Browsing by Subject "Conflict"

The value of task-related conflict to team effectiveness continues to generate controversy in organizational studies. I argue that this debate reflects as much differences in the conceptualization of conflict by scholars from separate traditions as it does variation in empirical settings and methods. The model proposed in this research is a more general framework for the study of team conflict that clarifies, accommodates, and reconciles to a large degree the divergent findings of prior research. It suggests that recent pessimism about the value of team conflict is overstated, and it offers a number of promising paths through which task-related conflict may improve team performance and satisfaction. Chapter 1 reviews the history of this debate and introduces the model of team conflict. Chapter 2 documents a test of the model's propositions in a correlational study of 223 MBA teams conducting a decision-making exercise. Chapter 3 features an experimental test of the model with a forecasting task completed by 60 3-person groups. And Chapter 4 revisits the conflict over conflict in light of the studies presented herein.

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.

At every moment in life we are receiving input from multiple sensory modalities. We are limited, however, in the amount of information we can selectively attend to and fully process at any one time. The ability to integrate the relevant corresponding multisensory inputs together and to segregate other sensory information that is conflicting or distracting is therefore fundamental to our ability to successfully navigate through our complex environment. Such multisensory integration and segregation is done on the basis of temporal, spatial, and semantic cues, often aided by selective attention to particular inputs from one or multiple modalities. The precise nature of how attention interacts with multisensory perception, and how this ramifies behaviorally and neurally, has been largely underexplored. Here, in a series of six cognitive experiments in humans using auditory and visual stimuli, along with electroencephalography (EEG) measures of brain activity and behavioral measures of task performance, I examine the interactions between attention, stimulus conflict, and multisensory processing. I demonstrate that attention can spread across modalities in a pattern that closely follows the temporal linking of multisensory stimuli, while also engendering the spatial linking of such multisensory stimuli. When stimulus inputs either within audition or across modalities conflict, I observe an electrophysiological signature of the processing of this conflict that is similar to what had been previously observed within the visual modality. Moreover, using neural measures of attentional distraction, I show that when task-irrelevant stimulus input from one modality conflicts with task-relevant input from another, attention is initially pulled toward the conflicting irrelevant modality, thereby contributing to the observed impairment in task performance. Finally, I demonstrate that there are individual differences in multisensory temporal processing in the population, in particular between those with extensive action-video-game experience versus those with little. However, everyone appears to be susceptible to multisensory distraction, a finding that should be taken into serious consideration in today's complex world of multitasking.

This dissertation explains the influence of ethnic non-state actors on the management of International Crises. I begin by arguing that when actively engaged in a crisis, ethnic actors contribute to; crisis violence, indecisive outcomes, and the escalation of interstate tensions. They do so because their more robust sponsorship allows them to drive relatively hard bargains with the state they are in conflict with. The analysis contributes to the development of theory by filling a gap in the literature and helping to resolve an important debate. Here I consider the entire population of non-state actors as a topic for analysis. This is in contrast to the general trend, which is to treat non-state actors as part of the landscape in studies that are otherwise concerned with ethnic conflict, terrorism or nation-building. In addition, the analysis here helps resolve a debate between bargaining theorist and ethnic conflict scholars concerning the relevance of ethnicity for our understanding of (both interstate and intrastate) conflict. In particular it identifies mechanisms specifically associated with ethnic rebel groups and demonstrates that ethnicity has an influence on interstate conflict through the actions of violent non-state actors. In the analysis I build on the logic above to develop a series of testable hypotheses. I then collect a new data-set of crisis-dyad-years and identify each crisis with a participating non-state actor (NSA-Crises) as well as those with ethnic non-state actors. Next I conduct a series of quantitative test of the relationship between ethnic actor participation and crisis management. The results demonstrate that ethnically mobilized rebel groups influence crises in unique ways, causing higher levels of violence and a higher incidence of stalemate. These findings are robust to various model specifications and the relationship between ethnic actors and crisis management is not conditioned by state-based sponsorship. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this analysis for both theory and policy-making.

This dissertation focuses on raiding and sovereignty in the Central African Republic's (CAR) northeastern borderlands, on the margins of Darfur. A vast literature on social evolution has assumed the inevitability of centralization. But these borderlands show that centralization does not always occur. Never claimed by any centralizing forces, the area has instead long been used as a reservoir of resources by neighboring areas' militarized entrepreneurs, who seek this forest-savanna's goods. The raiders seize resources but also govern. The dynamics of this zone, much of it a place anthropologists used to refer to as "stateless," suggest a re-thinking of the modalities of sovereignty. The dissertation proposes conceptualizing sovereignty not as a totalizing, territorialized political order but rather through its constituent governing capabilities, which may centralize or not, and can combine to create hybrid political systems. The dissertation develops this framework through analysis of three categories of men-in-arms -- road-blockers, anti-poaching militiamen, and members of rebel groups -- and their relationships with international peacebuilding initiatives. It compares roadblocks and "road cutting" (robbery) to show how they stop traffic and create flexible, personalized entitlements to profit for those who operate them. The dissertation also probes the politics of militarized conservation: in a low-level war that has lasted for twenty-five years, the European Union-funded militiamen fight deadly battles against herders and hunters. Though ostensibly fought to protect CAR's "national patrimony" (its animals and plants), this war bolsters the sovereign capabilities of a range of non-state actors and has resulted in hundreds of deaths in the last few years, many of them hidden in the bush. The dissertation then shows how CAR's recent cycle of rebellion has changed governance in rural areas. Though mobile armed groups have long operated in CAR, they used to work as road cutters and local defense forces and only recently started calling themselves "rebels" -- a move that has landed them in new roles as "governors" of populations while leaving them without the welfare largess they seek. Throughout these various raiders' projects, the idea of the all-powerful state serves as a reference point they use to qualify themselves with sovereign authorities. But their actions as rulers undermine the creation of the unitary political authority they desire and invoke. Failure to appreciate these non-centralized micropolitical processes is a main reason peacebuilding efforts (such as disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration) in the region have failed.

Secession is a watershed event not only for the new state that is created and the old state that is dissolved, but also for neighboring states, proximate ethno-political groups and major powers. This project examines the problem of violent secessionist conflict and addresses an important debate at the intersection of comparative and international politics about the conditions under which secession is a peaceful solution to ethnic conflict. It demonstrates that secession is rarely a solution to ethnic conflict, does not assure the protection of remaining minorities and produces new forms of violence. To explain why some secessions produce peace, while others generate violence, the project develops a theoretical model of the conditions that produce internally coherent, stable and peaceful post-secessionist states rather than recursive secession (i.e., secession from a new secessionist state) or interstate disputes between the rump and secessionist state. Theoretically, the analysis reveals a curvilinear relationship between ethno-territorial heterogeneity and conflict, explains disparate findings in the literature on ethnic conflict and conclusively links ethnic structure and violence. The project also contributes to the literature on secessionist violence, and civil war more generally, by linking intrastate and interstate causes, showing that what is frequently thought of as a domestic phenomenon is in fact mostly a phenomenon of international politics. Drawing upon original data, methodological advances at the interface of statistics, computer science and probability theory, and qualitative methods such as elite interviews and archival research, the project offers a comprehensive, comparative and contextual treatment of secession and violence.

Since the end of the Cold War, natural resources have assumed an increasingly prominent role in security, conflict, and peace studies. Scholars and development practitioners alike view the development of strong institutions, which aim to domesticate global regulatory regimes that foster neoliberal principles like privatization, transparency, and accountability, as necessary to mitigate natural resource conflict in resource-rich states, as well as enhance opportunities for peace and social justice. However, the application of environmental peacebuilding theory to resource-rich contexts has outpaced the ability of empirical research to substantiate its claims, and scholars remain unclear about the mechanisms by which institutional reforms minimize conflict risk or promote peace. This dissertation examines the extent to which the diffusion and uptake of global environmental governance standards has (re)shaped the politics of mineral extraction in Ghana and Sierra Leone. I explore claims that social and environmental outcomes have deteriorated amid efforts by Ghana and Sierra Leone to build regulatory capacity. Using interview, survey, and ethnographic data collected across multiple scales in Ghana and Sierra Leone between 2014 and 2016, I find that while governance reforms have produced strong environmental regulatory institutions in both contexts, these institutions have failed to drive wider social and environmental change within society. Rather, institutional reforms have contributed to patterns of development that undermine state-society relations, and reinforced conditions that promote institutional plurality on the ground. The state remains only one of several options for obtaining legitimate access to mineral resources, meaning that multiple and conflicting sets of “rules-in-use” govern extraction. This perpetuates what I term a “hollow state” in which formal state institutions are continually eroded by informal bottom-up processes. The resulting institutional terrain has produced conditions in which plural authoritative networks compete for social influence as well as access to and control of natural resources. This, in turn, has contributed to chronic, low-intensity conflict, environmental degradation, and the pursuit of elite interests and power at the expense of sustainable resource extraction and livelihood security. Overall, this research suggests a need for environmental peacebuilding theory to reconceptualize linkages between environment, development, and social stability in resource-rich states.

How do people rebuild their lives, livelihoods, and community in the same location where brutal conflict has occurred? My research in San Carlos, Colombia--a rural community emerging from a decade of violence--investigates how conflict targets the built and natural environments of people's lives. Roads, bridges, buildings, and land have all been sites of violence, illustrating the blurred lines between military and civilian space. The meanings of these locations change after war. Yet, for those returning after a decade of internal displacement, these are exactly the building blocks that must be used to remake home, livelihoods, and community. I use the concept of forensic infrastructure to explore the materiality of memory and politics in war, the immediate aftermath, and long-term reconstruction.

A forensic approach to infrastructure involves understanding materials as text and tools in which politics and memory are embedded and enacted. Forms of infrastructure serve as archives of the past and stages for the practice and performance of awesome and everyday life. As both material and metaphor for interdependence, infrastructure is the physical embodiment of complex concepts such as development, modernity, progress, citizenship, and stability.

Nowhere are these concepts more contested in Colombia than San Carlos. Between 1998-2005, the FARC and ELN guerrillas, the Bloque Metro and Cacique Nutibara paramilitaries, and the armed forces fought in San Carlos over control of the country's largest hydroelectric complex and the Bogotá-Medellín highway connecting Colombia's two biggest cities. Eighty percent of the population fled. Beginning in 2005, however, after paramilitary demobilization and military victories over the FARC, people started returning to their homes. Since 2010, San Carlos has been host to innovative initiatives facilitating return. It is often portrayed in the national media as a model for return, reconstruction, and reconciliation.

While internal displacement has been a crisis in Colombia for decades, large-scale return is a new phenomenon. Little has been written about return, especially based on sustained ethnographic fieldwork. This dissertation, based on seven research trips between 2008-2015, including fifteen months of fieldwork in San Carlos and Medellín in 2011-2012, sheds light on the everyday experiences and difficulties of return--both for those who were displaced and those who remained. Rebuilding the physical spaces of connection, containment, and circulation necessary for community to function in San Carlos embodies a larger struggle over the nature of development, progress, and reparation in Colombia. I suggest return is possible in San Carlos because the fight was over mobility instead of the land itself. The same model of return will be difficult to impossible to apply in areas where monoculture agriculture or mining play a major role in conflict.

Foreign military bases are anomalies in a world of sovereign states. Why do major powers station their finite military forces to protect other countries and how does the distribution of these bases relate to a country’s grand strategy? Why do host-nations give up their sovereignty and allow foreign forces, capable of existential violence, to deploy within their borders? This dissertation takes a mixed method approach to each of these questions. For the first, I combine descriptive case studies relating the basing postures of five major powers and to their respective grand strategies with a quantitative analysis of the correlates of the US military basing network. To answer the second, I test the role of host-nation security conditions on US military access and then conduct an in-depth process tracing of US-Philippine basing relations. I find that foreign military bases are essential for super-power status and are an arena for great power competition. I conclude that the US foreign basing posture is strongly aligned with American trade relationships and against US enemies. For host-nation motivations, I conclude that security threats to the host-nation matter, but not uniformly. External threats have the greatest influence in increasing foreign military access, but low-intensity revolutionary threats actually tend to decrease a host-nation’s willingness to accommodate foreign forces.