Browsing by Author "Schubiger, Livia"

Victory in Irregular Wars is rarely a question of military capability alone. History and recent events offer examples of established governments who were defeated by insurgencies or rebels who, on paper, had far less military firepower and resources. Understanding this apparent paradox requires exploring the political dimensions of Irregular Wars. This study is an effort to generate a politically focused analytical tool which can help academics and practitioners understand how to best campaign plan for insurgencies and counter-insurgencies. This requires reducing a wide variety of political requirements into as few analytical categories as possible. This is done by framing insurgent/counter-insurgent policy decisions in terms of how well political leaders maximize a discrete set of organizational functions. The analytical tool is premised on the idea that the group, insurgent or counter-insurgent, who best optimizes this set of functions is best postured to win the Irregular War. To flesh out this analytical tool, I interviewed long serving members of the US Special Operations community. I chose this community because they are the only body of professionals with common training and doctrine focused on Irregular Warfare (the support or opposition of rebel groups). I asked these soldiers to provide qualitative feedback on nine proposed political factors and to then use these factors to grade the participants in multiple Irregular Wars. The results of this study suggest that these factors are interrelated and that the context of the Irregular War, i.e. the nature of each of the participants, determines how political leaders can best optimize their political capital to win the Irregular War.

This dissertation investigates the politics of global health and how international actors shape women’s outcomes in low- and middle-income countries. Using a three-paper model, it consists of three separate studies that highlight the interconnectedness of gender, health, and international politics. The first paper explores the spillover effects of a randomized controlled trial (RCT) implemented in Migori, Kenya in support of the World Health Organization’s cervical cancer elimination strategy. An original follow-up survey was administered to women living in the intervention and control villages to understand the RCT’s impact on non-medical outcomes. The second paper focuses on the international politics of foreign aid for family planning and demonstrates that a country’s response to dynamics within the international arena can determine how and why countries choose to contribute to policies that target women. Specifically, it investigates the international response when the United States, the largest aid donor, withdraws funding for family planning through its Mexico City Policy, better known as the “global gag rule.” The third paper looks at foreign aid termination more broadly, and how the use of this sanction instrument by the United Nations, United States, and European Union affects women’s health and safety in the target countries. These papers employ quantitative methods on a variety of data sources, ranging from original survey data collected in rural, western Kenya, to observational data on a range of indicators for multiple countries. Taken together, these studies show that women in low- and middle-income countries are subjected to consequences that stem from the political actions of international players.

This dissertation investigates the role of civilians’ social ties in transforming wartime and postwar local order. Leveraging advanced methodological tools for causal inference and original sub-national, cross-national, and qualitative data, the project improves our understanding of the relationship between local social landscapes and conflict processes.The first essay in this dissertation develops and tests a theory of the conditions under which insurgent conscription—a distinct type of forced recruitment whereby rebels use their administrative capacity to mandate military service in areas under their control—can ensure community compliance by forging social ties between civilians and insurgents. I argue that when state violence against armed groups’ civilian constituencies isolates civilians from the state, armed groups can use insurgent conscription to forge direct social ties between every civilian and the rebellion. I test the argument using a matching approach for time series, cross-sectional data and a novel data set documenting the use of insurgent conscription across 1,415 armed group-year observations between 1946 and 2008. The second essay explores the influence of gendered societal norms and women’s net- works on the governance of armed groups. Through process tracing and qualitative analysis of more than 50 interviews with high-ranking rebel leaders, local officials, and civilians in Nepal who experienced rebel rule, I illustrate that when armed groups mobilize women into rebel governing structures, women insurgent governors can use their roles within their families and communities to provide and build trust in direct armed group social services. The final essay shines an empirical and theoretical spotlight on the conditions under which women’s networks are resilient to conflict and armed group incursions. I argue that in- vestments in local women service providers improve service providers’ ability perform three functions critical to collective action: gathering information about the needs of women in their communities, deepening interpersonal ties between women in their communities, and building the institutional knowledge necessary to assert and advocate for collective de- mands. Moreover, I argue that the effects of resource allocation to women service providers on collective action are likely to be resilient to shocks because, due to the private, intimate nature of their work, women service providers are practiced in cooperating under difficult conditions and build particularly durable social ties. Utilizing newly gathered data on over 13,500 wards in Nepal, and both difference-in-differences and regression discontinuity de- signs, I illustrate how state allocation of resources to women service providers before the war contributed to the formation of channels for women’s collective action through a nearly 20 year period, including active conflict and immediate post-conflict years.

Why do people affected by wartime violence sometimes support armed actors that target civilians? More broadly, how do they respond to civilian targeting? Answering these questions is crucial for understanding civilian attitudes toward armed groups and transitional justice. I draw on research from moral and political psychology concerning dyadic morality, motivated reasoning, and moral disengagement to argue that people's responses to civilian targeting are shaped by moral considerations, identity, and self-interest. Individuals characterize some forms of violence against civilians as less unethical; they are more willing to support perpetrators who violate less strict norms, have less agency, or have less clear causal ties to the victims. Further, their preferences over conflict actors shape their reactions to civilians targeting; such preferences are affected by violence, governance, and ideology. However, given the strong norm against civilian targeting, people must justify the violence committed by their preferred side in order to continue supporting the perpetrators. I test this argument in the case of Colombia, relying on two original online survey experiments, analysis of pre-existing survey data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project, interviews with civil society leaders, and archival research. In doing so, I find evidence that people are more likely to support perpetrators who engage in forms of civilian targeting they perceive as less unethical, even when both forms of violence pose an equivalent level of physical threat. They also respond less negatively to civilian targeting when the perpetrators provide them effective governance or promote an ideology similar to their own. Further, people justify reduced punishment for violence committed by their preferred side by characterizing that side's abuse as less likely to be the responsibility of armed group leadership and as less harmful.