and specialized police units to address violence against women. Proponents of this international norm, including women’s nongovernmental organizations, argue that these specialized mechanisms will improve how victims of gendered violence are treated by the criminal justice system and will ensure that perpetrators are held accountable by the law. My book project is a comparative study of the implementation of this international norm in post-war states in Africa. I draw on over 300 interviews conducted in Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire to study variation in the establishment of specialized units in the police force and gendarmerie. While both countries have created specialized units, Liberia has made more progress in institutionalizing its unit. I also study how the establishment of these specialized units have affected the performance of street-level officers in cases of intimate partner violence and non-partner perpetrated rape. These findings are also relevant for policymakers as they identify the conditions under which specialized units are more likely to be institutionalized and to improve law enforcement and advance women’s rights. I argue that while pressure from the United Nations, including the peacekeeping mission in both countries, was sufficient for the creation of the specialized units, it was not sufficient for their institutionalization. Instead, strong pressure from domestic actors, particularly women’s organizations, and favorable political and institutional conditions were needed for rapid institutionalization. Furthermore, in both countries, officers in specialized units were less likely to adopt practices that re-victimized girls and women and were more likely to refer rape cases for prosecution. However, street-level performance was hampered by infrastructural and logistical constraints. These findings provide insight into the domestic implementation of international norms and demonstrate the roles of international and domestic actors in addressing violence against women and in building institutions in war-affected states. These findings are also relevant for policymakers as they identify the conditions under which specialized units are more likely to be institutionalized and to improve law enforcement and advance women’s rights. BibliographyMedie, Peace. “Rape Reporting in Post-conflict Cote D’Ivoire: Accessing Justice and Ending Impunity,”African Affairs, 116/464, 414-434
Ways of War: Toward a Global Military HistoryTonio A. Andrade, History, Emory UniversityResearch Grant, 2012 My research, supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, focused on an emerging field of study: global military history, resulting in the publication of a book, The Gunpowder Age (Princeton University Press, 2016), which compares Chinese and Western European military history from 900 to 1900 AD. Scholars have long argued that China’s military traditions, technologies, and techniques fell behind those of the West shortly after gunpowder arrived in Europe in the early fourteenth century, with Europeans “perfecting” guns while China stagnated. My research showed, however, that China maintained military superiority or parity with the West for much longer: well into the eighteenth century. Drawing on Chinese and Western sources—such as military manuals published in profusion in both China and the West during the 1500s and 1600s—The Gunpowder Age shows that China was undergoing many of the same developments that were revolutionizing warfare and society in western Europe at precisely the same time. For example, the famous Ming general Qi Jiguang (1528–88) adopted advanced muskets earlier than has been appreciated and, strikingly, employed advanced musketry drilling techniques some forty years before they seem to have appeared in Europe (these techniques have been considered a hallmark of Europe’s famous “Military Revolution”). In general, Ming China showed many of the cascading changes that historians have argued typified the European Military Revolution—a replacement of cavalry by infantry, a rapid increase in the complexity of military hierarchies, a proliferation of printed drilling manuals, and a rapid increase in the ratio of firearms to traditional weapons. Countries that achieve too much military success may tend in the long run to become vulnerable to adversaries from regions where warfare is more frequent. China maintained its military parity into the eighteenth century, but then found itself outclassed by the western states, whose military prowess continued increasing, whereas China’s atrophied, leaving China vulnerable to Great Britain, which easily bested it in the Opium War of 1839-42. Why? Not just because Britain was undergoing industrialization but also—and perhaps more importantly—because by 1839, China had enjoyed nearly a century of relative peace under the overwhelming regional dominance of the powerful Qing Dynasty. Thanks to Qing power, China enjoyed during this period what appears to be the least warlike period in its millennia-long history. (There were, of course, many wars and rebellions, so we are speaking relatively, comparing the incidence of conflict to other periods in China’s bloody history.) As a result, its once dynamic military institutions and technologies had atrophied. I believe, therefore, that China’s nineteenth-century weakness was an aberration and that, in order to truly understand the military pattern of the Chinese past, one must pay attention to the frequency of warfare in and around China. It’s an old idea, but one that today can be applied more rigorously and with greater precision, thanks to a profusion of data from China. China’s so-called “stagnation” was a short-term state, due to the unprecedented power of its last imperial dynasty. What does this study tell us about human violence and warfare in general? For one, it suggests that countries that achieve too much military success, such as the Qing dynasty’s unprecedented hegemony of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, may tend in the long run to become vulnerable to adversaries from regions where warfare is more frequent. In any case, it suggests that a careful and nuanced study of the frequency of warfare may shed significant light on patterns of global history.
When Comrades Go to War: Post-Liberation Movements, Elite Politics and the Internal Dynamics of Africa’s Great WarHarry Verhoeven, Politics and International Relations, University of OxfordPhilip Roessler, Government, College of William & MaryResearch Grant, 2013 Funding by the HFG enabled vital fieldwork in six African countries (Angola, Congo, Eritrea, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda), which helped detail the day-by-day, week-by-week chronicle of Africa’s Great War, a conflict that had its roots in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 and erupted in two phases (1996 and 1998), claiming the lives of more than four million Africans. These findings were written up in a monograph, Why Comrades Go To War. Liberation Politics and the Outbreak of Africa’s Deadliest Conflict. We found in our research and argue in the book that Africa’s Great War was not a conflict between old enemies or distant strangers but rather between ideological fellow travelers and revolutionaries who had long waged the same struggle for a new, leftist Africa. Ironically, but not coincidentally, it was this very intimacy that would be the undoing of what initially seemed like a triumph (the ouster of Mobutu, arch-symbol of authoritarianism and decadence in Africa) but quickly turned into a fratricidal nightmare between leftist liberation movements from across the continent. The initial revolutionary euphoria of liberating Africa's third-biggest country rapidly gave way to distrust between the comrades, now turned ministers and generals. The seeds of Africa’s Great War were sown in the revolutionary struggle against Mobutu—the way the revolution came together, the way it was organized, and, paradoxically, the very way it succeeded. The overthrow of the ancien regime proved a Pyrrhic victory because the protagonists ignored the philosophy of Julius Nyerere, the godfather of Africa’s liberation movements: they put the gun before the unglamorous but essential task of building the domestic and regional political institutions and organizational structures necessary to consolidate peace after revolution. Thus, the initial revolutionary euphoria of liberating Africa’s third-biggest country rapidly gave way to distrust between the comrades, now turned ministers and generals. In the absence of robust institutions to settle disputes, divide the spoils of victory, and balance competing visions for the revolution, political disagreements and misperceptions became sources of great tension and later catastrophic physical violence. A mere 15 months after what should have been a “second independence,” the outcome was Africa’s Great War.
King George’s Generals: How the British Army Lost America, 1774-1781William Anthony Hay, History, Mississippi State UniversityResearch Grant, 2013 My research project examines how successive British commanders understood the problem they faced during the American Revolution, the ways in which they responded, and why they ultimately failed. The five commanders on whom I focus—Thomas Gage, William Howe, John Burgoyne, Sir Henry Clinton, and Lord Cornwallis—each brought to the task wide experience and a strong record. Their careers reflected the growth of military professionalism in the British army from the mid-18th century, and they scored important successes against the Continental Army of the United States. Far from being incompetent or hidebound aristocrats unable to overcome antiquated assumptions, British commanders demonstrated impressive skill. As Andrew O’Shaughnessy has pointed out, the war’s outcome remained uncertain to the very end. The failure by the British commanders I study lay in their inability to translate operational success into political outcomes by dismantling the revolutionary government they fought. Survival meant success for the fledgling United States. This research gave me a deeper understanding of how British insiders saw events in America as the war continued along with the civilian side of developing policy and strategy. Along with its substantial contribution to historical scholarship on the American Revolution and the 18th century British Atlantic world, my project has contemporary relevance. Britain’s position in the American Revolution significantly resembles that of the United States today. Its army had significant experience with irregular warfare from the Seven Years’ War and Jacobite Rebellions, along with conventional operations against comparable opponents. But a small, professional army of long-serving regular soldiers proved a very fragile instrument of war. Possessing the most powerful navy of the age, Britain struggled to turn advantages in weapons, training, and capabilities into strategic success in America. With forces operating across the Atlantic at the end of an extended logistics chain, British policymakers had to balance the American crisis with global commitments and politics at home. Despite changes in technology and differences in context, these points capture problems the United States faces with overseas expeditionary warfare. They also point to the difficulty of coordinating policy and strategy to guide military operations effectively. Research supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation enabled me to work extensively with British manuscript sources unavailable in the United States. Besides letters and reports by the main figures in my study, I saw a range of material, including private letters and diaries. This research gave me a deeper understanding of how British insiders saw events in America as the war continued along with the civilian side of developing policy and strategy. It pointed me toward the role that sea power, including water transport and navigation on lakes and rivers, played for both sides. Howe’s partnership with his brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, who commanded naval forces, became an important part of my chapter on his tenure. Overall, the research gave me a fuller perspective of the British side that set each of my protagonists in context and showed the pressures they faced from superiors at home. Two of five chapters are drafted, along with a thematic introduction. Writing expanded the scope of my project, drawing it back into the 1760s to explain the conflict’s origins. I anticipate drafting the remaining chapters this year. Material from my research supported a chapter entitled “An End to Empire? British Strategy in the American Revolution and Making Peace” in Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American Revolution (Oklahoma: June 2018). BibliographyAn End to Empire? British Strategy in the American Revolution and Making Peace in Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American Revolution (Oklahoma: June 2018).
Political Economy of Memory: The Making, Unmaking and Remaking of the Nigeria-Biafra WarGodwin Onuoha, Democracy, Governance and Service Delivery (DGSD) Programme, Human Sciences Research Council, South AfricaResearch Grant, 2014 This research examines the memories of wars, conflicts, and violence in postcolonial Africa. Its point of departure is the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–1970). Referred to by multiple names, like “Nigeria-Biafra War,” “Biafran War,” “Nigerian Civil War,” “War of National Unity,” “War against Infidels,” the Nigeria-Biafra War was a global event, generally regarded as a defining moment in the postcolonial global order because it foreshadowed the array of devastating conflicts that would eventually threaten the survival of most postcolonial African states. The war was the first major conflict in postcolonial Africa, and in many ways, it represented the end of the “old wars” and the first of the “new wars.” Certainly, it was the first to approximate what we now call “black-on-black” genocide in postcolonial Africa; the first televised African war; the only conflict in postcolonial Africa that had both major super powers of the Cold War on the same side; and the war that launched the modern humanitarian-aid industry as we know it today. Official memories conceal and disenfranchise other memories, but also perform the ideological task of projecting the state as the sole owner of war memories in post–civil war Nigeria. Almost fifty years after the war, the individual and collective memories of the Nigeria-Biafra War still dominate national discourse in a manner that elicits passion, discord, and contestation in contemporary Nigeria. Drawing on a political economy approach, this research focused on the following. First, it offered new insights into memory studies by examining how memories are constructed, contested, resisted, appropriated, and structured in a postwar Nigerian context. Second, it explored how memories of wars, conflicts, and violence can underlie a group’s identity and sustain that identity and, ultimately, translate into a basis for future violence. Third, it explores the politics of “dominant” and “subordinate” memories of war and violence in a contested political space. The research was mainly qualitative and most of the fieldwork was done in the five southeastern states of Nigeria. Fieldwork comprised visiting key locations and cities in this region as landscapes of memory and where the activities of neo-Biafran movements took place. The research provides a historical and contemporaneous analysis of memories of the Nigeria-Biafra War. It demonstrates the nuances in the making of Nigeria-Biafra War memories and why these memories continue to stymie and stunt Nigeria’s post–civil war nation-building project from becoming a more just and inclusive one. It unveiled the making of “official” memories by the state and the interrogation and contestation of these memories by opposing forces. Official memories conceal and disenfranchise other memories, but also perform the ideological task of projecting the state as the sole owner of war memories in post–civil war Nigeria. The research complicates this official narrative by exploring memory production in the Nigerian state as a continuously contested and conflicting project. This involves interrogating the ownership, production, and consumption of extant official war memories, understanding the different forces at play in inscribing and entrenching or subverting and challenging these memories, and the manifold ways in which diverse identities, classes, regions, and intellectual traditions simultaneously project memories of the war in post–civil war Nigeria. Bibliography2016: "Shared Histories, Divided Memories: Mediating and Navigating the Tensions in Nigeria-Biafra War Discourses,"Africa Today, Vol. 63, No. 1: 2-21.2017: "Bringing 'Biafra' Back In: Narrative, Identity and the Politics of Non-Reconciliation in Nigeria,"National Identities, (Forthcoming DOI link: https://doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2017.1279133).(Forthcoming): Memory, Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in Post-Civil War South- eastern Nigeria, APN Working Papers Series, African Peacebuilding Network (APN), Social Science Research Council, New York.
Legacies of the Past and Support for Terrorism in the Basque CountryHenar Criado, Political Science and Sociology, Universidad Complutense de MadridJordi Domenech, Universidad Carlos III de MadridFrancisco Herreros, Spanish National Research CouncilResearch Grant, 2015 Why do people turn to terrorism? Social scientists have offered many insightful answers to this question ranging from education, poverty, and inequalities to the effects of political regimes. And yet, we are still far from providing a definite solution to this puzzle. Our project, funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, seeks to provide an answer to this question by focusing on the long-term historical legacies of political violence. We analyze how civil wars in the distant past (the nineteenth century) in the Basque Country in Spain could have left an imprint on beliefs and preferences that partly explain the outbreak of terrorism in the 1970s. We use archival data from the three Basque provinces to collect information about political violence across villages in the nineteenth century. During the nineteenth century, there were two civil wars in Spain that were fought mainly in the Basque Lands. We have collected several indicators from archival and secondary sources of support for one of the warring factions, the one devoted to the defense of Basque autonomy and laws (the “Carlists”), across villages. These indicators include deserters of the Army, votes for Carlist candidates in elections immediately after the second civil war, and subscriptions to the main Carlist journal during the first civil war. We found a positive association between these indicators and support for political violence in the 1970s, which indicates that the legacy of political violence in the past has indeed affected the outbreak of terrorism one hundred years later. Civil wars left a legacy of distrust and alienation toward the state that can persist through generations, paving the way to violent responses to perceived threats. Our research has tried to go more in depth into the mechanisms connecting political violence in the nineteenth century and beliefs and preferences in the 1970s. We found that civil wars left a legacy of distrust and alienation toward the state that can persist through generations, paving the way to violent responses to perceived threats. The research also shows that the transmission of these legacies was especially strong in communities that have remained largely isolated in the century that separates the civil wars from the terrorism of the 1970s.
