State Practices, National Identity and Anti-Immigrantism in Western Democracies This study critically examines the various practices of anti-immigrantism in three Western democracies—the United States, the United Kingdom, and France—within the context of globalization. The study draws upon the works…
Social Dominance and Coercive Strategies of Resource Control in Children …that many high-status and well-accepted individuals (e.g., CEOs, political leaders) are modestly aggressive in their own right. Is aggression in some contexts adaptive and socially competent? A strategy-based evolutionary perspective…
Characteristics and Determinants of Global Homicide Crime Waves, 1946 to 1998 Difficulties in comparing political and legal systems have long hampered our efforts to estimate cross-national violent crime rates. Adding the requirement that such studies examine trends over time makes the…
Striving in the Path of God: Discursive Traditions on Jihad and the Cult of Martyrdom …to specific historical and political circumstances. Among these circumstances are the continuing border skirmishes with the Byzantines in the Umayyad period (661–750), the Crusades and the Mongol attacks from the…
Criminal Retaliation: A Qualitative Study of Social Control Beyond the Law Despite its preeminent role in regulating disputes between and among street criminals, retaliation has received scant attention from criminological researchers. Existing studies explore retaliation only tangentially, with little or no…
Competitive Intervention and its Consequences for Civil Wars This project explores two interrelated puzzles about external intervention and internal war. The first asks why rebels, governments, and third-party interveners often continue to invest in costly and protracted conflicts…
Insurgent Fragmentation and State Attachment in the Syrian Civil War …costly infighting, most notably when the so-called Islamic State broke away to establish a rival political-religious project in 2013–14. Repeated foreign-backed attempts to unify Syria’s rebel factions behind a central…
Hurt Sentiments and Blasphemy in South Asia …In this book project, I cross political and territorial boundaries to bring together cases of censorship that allegedly “hurt sentiments” of individuals and religious communities. The landmark lawsuits that I…
Nuclear Complacency: A Report from Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation …which the robust scholarship, activism, and diplomacy of the past 80 years have been replaced by public indifference, political de-prioritization, and military buildup of these weapons. Read the report (PDF)…
Mass Shootings: Causes and Prevention …to high-capacity weapons, building more effective early-warning systems, and creating a reliable process for data collection could greatly reduce the frequency and toll of this very American type of violence….
