Browsing by Subject "Civil War"

This paper constitutes a partial answer to the question of when political

resistance campaigns that use primarily violent or nonviolent strategies occur. In doing so, it attempts to bridge the gap between discussions of rebellion and civil resistance. A number of broad theoretical propositions are made and statistically tested by combining the NAVCO data on violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns with data that is commonly used in the civil war literature. The study finds that revolutionary civil resistance campaigns are unlikely to occur in democracies, population size does not obstruct nonviolent collective action, and the present favors nonviolent resistance more than the past, likely due to technological factors. It also provides evidence that divided societies are associated with rebellion rather than civil resistance.

Geographies of Freedom explores the ways in which free and enslaved black women pursued freedom for themselves and their families in the middle Mississippi River Valley using the law and uniquely gendered access to forms of labor, mobility, and the special configurations of the region. The river-centric economy and the fluid mobility of goods, people, and ideas across state borders there begs the study of the region expanding out from the confluence of the western rivers as a unique site to explore questions of mobility, geography, slavery, and freedom.

My dissertation argues that black women actively navigated the roiling world of the antebellum middle Mississippi River Valley-a region that offers an unparalleled opportunity to understand some of the most historically significant cultural, political, and economic shifts of the nineteenth century anew. The black women I discuss lived in a world being transformed by an increasingly market driven economy and attendant reconstructions of labor organization. At the same time, the demographic landscape was shifting, new industries and public social spaces emerged, and the conflict over the political geography of slavery and freedom heightened. Amidst the chaos, black women found access to mobility, economic opportunity, and even the law, which they used to pursue freedom. From court records, slave testimonies, newspapers, government records, manuscript collections and contemporary popular literature, I extract narratives of black women as migrants, laborers, litigants, and agents of their own lives in a border region perpetually in the process of making itself.

By running away, suing for their freedom or that of their children, and achieving economic stability, black women embodied the very promise of capitalism and democracy that most white men flocked to the river valley to pursue. In doing so, they threatened hardening notions of gender inequality and racial control. My dissertation shows that as they continued to act in these self-determined ways, black women fueled an accelerating political conflict over race and slavery in the border region leading up the Civil War. They challenged slave holders' claims to their bodies, their labor, and their children, and they forced judges and attorneys in the region to reevaluate laws around slavery, freedom, and property. In the aftermath of the Civil War, black women retained these methods of strategically appealing to the law and using their mobility and extended networks of communication to organize and maintain control over their lives.

How does competition and rivalry within alliances affect outcomes and processes in civil wars? Towards addressing this inquiry, this dissertation presents a formal theory of alliance formation that takes into account both internal and external threats. The theory, presented in Chapter 2, focuses on how allying parties make decisions regarding resource mobilization for conflictual purposes, in the presence of both internal and external hazards. The model indicates that intra-coalition division should serve not only as a source of instability but also as a wellspring of strength for aligning militant groups. This leads to a peculiar result, whereby the internal factors enabling groups to overcome the problem of collective action may also contribute to the "conflict trap." Testable implications are derived and examined empirically via a new dataset on alliances between rebel groups during civil wars from 1944 to 2001. The series of logistical models in Chapter 3 indicates that alliances marked by rivalry and competition are indeed more likely to lead to rebel victories. Yet, the analysis also demonstrates that these types of arrangements are also significant predictors of war recurrence. The latter result holds irrespective of how the original conflicts terminate. Additionally, Chapter 4 of this dissertation presents a comparative analysis between two cases of civil war marked by competitive alliances. In addition to other factors, the cases suggest the relative size of alliance members, the influence external actors, and the presence of electoral institutions may either exacerbate or mitigate competition issues within alliances.

Conflict between states in an anarchic international system is generally the result of an inability among state leaders to successfully negotiate perceived power imbalances within the system. Interstate conflicts are relatively rare events and are generally short in duration; international pressures to quickly and permanently resolve conflicts before their effects are felt outside the region of conflict are often intense. In an increasingly global community, an international order in turmoil ripples through the global financial system, often leading to a weakening of state power within it.

Violent conflicts within state borders have been historically more common, with causative issues ranging from polity dissatisfaction or inequities in the economic structure of the state to disputes over territorial integrity and autonomy. Pressure to rapidly resolve conflict within states is differentially applied cross-regionally; however, where strategic interests of major-power states are involved, such conflicts are usually quickly addressed. Where no such interests exist, these conflicts can and do persist for decades, at often huge costs to state resources.

In the mid-1990s the number of ongoing subnational conflicts appeared to be trending upward and increasingly between dissimilar people groups; Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis posited that future conflict at the subnational and international levels would be increasingly between groups of differing civilizational origin. This study disputes this claim, intending instead to show that conflict between groups of dissimilar religious beliefs is more likely to escalate to violence than that occurring between civilizational groupings, especially after the end of the Cold War.

This study covers nearly 200 countries during the period 1946-2007, including those granted independence within the period and new republics formed in the wake of the breakup of the Soviet Union. If Huntington's thesis is correct, states located along defined civilizational "fault-lines" should experience a higher incidence of violent conflict at the state level. States that contain sufficiently large populations from differing civilizations (defined as cleft states) should also be more conflict prone. The differential advantages gained during modernization processes in the post-Cold War era should result in an upward trend in such conflict after 1989.

This study uses conflict data from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, recording 1,670 conflict-years in over 100 countries within the observation period. Descriptive statistics suggest subnational conflicts have not become increasingly civilizational as Huntington described. Instead, conflict between dissimilar religious groups has become more common since the end of the Cold War. Multivariate analysis is used to estimate the relative importance of religious differences on the initiation of violent subnational conflict. In addition to the existence of religious cleavages, the salience of a number of realist variables is also considered.

Results show Huntington's theory to be insufficient to describe this evolution of subnational conflict. Civilizations are too broad to engender the necessary inclusivity in times of crisis, and the number of classifications theorized too narrow. However, results suggest religious cleavages to be equally weak predictors of future conflict likelihood at the subnational level. As in prior studies of civil wars, religion seems epiphenomenal in causative predictions of low-level subnational conflict initiation in the modern era.

Troy in America: Soldier Suicide in American War Literature attempts to illuminate how a war mentality forces an acceptance of mortality that not only brings out the irrationality of life itself, but also makes suicide more thinkable. This dissertation is therefore about the different reasons soldiers and veterans depicted in literature choose to die by suicide, but also those who consider it and choose not to. Troy in America draws on examples of suicide found in Ancient Greek literature to contextualize similar genres of suicide depicted in American war literature. Four Ancient Greek warriors suffer from different forms of suicidal behavior: Achilles’s grief, Odysseus’s despair, Ajax’s honor, and Philoctetes’s pain. Each hero’s suicidality is characterized by unique features that forms a discrete archetype that endures and informs characters found in literature about the American Civil War to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The authors of the texts analyzed in Troy in America appear to be in substantial agreement that the experience of combat can be so troubling that, for some of its participants and veterans, suicide seems to be an answer. For many survivors, the end of war does not mark the end of their suffering. War removes its participants from society in an effort to preserve it. War thus becomes, in effect, a trip to the Underworld; a liminal experience where the social order becomes available for inspection. As a result, coming home can be as difficult emotionally as combat. After experiencing the irrationality of war and gaining insight into the irrationality of life, the warrior must change in order to return to society. But some do not change; instead, they choose to end their lives.