Communicative Structure and the Emergence of Armed Conflict
Abstract
The goal of this dissertation is to provide a logically coherent and empirically grounded
account of the relationships between collective communication, collective loyalties,
and collective violence. Drawing on research from an array of disciplines, ranging
from psychology to economics and sociology, I develop a new theoretical framework
that I term "communicative structuralism." The central claim of this framework is
that the communicative processes upon which the formation of collective identities
and loyalties are based are structurally constrained in systematic ways. More specifically,
it claims that public communicative structures, those which transmit synchronized
messages and thus generate joint awareness of those messages amongst a collective
audience, are central to the development of national, sub-national, and transnational
symbolic allegiances because they create communities of shared experience and thereby
generate symbolic touchstones which allow individuals to feel connected to a seemingly
unified moral community.
To test this theory, I collect data on the structural properties of the most prominent
public communicative structures in the contemporary state system - those constituted
by the mass media networks of newspapers, radios, and televisions - in 177 countries
for the period 1945 - 1999. I then use this data to test the implications of the
theory at two separate levels of analysis: (1) at the individual level the theory
is tested using cross-national survey data on media exposure and state allegiance
from over 30,000 respondents in 38 countries, and (2) at the state level the theory
is tested using cross-national time-series data on civil conflict, identity fragmentation,
and regime stability. I each case, the central finding is that mass media structures
are fundamentally involved in generating the conditions for the formation of collective
audiences (that is, audiences which are composed of members who are jointly aware
of themselves as a collective). The dissertation demonstrates that such collective
audiences, when constituted on a national scale by dense public communicative structures
(i.e. mass media), make individuals more inclined to feel affective attachments to
their country, and reduce the propensity to sociopolitical fragmentation thereby lessening
the risk of large-scale civil conflict. In making this demonstration, the dissertation
attempts to triangulate through the use of a wide variety of quantitative techniques,
including multilevel hierarchical linear models, structural equation models, non-parametric
tests of predictive accuracy, Bayesian model averaging, social network analysis, and
agent-based computational simulations. I also ground the analysis in careful qualitative
process-tracing of the disintegration of the Yugoslavian federation.
Type
DissertationDepartment
Political ScienceSubject
Political Science, International Law and RelationsMass Media
Group Loyalty
Civil War
Communication
Network
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/606Citation
Warren, Timothy Camber (2008). Communicative Structure and the Emergence of Armed Conflict. Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/606.Collections
More Info
Show full item record
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Rights for Collection: Duke Dissertations
Works are deposited here by their authors, and represent their research and opinions, not that of Duke University. Some materials and descriptions may include offensive content. More info