Browsing by Author "Allred, Robert P"

Rebel groups frequently rely on support from civilian populations to conduct civil conflicts. Why, then, do rebel groups risk alienating civilian populations by committing atrocities against them? Much of the civil wars literature argues that relative rebel capabilities and the source thereof explain rebel group decisions to use violence against noncombatants. In this paper, I examine how international borders, through rebel use of a foreign sanctuary, increase the violent behavior of rebel groups toward civilian populations. I argue that sanctuary constrains cooperative rebel strategies by reducing the level of possible interaction with local populations, and lowers the cost of violence by protecting rebels from government reprisals. Additionally, since violence can be counterproductive to rebel success in the long-run, rebel groups utilizing sanctuary should moderate their violence as a conflict ages. I test these expectations using a quasi-Poisson count model of civilian deaths caused by rebels, and I find support for both of my hypotheses. My findings suggest foreign sanctuary is more powerful in describing variation in one-sided violence than previously researched phenomena, such as foreign support.

Intelligence is an integral part of states’ foreign policy formation and implementation. In the American context, the intelligence community is involved in essentially every national security discussion occurring in government, yet it remains relatively obscure to academia and the broader public. The inherently secretive nature of intelligence impedes the collection and analysis of reliable and representative data. Consequently, broad generalities and sensational accounts pervade public discussions and even academic research. We can have little confidence that we have a complete picture of how these clandestine organizations operate, their success as instruments of policy, or their effectiveness in warning.

Congress is nominally endowed with the primary responsibility for piercing this curtain of secrecy and ensuring the community’s primary goals are pursued efficiently and lawfully. Unfortunately, the secrecy that makes congressional oversight necessary also perversely disincentivize it. These efforts largely occur in private, taking members away from electorally beneficial activities. Inattentive voters, few interest groups, incomplete control of intelligence budgets, and no natural voting constituency exacerbate this problem. Despite these shortcomings, intelligence committee service has been highly coveted in recent years.

I argue that Congress members see other electoral benefits to intelligence committee service. At the institutional level, party and committee leadership see opportunities to search for failures or executive malfeasance in closed hearings and to bring salient issues to public attention in open sessions. At the individual level, committee members perceive that service bolsters foreign policy credentials and provides regular opportunities to take critical policy positions. Finally, while the public may be uninformed and inattentive on intelligence, they do pay attention to salient crises or alleged malfeasance, providing an electoral connection to the above partisan motivations.

I provide evidence of these incentives in a quantitative analysis of oversight hearing data, natural language processing of committee member communications on Twitter, and a national online survey with two survey experiments. I find that partisan political factors like divided government, election cycles, and party identity can influence patterns of committee and individual behavior, as well as the beliefs held by the public. In short, for intelligence oversight its politics as usual.