Browsing by Author "Beardsley, Kyle"

Does Chinese aid cause more civil conflicts in Africa? Doubts have been cast about Chinese development assistance finance. In this article, I argue that Chinese aid is likely to arouse more civil conflicts in Africa because Chinese aid’s non-conditionality on the recipient country tends to cause the moral hazard problem—— the recipient country may use the aid to strengthen its capacity to repress the dissents and rebels, while the unfair aid allocation could intensify the grievances in that country. Focusing on Chinese aid and African conflicts nexus from 2004 to 2013, I collect data from multiple databases and websites, and conduct a series of negative binomial regression analyses. In order to evade aid’s endogeneity problem, I employ Confucius Institutes’ development level as my instrumental variable to predict Chinese aid. I find that Chinese official aid money and Chinese official aid projects have explanatory powers for a recipient country’s civil conflicts. This study attempts to contribute to the scholarship by clarifying Chinese aid’s effects on African conflicts through an instrumental variable approach and by extending the time range for research from 2004 to 2013.

Recent decades have witnessed increasing levels of internet censorship as part of the global diffusion of digital authoritarianism, yet the causes and patterns of the diffusion remain uncertain. This article argues that the international environment constitutes a vital factor related to the cross-national diffusion of censorship through influencing the norm and expertise to censor. I develop and test three hypotheses to examine the two proposed paths: (1) states employ higher levels of censorship in response to the increased norm to censor within their “neighborhood”; (2) states receive more technological expertise on censorship from their “neighbors”, which leads to (3) the availability of censorship expertise increases states’ employment of censorship. Using social network analysis, I construct three types of international neighborhood based on linkages of geography, trade, and military alliance. Using panel data on the internet censorship level of 96 countries over a period of eleven years (2009-2020), I test the hypotheses on all three types of neighborhoods through fixed-effects regression with spatially weighted techniques. The analysis shows that the military alliance neighborhood has the most salient impact on the diffusion of censorship through both norm and technological availability, while the trade neighborhood also shows homogeneity in the perceived norm to censor. I interpret the result as evidence that censorship is encouraged among authoritarian alliance states by those already possessing sophisticated censorship systems like China. The study contributes to the growing literature on democratic backsliding by introducing the international dimension into digital authoritarianism.

This dissertation explores the conditions under which international peacebuilding and community dispute resolution (CDR), or the ways in which communities try to address issues, complement or undermine one another. It argues that community dispute resolution can, under some circumstances, address issues before they become larger-scale sources of conflict, thereby enhancing local peace. International peacebuilding in particular, tries to promote a greater reliance on state institutions and broad participation in local affairs. Depending on the CDR characteristics in place within a community, these norms will align or will not be aligned with the CDR practices that the community already has in place. International peacebuilding will either complement, supplement or undermine CDR efforts at maintaining local peace.

Through novel data collection using community leader interviews, community histories and the implementation of two surveys in Liberia (one community leader survey and one household survey representative at the neighborhood level), this dissertation develops and tests the argument at hand. The qualitative evidence is used to further develop the theoretical expectations of the project and to probe specific mechanisms by which the arguments operate. The quantitative survey evidence is analyzed as the primary test of the theoretical argument. Item response theory (IRT) models are used to further develop the measures included in the statistical models and several different kinds of statistical models (ordinary least squares regression, logit models, hierarchical linear models and hierarchical ordinal logistic models), depending on the dependent variable of interest, are used to test the observable implications of the theoretical framework.

There are several findings that emerge from the project as a whole. First, and perhaps most important, peacekeeping exposure at the micro-level has a long-lasting influence on micro-level peace dynamics, however this influence is conditional on the CDR structures in place at the neighborhood level. Second, CDR contributes to and undermines local peace depending on the CDR characteristic at hand. Third, the influence of CDR and peacekeeping exposure are not the same for different components of local peace: i.e. physical security versus perceptions of peace versus dynamics within and between communities. Fourth, peacekeeping exposure does have the potential to undermine, complement or supplement CDR efforts, depending on the CDR characteristic of interest. Lastly, in ``post-conflict'' environments with large-scale peacekeeping operations, peacekeepers often promote a greater reliance on the state. However, doing so can lead to complicated dynamics that are worthy of more time and policy attention. While these efforts can be beneficial to communities if they exhibit norms that are consistent with the goals of peacekeeping operations, they can also lead to adverse effects such as forum shopping, undermining community leader authority and exacerbating local cleavages. CDR can help to ``keep the peace'' once peacekeepers have departed, however, they should not necessarily be considered as substitutes for the state. Instead, this dissertation suggests that they are an additional actor in a complex web of institutions tasked with maintaining order and peace.

Citizens' opinions in authoritarian countries are overlooked in the current research on authoritarian regimes. It is also hard to get the true opinions from the citizens. Because they might fear the consequences of disclosure and they might be unwilling to report socially undesired opinions. Researchers question the survey conducted in authoritarian countries, and worry about the possible "self-censorship" in those countries. In this paper, I applied a survey technique named list experiment to answer whether citizens in authoritarian countries censor their opinions towards sensitive questions, what kind of issue could be more sensitive and what kind of people tend to self-censor more. Based on my experiment in the capital of China, people do censor themselves, especially in political fundamental issue. People are more willing to tell true opinion towards economic issue. Among different subgroups, old people, probationary CCP members and government employees tend to censor themselves more.

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This dissertation seeks to explain the role of governmental and non-governmental actors in increasing/reducing the emergence of intergroup conflict after war, when group differences have been a salient aspect of group mobilization. This question emerges from several interrelated branches of scholarship on self-enforcing institutions and power-sharing arrangements, group fragmentation and demographic change, collective mobilization for collectively-targeted violence, and conflict termination and the post-conflict quality of peace. This question is investigated through quantitative analyses performed at the sub-national, national, and cross-national level on the effect of elite competition on the likelihood of violence committed on the basis of group difference after war. These quantitative analyses are each accompanied by qualitative, case study analyses drawn from the American Reconstruction South, Iraq, and Cote d'Ivoire that illustrate and clarify the mechanisms evaluated through quantitative analysis.

Shared findings suggest the correlation of reduced political competition with the increased likelihood of violence committed on the basis of group difference. Separate findings shed light on how covariates related to control over rent extraction and armed forces, decentralization, and citizenship can lead to a reduction in violence. However, these same quantitative analyses and case study analysis suggest that the control of the state can be perceived as a threat after the end of conflict. Further, together these findings suggest the political nature of violence committed on the basis of group difference as opposed to ethnic identity or resource scarcity alone.

Together, these combined analyses shed light on how and why political identities are formed and mobilized for the purpose of committing political violence after war. In this sense, they shed light on the factors that constrain post-conflict violence in deeply divided societies, and contribute to relevant academic, policy, and normative questions.

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.

This dissertation project argues that high levels of religious commitment within a population-that is, high levels of importance attached to religious identities and ideas-can increase a state's propensity for initiating conflict. Following a three-article framework, the project contains three interlocking empirical studies, each speaking to religion's role in conditioning interstate conflict and connections between domestic culture and global politics.

Article 1, "Religiosity and Bellicosity: The Impact of Religious Commitment on Patterns of Interstate Conflict," explores whether states with religiously committed citizens are more likely to initiate conflict than states with less committed populations. The article builds upon findings within the literature on American politics that link individuals' levels of religious commitment to their attitudes about foreign policy, and tests whether the implications of these findings have cross-national applicability and explanatory power for interstate conflict. Using a novel, robust measure of the proportion of a state's population that is religiously committed, as well as monadic and dyadic statistical models, the analysis finds widespread connections between religious commitment and bellicose state behaviors. The results show that states with more religiously committed populations demonstrate higher propensities for initiating conflict with other states. This relationship is most severe when both states in a dyad have high levels of religious commitment, while it does not appear to be conditioned by whether majorities within the populations of each state ascribe to different religious traditions.

Article 2, "Sacred Bonds? Leaders, Religious Constituents, and Foreign Policy in Turkey," outlines a theory to more deeply analyze the empirical phenomenon identified in the first article, explaining why countries with religiously committed populations are likely to be prone to international conflict. The article builds the theory and then tests it on a case study of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's tenure as prime minister and president of Turkey. The theory posits that in highly religious societies such as Turkey, leaders have incentives to compete for and maintain the support of their religious citizens when they perceive credible threats from domestic challengers. To effectively compete, leaders use religious signals to "outbid" their opponents and establish themselves as trustworthy champions of the faithful. As part of this process, leaders are incentivized to religiously outbid into the realm of foreign policy in pursuit of "rally-round-the-sacred-symbol" effects, and so will "spiritualize" foreign threats with religious framing. In framing foreign affairs as having implications beyond the material world, however, leaders find the domestic costs of backing down from addressing the threats particularly high and their audiences especially unforgiving of inaction. Ultimately, this increases the likelihood that leaders will follow through on combative rhetoric and results in higher overall likelihoods that they will initiate conflict. The case study leverages original field interviews and both Turkish and English-language resources to test and refine the mechanisms of the general theory.

Finally, Article 3, "Choose Your Words Faithfully: Religious Commitment, Elite Rhetoric, and the Formation of Individual Foreign Policy Opinion," takes a micro-level approach to the relationship between religious commitment and state foreign policy behaviors. The project focuses on why and how religious signals, like those identified in the macro theory of Article 2, may influence the foreign policy opinions of religiously committed people and elicit their support for a particular issue. Existing public opinion research in the United States has shown a connection between individuals' levels of religious commitment and their opinions about foreign affairs. However, relatively little is known about what drives this association, particularly when foreign policies do not have clear partisan stakeholders. The article posits that the relationship is at least partially attributable to how religiously committed people process elite cues about foreign policy issues, as they will most privilege the opinions of elites who use religious signaling. The results of an original survey experiment administered to a national sample of American adults tentatively support this argument, though the analysis suggests that not all religious signals are created equal. Religiously committed respondents show the greatest support for a foreign policy recommendation when it has been made using religious rhetoric, while a recommendation made by elites simply identified as being religious receives no more support-and often less-than one made by a non-religious group. The study contributes to our understanding of how members of the public develop foreign policy preferences in relation to their religious convictions and also helps to identify the audience for whom religious rhetoric may be an effective framing tool. The empirical evidence presented by the article contains a great deal of uncertainty, so these conclusions are ultimately preliminary, however, one final result about which there is no ambiguity-only consistent statistical significance-is that individual religious commitment matters for shaping foreign policy opinion, even in the absence of elite religious framing. Future research must therefore continue to grapple with explaining the significance of religious commitment to how individuals develop views on foreign policy.

My research is driven by two questions: Why do some dissident groups choose nonviolence over violence while others prefer violence over nonviolence? Why do political movements, even those using the same tactics, unfold and evolve divergently? To answer the first question, I argue that nonviolent dissidents are dependent on human resources and violent dissidents are dependent on physical resources. Further, either strategy could be more costly, depending on the strategic environment in which the resistance movement takes place. For the second question, I contend that the opposition which poses a level of threat greater than the cost of policy change gains concession in a prolonged movement. Oppositions that are unable to sustain their activities do not constitute a credible threat and therefore are defeated rather swiftly. Finally, every process requires time and therefore a movement's duration should explain the outcome of significant progress. By analyzing 250 political movements of various types around the world, I provide empirical evidence to support my theory. To complement the large-N empirical analysis, an in-depth analysis of two movements (one violent and one nonviolent) in India is provided.

There is a vast literature on how women's movements affect political regime transitions. This literature largely speaks to how these movements can lead to electoral outcomes with increased representation in formal political spaces, or to how women's movements have pushed for particular political agendas or policies. However, the question still remains: How do political regime transitions effect women's security more broadly? There is a gap in our understanding of how political regime transitions effect the public at-large, irrespective of electoral representation or policy outcomes. This paper argues that political regime transitions provide an opening for improvement in women's civil liberties, a key aspect of women's security, and that elite preferences are a key factor for whether leaders will adopt or reject policies that effect women's security after a regime transition. Using a large-N empirical analysis this paper finds that regime transitions do have an effect on women's security and this effect varies depending on a number of specifications leading to several implications for future work in the area.

How can community-level observations in ethnically divided post-conflict zones explain local behavior towards the memory and denial of a genocide? Nearly 30 years after the end of the war and genocide of the targeted group of focus in this study (Bosnian Muslims, or Bosniaks), certain municipalities across Bosnia-Herzegovina (Bosnia), particularly in the Bosnian state entity of Republika Srpska, remain divided in favor of ethnic Bosnian Serbs and create a hostile social and political environment for Bosniaks. In this thesis, I seek to understand the social factors that explain the extremes of denial and memory of the Bosnian War’s concurrent genocide. I will focus on the case of the municipality of Prijedor in north-west Bosnia, where post-war behavior towards the war and genocide reflects the extreme changes and violence endured by the civilians of the municipality during the active conflict. I conclude that municipalities like Prijedor with long multicultural histories are more vulnerable to the conditions that destroy nations during genocides and ethnic-based conflict, and in the post-genocide era, memory and denial coexist and fight for a platform in the same social spaces.

Previous research examining the deterring effect of a missile defense has asserted that

such a missile defense|damage-limiting capability |decreases the vulnerability of

the United States(US) and enhances its security guarantee to allies. However, the

puzzle of how to convince the potential challenger of the credibility of the threat

inherent in an extended deterrence remains unsolved. In this paper, I present a game-

theoretic model of the deployment of a missile defense which I use to demonstrate

the gap between the resolve of the US as inferred from that deployment and the

actual security commitment of the US to the region in which the missile defense is

installed. Such a discrepancy weakens the credibility of the US security umbrella

and consequentially lowers the likelihood of success of a policy based thereon which

is intended to compel the behavior of an opponent. This finding suggests that a

damage-limiting force actually undermines the credibility of the deterrence threat in

an extended deterrence setting.

What are the causes of conflict recurrence in states recently coming out of a civil war? Various theories focus on how the conflict ends, the development issues the states faces post-war, or the effect of a third-party intervention as the prime factors leading to a stable peace or renewed violence. However, very little work has been done to measure the effect that achieving a group’s goals has on their likelihood to return to war. Following in the grievance-based argument for conflict onset, wherein the horizontal inequalities – the inequalities across groups – lead to conflict, this thesis focuses on what happens after the fighting has stopped and groups evaluate how they fared from the conflict. Groups which are historically and continually excluded from political decision-making may see conflict as their only means of addressing the grievances that remain post-civil war. Conflicts can also cause groups to lose their political status that the group may view as unfair; they may see conflict as the best means to regain their former position. While the theory holds that these groups will seek renewed conflict to address their concerns, the empirical data suggests that political grievances may have little to do with why states witness new episodes of fighting. Utilizing the Ethnic Power Relations Dataset, this analysis shows that the economic development level and the greater number of peace years post-conflict have a far greater influence on whether there is renewed fighting than unaddressed or new grievances. The following research highlights that while the literature may point to political grievances as having a strong influence on the outset of an initial conflict, such grievances may not be enough to push groups to once again return to war.

How does exposure to one-sided violence affect individuals’ political engagement? Theoretical explanations point in different directions, with existing empirical studies presenting inconclusive results. This paper examines the relationship between one-sided violence exposure and political participation while also incorporating the role of media usage and regime types in shaping civilian reactions. Drawing on data from the UCDP and Afrobarometer datasets, I aligned respondents with one-sided violent events through GIS-based geographical matching. Using an instrumental variable estimation approach, the study reveals that exposure to heightened one-sided violence, particularly when the government is identified as the perpetrator, leads to greater political participation. The positive effect is intensified by the consumption of mass media but dampened by the consumption of social media. The presence of a democratic regime also amplifies the activation effects of one-sided violence. The evidence points to two mechanisms explaining the mobilization impact of one-sided violence: (1) a political trust mechanism, wherein civilians amplify their trust in a government they view as maintaining security through acts of violence, thereby increasing political participation; and (2) an insecurity mechanism, where elevated threat perceptions propel adaptive and coping behaviors. This paper highlights violence’s capacity to motivate political activism and the need to understand the media’s impact in conflict settings.

Global networks are distinguished by the presence of communities varying in size, often overlapping to form "community brokers" with memberships across multiple communities. Utilizing Link Community Detection Algorithm, this study unveils two hierarchi- cal influences of such overlapping communities on global security networks. Firstly, the cross-network effect posits that community brokers, through their involvement in various communities, attain an informational edge, potentially mitigating inter-communal conflicts. Secondly, the network endogenous evolution effect suggests that diminishing reliance on a singular community may erode the credibility of community brokers in fostering communal security, diminishing their attractiveness as defense collaborators and intensifying rivalries among brokers. Using data on global defense cooperation and conflicts from 1990 to 2010, the study tests these hypotheses. While fixed-effect Logit models provide evidence for the cross-network effects, when incorporating the co-evolution of defense cooperation and conflict networks via Stochastic Actor-Oriented Models (SAOM), this effect has limited ability to explain interstate conflict. However, SAOM elucidates a network hierarchy overlooked by dyadic models and support the endogenous evolution effect: states with greater importance in established defense communities are less favored targets for new defense partners, and community brokers show a reduced propensity to build direct defense cooperation links with each other. This research elucidates the complex dynamics and hierarchical structures shaped by overlapping communities within global networks, offering novel insights into the intricate web of interdependencies that underpin global security dynamics.

Although the previous literature has extensively debated the role of nationalism in civil conflicts, few studies have addressed how different types of nationalism might affect the occurrence of civil conflicts. In this study, I distinguish two types of nationalism—inclusive and exclusive—and examine their impact on the likelihood of civil war. I argue that both inclusive and exclusive nationalism can have pacifying effects that are produced by distinct mechanisms in each case. In particular, inclusive nationalism will reinforce national identity and national unity, leading to a reduced likelihood of civil conflicts. Meanwhile, exclusive nationalism creates a window in which the likelihood of interstate wars increases by distracting attention away from domestic grievances, which, in turn, decreases the likelihood of civil war. In this study, I use a nationalism-­‐‑inducing sporting event—the Summer Olympic Games—as the impetus for creating surges in nationalism, and I test the effects of the Games on the likelihood of civil war in a given country. An analysis of an original dataset on Summer Olympic Games and civil war from 1946 to 2015 confirms my theory that nationalism induced by the Summer Olympic Games reduces the likelihood of civil conflicts.

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.

Ethnic groups within and beyond national borders are interdependent. They are connected via kindred, shared experiences, shared geographic spaces, and so on. How do these interdependencies among ethnic groups affect their mobilizations against their governments, their competition toward one another, and their pursuit of power-sharing and political inclusion? This dissertation views ethnic groups as interdependent actors. It specifically investigates how ethnic interdependence affects subsequent mobilization, competition, and inclusion. It contains three distinct but related essays. The first essay examines the impact of interstate hostility on the risk of ethnic civil wars through the lens of trans-border ethnic kin (TEK) groups. It finds that militarized dispute between a state-at-risk and an external state increases the likelihood of ethnic wars in the state-at-risk. Moreover, this effect is not conditional on its TEK group's access to power in the external state. The second essay considers how ethnic competition at a subnational level related to the surrounding area of an ethnic group affects the risk of ethnic conflict. It argues that local competition provides opportunities for strategic exploitation by governments, thereby undermining the collective capabilities of potential rebellions and creating co-opted groups with governments. The analysis shows that ethnic groups in areas where local ethnic competition is high are less likely to fight with governments, especially for territorial conflicts. The final essay of this dissertation examines how interdependencies via similar experiences and shared spaces affect an ethnic group's political inclusion in the center. It argues that similarities in experience help governments learn and assess the consequences of granting concessions to other aggrieved groups, thereby producing an intrastate diffusion of political inclusion. In brief, this dissertation contributes to our understanding of the consequences of interdependence among ethnic groups in ethnic politics in the contemporary world.

Why do some civil conflicts simmer at low-intensity, while others escalate to war? When and why do some civil conflicts experience cycles of escalation and de-escalation? This dissertation challenges traditional approaches to intrastate conflict by arguing the need to distinguish both theoretically and empirically between the onset and escalation of civil conflict. I start with a formal model with incomplete information and a two-stage informational updating process. The model develops a novel, strategic argument about three causal mechanisms that differentially drive low-intensity violence (LIV) versus full-blown war: the information environment, the type of rebel group, and the state's capacity. Violence yields information on group identity and type, but differentially so over time; this inter-temporal variation in formation colors the state's strategic response, conditional on state capacity. For example, stronger groups become relatively more common past LIV, whereas before LIV, states have limited information on challenger type and so less ability to bargain. Empirical implications are tested in the third chapter using data on self-determination disputes from 1960-2005, with strong support for my argument. Results highlight the changing role of state capacity: stronger states are less likely to face LIV, but if they do, they are more likely to escalate to war. The fourth chapter expands on this analysis by using multi-state survival modeling to assess how the conflict evolves from start to finish, yielding nuanced findings about how key covariates affect a conflict's transition from (and cycles through) LIV to war to peace. This approach therefore forces a reexamination of the seminal findings in civil war.