Crime Gun Theft

Philip Cook, Duke University

Research Grant, 2015

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Only about 1 percent of all gun transactions in the US are thefts, and there is no evidence that theft is an important source of guns to those who use them to commit violent crimes. The analysis in support of this finding uses national and local data on the volume of gun theft and the sources of guns used in crime.

In particular, Chicago data suggests that only a tiny proportion of crime guns in that city were ever reported stolen to the Police Department. That and other evidence challenge the popular belief that gun theft is a major source of guns used in violent crime.  

There is no evidence that theft is an important source of guns to those who use them to commit violent crimes. 

The research draws on the best available evidence on how many guns are stolen each year in the US, and the extent to which these are then used to commit further offences.

The primary sources are the National Crime Victimization Survey (for data on gun theft from households); federal data on guns stolen from licensed dealers; police data on guns reported stolen to the Chicago Police Department; and national surveys of people convicted of felonies about how they obtained their guns.

On average, 232,400 guns were stolen nationwide between 2005 and 2010, and 251,300 guns between 2010 and 2014. Residential burglaries accounted for 58 percent of such thefts between 2005 and 2010, and the most common type of gun stolen was the handgun. These gun thefts constituted only about 1 percent of the 32 million annual gun transactions nationwide.

The Chicago Police Department reported that between 2010 and 2016, residents reported 473 guns stolen per year. Just half of the reports included a serial number and manufacturer name. In 2016, 84 (1.5 percent) of the stolen guns could be matched to one of the more than 5,600 crimes committed in Chicago that year. Taking account of the missing data, it is reasonable to conclude that 3 percent of recovered guns had been reported stolen in that city.

Military Medicine and the Changing Costs of War

Tanisha Fazal, University of Notre Dame

Research Grant, 2016

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The decision to go to war is often framed as a cost-benefit analysis. But what if we are getting the costs systematically wrong? A positive trend—improvements in military medicine that save lives on the battlefield—has led to significant underestimation of the costs of modern war.

The costs of war, both human and financial, are traditionally conceptualized in a time-bound manner. Specifically, the human costs of war are typically described in terms of battle fatalities, while the financial costs of war focus on military materiel. This view of the costs of war is not appropriate to today’s wars.

Over the past two centuries, dramatic improvements in military medicine, alongside the historic expansion of the veterans’ benefits system, have increased the long-term downstream costs of war for the United States in ways underappreciated by both policymakers and the public.

In an era of anticipated increased great power competition, updating our understanding of the costs of war is an especially urgent task.

Consider first the implications of improvements in military medicine for the human costs of war. The ratio of soldiers wounded to those killed in battle held steady at 3:1 for centuries.

Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, however, that ratio began drifting up with improvements in medicine. In the US’s most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the historical wounded-to-killed ratio more than tripled; today it lies between 10:1 and 17:1. As a percentage of those deployed, many more military personnel are returning home having survived wounds they would not have survived in past conflicts. Improvements in military medicine, from better preventive care to advances in hemostatics to investment in air evacuation, are the principal cause of this shift.

But the lives saved are often indelibly altered. Returned military personnel and the families who care for them bear visible and invisible costs of war for decades. The US government also bears significant long-term financial costs of war as a result of these military medical improvements. Veterans Affairs (VA) spending today outstrips that of agencies such as the Departments of Agriculture, Education, and Homeland Security. And while concern over the cost of Civil War pensions was so great that anticipation of creating a new generation of pensioners arguably delayed the US’s entrance into World War I, to suggest reducing veterans’ benefits today would likely invite rare bipartisan backlash.

To be clear, I do not argue that we should roll back military medicine or veterans’ benefits. Instead, key decision-makers must take these downstream costs into account when considering military action. US defense policy is currently pivoting from counterinsurgency wars in the Middle East to meeting challenges posed by more conventional rivals Russia and China. In an era of anticipated increased great power competition, updating our understanding of the costs of war is an especially urgent task. That war appears cheaper than it is today makes the world a more dangerous place. The medical consequences of the US military’s current pivot to great power competition are profound and speak directly to the importance of considering how medicine may affect future costs of war. Because the most recent wars have been land campaigns, relatively little attention has been paid to naval and air medicine. And ongoing conversations about the national debt and federal budget have already sparked debate over future veterans’ benefits.

National security experts expect that future US wars will look quite different from those of the recent past. But as long as force is used in war, there will be developments in medicine and costs associated with the wounded. Gaining an understanding of these costs before deciding whether to use force is essential to informed policymaking

Bibliography

1. Fazal, Tanisha M. 2021. “Life and Limb: New Estimates of Casualty Aversion in the US.”International Studies Quarterly 65, no. 1 (March 2021): 160–172. Fazal, Tanisha M. and Kreps, Sarah. “The United States’ Perpetual War in Afghanistan.” Foreign Affairs, Snapshot, August 20, 2018. Fazal, Tanisha M. “A New Korean War Would Kill More US Military Personnel Than You Think.” The Washington Post, The Monkey Cage, January 8, 2018.

Dying to Save: Youth Vigilantism, Civilian Joint Task Force, and Counterterrorism in Nigeria

Daniel Agbiboa, George Mason University

Research Grant, 2017

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How do civilian communities in contemporary armed rebellions create order in a context of pervasive insecurity? What are the consequences of civilian self-protection strategies and order-making for violence in general and for the intensity, duration, and termination of armed rebellions in particular? These are the overriding questions that this research project sought to tackle in the context of the Boko Haram insurgency in northeast Nigeria.

Since 2009, Nigeria and its neighbors in the Lake Chad Basin have been in the throes of a violent insurgency by the Salafi-jihadi group known as Boko Haram, which later merged into Wilayat Garb Ifriquiya (the Islamic State’s West Africa Province, or ISWAP).

In June 2011, as Boko Haram’s drive-by shootings and bombings surged, the Nigerian government deployed a special Joint Task Force (JTF), “Operation Restore Order,” to northeastern Nigeria with the aim of extirpating insurgents from the land. But the JTF’s poor knowledge of the physical and social terrain in which Boko Haram operates made it extremely difficult to build the networks of trust and reciprocity that are key to overcoming an internal enemy.

Dispensing with any efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of the local population, the JTF lumped the local civilian populations into “suspect communities” and, thus, legitimized its use of indiscriminate violence against civilian populations, especially young men.

Dispensing with any efforts to win the “hearts and minds” of the local population, the JTF lumped the local civilian populations into “suspect communities” and, thus, legitimized its use of indiscriminate violence against civilian populations, especially young men. As one local respondent put it: “To the Nigerian military, the locals are ‘Boko Haram’ and to Boko Haram, the locals are traitors.” It is no wonder, then, that at the peak of the Boko Haram insurgency (2010–2013), the JTF is estimated to have killed three times more civilians than Boko Haram. The scorched-earth tactics of the JTF alienated many innocent citizens and hurt chances of any local cooperation. Despite the disbandment of the JTF in 2013, and its replacement with the 7th infantry division as the umbrella command for the war on Boko Haram, indiscriminate attacks on civilians continued to be widespread and extreme. This was the context in which urban vigilante and rural hunter militias—most prominently the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF)—emerged in affected parts of northeast Nigeria with the overriding aim of fighting terror and keeping the peace.

Since its creation in early 2013, the CJTF has mobilized thousands of local youths (both men and women) who have intimate knowledge of the physical and social terrain in which Boko Haram/ISWAP insurgents operate, and who work collaboratively with state security forces and other community-based armed groups. The CJTF’s superior linguistic, topographical, and social skills assisted the Nigerian military with garnering information from local community members and with overcoming the problem of identification (i.e., differentiating between armed insurgents and civilians). As a result, Nigerian soldiers were able to more effectively and selectively target Boko Haram insurgents, thus driving down the level of civilian victimization. The CJTF is widely credited with dislodging Boko Haram insurgents from the city of Maiduguri, the group’s main operational base, in late 2013. 

Among Nigerian vigilante movements, the CJTF is unique in its core focus on counterinsurgency alongside state security forces and in its resolve to prop up rather than withdraw from or even resist the state. That said, while the CJTF’s bravery endeared it to civilian populations and politicians alike—with the Nigerian government hailing its members as “new national heroes”—growing and credible evidence of the group’s human rights abuses calls for a sober reflection on the role and contributions of militias to African counterinsurgencies.

This research project was, at heart, an effort to understand how local communities in conflict sustained a sense of order and agency in the face of insecurity. It drew richly on qualitative fieldwork conducted in three of the most adversely affected states in northeast Nigeria, namely, Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa states. 

The rise of vigilante and hunter militias in the context of state counterinsurgency offers an opportunity to go beyond the conventional focus on the local state to understand the hybrid nature of security governance in African rebellions. Furthermore, the voices and experiences of those who live daily with violence are a window into the social resilience and agency of local populations amid disempowering circumstances. By analyzing the role and contributions of militias in counterinsurgency, this research demonstrated that civilian populations are not passive victims of war, but instead adapt in a variety of ways to impose order and predictability on their dangerous environments. This project therefore expanded and complemented the growing corpus of works on the complex role of militias vis-a-vis the state and the community in a context of armed rebellion. Specifically, it highlighted the crucial role of civil-military cooperation for overcoming Salafi-jihadi groups such as Boko Haram and reducing state violence against local populations. At the same time, the project underscored the precarious nature of civilian self-protection tactics, both in terms of increasing the violent targeting of innocent civilians by vengeful insurgents as well as the tendency for militias to go rogue and become existential threats to the local communities they were expected to protect.

Moreover, much has been written about women in African conflicts as victims and violent perpetrators. Less well understood is their active role as counterinsurgents and local vanguards. This project shed new light onto the gendered practices of counterinsurgency in northeast Nigeria, with particular attention to why women joined the war on Boko Haram and what role they played in the civilian resistance to the Salafi-jihadi group. The research found that women joined the war for a variety of reasons, including personal losses, family ties, community attachment (a sense of belonging), a desire to protect vulnerable members of their community (especially women), a deep sense of patriotic loyalty, and a yearning for normality. The project not only brings female counterinsurgents out of the shadows of male counterinsurgents and female insurgents (e.g., suicide bombers), but extends the extant literature beyond the narrow fixation with women’s participation in rebel groups and women as “weapons of terror.”

Finally, the rise of progovernment militias such as vigilante and hunter groups in the context of northeast Nigeria highlights the need for a new analytical framework that empirically and theoretically engages hybrid security governance in the context of African counterinsurgencies. Weak states are ordinarily not in a position to provide security and other political goods on their own. Given their local embeddedness and the popular legitimacy that they seem to enjoy, at least in the early phases, militias may be well-placed to carry out basic governance duties, establish public norms of compliance and cooperation with locals, and provide order and dispute-resolution services. The fusing of a nonstate armed group—volunteering to shield their community from insurgents—into an institution of legitimate violence underscores the limitations of conventional state/society dichotomies in analyses of how civilians imagine and encounter the state. In particular, it breaks down our normative understanding of state-civil society distinctions, and it collapses the traditional understanding of the state as the Leviathan possessing exclusive right to legitimate violence.

Insurgent Fragmentation and State Attachment in the Syrian Civil War

Aron Lund, The Century Foundation

Research Grant, 2017

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Syria has been ravaged by conflict since 2011, when an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad’s authoritarian rule spiraled into civil war. From the start, but especially in its first few years, the conflict was characterized by an extraordinary proliferation of armed factions. In 2013, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency counted around 1,200 insurgent factions. On the government side, too, Syria’s pre-war army had been partially replaced by a multitude of irregular units and volunteer militias. 

The fragmentation of the anti-Assad insurgency hobbled its effectiveness, undercut opposition governance, and culminated in costly infighting, most notably when the so-called Islamic State broke away to establish a rival political-religious project in 2013–14. Repeated foreign-backed attempts to unify Syria’s rebel factions behind a central leadership, often using the Free Syrian Army brand, were unsuccessful. 

Conversely, Syria’s proregime militias have sustained an adequate level of unity through the entire war. While they are deeply embroiled in organized crime and often feud over financial or local advantage, they have, with very rare exceptions, remained loyal to Assad’s rule and reasonably responsive to central government direction.

The fragmentation of the anti-Assad insurgency hobbled its effectiveness, undercut opposition governance, and culminated in costly infighting.

In “Insurgent Fragmentation and State Attachment in the Syrian Civil War,” a project funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation and carried out in my capacity as a fellow with The Century Foundation, I investigated key aspects of how Syrian armed groups have coalesced or fragmented since 2011. In addition to studying the conflict’s history and evolution, the project posed two questions: (1) Why did violent groups within the anti-Assad insurgency fail to unite behind a common platform despite their largely homogeneous ethno-sectarian makeup? and (2) What role did state institutions and regime patronage play in ensuring that violent actors on the internally diverse loyalist side would remain united behind Bashar al-Assad? 

Over the course of the project, from January 2018 until June 2020, I used a variety of research methods—interviews and field work, literature studies, and monitoring of media and social media—to answer these questions and to improve my understanding of the war in Syria and of fragmented conflicts more generally.

My research into coalition-building among anti-Assad factions suggests that bottom-up unity efforts within leaderless, factionalized insurgencies will, as a rule, be unsuccessful unless led by a powerful core faction that can attract, coerce, and absorb weaker groups; deter or defeat near-peer rivals; and secure the resources (often including external patronage) needed to sustain its dominance. When and where such “alpha factions” appeared in Syria, I found that they tended to share certain characteristics, including an intense ideological commitment, a prewar organizational structure or other assets that provided a first-mover advantage, and a willingness to aggressively and unsentimentally pursue their interests, even against likeminded actors. Examples include several of the most prominent Sunni Arab insurgent groups, such as the Islamic State (which ruled much of eastern Syria in 2014–17), the Nusra Front (which has dominated Idleb since 2016–17 and is now renamed Tahrir al-Sham), and the Islam Army (the strongest faction in the 2013–18 East Ghouta enclave). Ideological and other differences aside, the description also fits Syria’s dominant Kurdish faction, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which rose to dominate northeastern Syria from 2012 onward.

In the case of Syria’s loyalist militias, there was no need to search for a dominant faction: they had by definition emerged in support of President Assad’s regime. My research suggests that state and military institutions played a key role in mobilizing these militias and have subsequently acted to centralize and streamline control over them, such as by appointing liaisons, establishing regional Security and Military Committees, and herding disparate factions into state-linked umbrella structures such as the National Defense Forces. They also provide services and resources essential to militia operations, such as security clearances and permits, access to training grounds and bases, weapons and ammunition, and sometimes salaries. Moreover, even if many militias arose in service of local or personal interests, they and their constituents remain embedded in a social and institutional environment subject to state control and Assad’s authority. This structural dependence on, and immersion in, the Assad-led system helps explain the relative strategic coherence of Syria’s loyalist militia movement. Intermilitia competition remains a source of friction and dysfunction, but it plays out in a loyalist context where rivals are more likely to appeal to the regime’s higher echelons for support or adjudication than to organize against it.

Unearthing Sexual Violence in the Congo Free State and its Contemporary Significance 

Charlotte Mertens, University of Melbourne

Research Grant, 2017

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Goals

The project asks the following questions: How did sexual violence occur during one particularly violent colonial encounter, namely the period of the Congo Free State? How was the use of sexual violence linked to the imperial economy of the colony and rubber exploitation? What do the project findings reveal about present conceptualizations and understandings of wartime rape in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo?

Main Findings

Pawning, hostage taking, kidnapping, rape, sexual slavery, and sexual torture were the most common forms of gender-based violence committed by both sentries and colonial officials during the period of the Congo Free State. They were part of instilling a culture of (sexual) terror among the indigenous population.

This culture was highly gendered. While many of the origins of sexual violence in the Congo Free State can be traced back to practices conducted by slave traders and early colonial military expeditions, gendered patterns emerge in the perpetration of sexual violence specifically when it is used in pursuit of a particular objective, such as the practice of taking native women hostage in order to force the men to meet the requested rubber quota.

The archive shows women were often raped when held as hostages. They were raped when pawned to a White man or sentry in order to meet tax demands. The kidnapping (also referred to as rapt) of women, especially the “beautiful” ones, is a recurring theme in the archive.

White men and sentries stole local women and made them their concubines. While sexual violence was widespread and very common, no clear evidence could be found that rapes occurred systematically or strategically to extract resources. 

The evidence found in the archives emphasizes both the banality of brutal sexual violence and the cruel intimacy inherent to colonialism (in a context of extreme demand for resources but not necessarily because of it).

The archives illustrate that economic rationalities do not necessarily explain the use of sexual violence and torture, although the system of production did enable the violence. While sexual violence was used as punishment or as extortion, it mainly functioned as a display of colonial power. I, therefore, argue sexual violence is not a direct result of the regime’s demand for resources but is an integral aspect of the violently intimate colonial state. Sexual violence does not logically follow out of colonial occupation but structures and underwrites colonialism. 

There is no doubt profit was central to the Congo Free State regime. The incentive and sentry system as well as forced labor enabled gross atrocities and abuse, such as the severing of hands and feet of Congolese people when the rubber quota was not reached, yet sexual violence should not be seen as a direct result of the extreme demand for resources. The evidence found in the archives emphasizes both the banality of brutal sexual violence and the cruel intimacy inherent to colonialism (in a context of extreme demand for resources but not necessarily because of it). The archive further demonstrates colonial law’s selective recognition of Black people’s agency through criminality alone. The repression of sexual violence crimes committed by White colonials was central to colonial power.

These findings are important when examining contemporary sexual violence in eastern Congo. In particular, the wide prevalence and brutal nature of sexual violence in the Congo Free State refute current representations of Congo’s rapes as exceptional and profoundly different to the violence experienced in the West. My findings also show that sexual violence should not be seen as a direct result of the extreme demand for resources. This is relevant to the current context of eastern Congo where sexual violence is not directly tied to resource extraction and rebels’ greed. Finally, my findings show the centrality of sexual violence to colonial power and the politics of empire. Sexual violence structures colonialism. This enables an understanding of wartime rape as structural violence, which means an analysis of violence that examines the structures, ideologies, and institutions that legitimate, condone, and perpetuate it.

The Environmental Making of Sendero Luminoso: Drought, Famine, and Revolution in the Peruvian Andes, 1983–1986

Javier Puente, Smith College

Research Grant, 2017

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My original research project aimed to explore the intersection of two major events in Peru’s recent history. On the one hand, the militarization of the Internal Armed Conflict, a sociopolitical conflagration between the state and Sendero Luminoso, a Maoist terrorist organization.

On the other hand, the impact of the 1982–1983 El Niño, and the subsequent drought that engulfed the Andean region. As seasons of harvest failures and political violence collided and made a socioenvironmental catastrophe, thousands of villagers came to experience the intertwined wrath of nature and the militarization of their everyday lives. The enduring disenfranchisement and displacement of Andean livelihoods became the unequivocal outcomes of this process. 

As seasons of harvest failures and political violence collided and made a socioenvironmental catastrophe, thousands of villagers came to experience the intertwined wrath of nature and the militarization of their everyday lives.

During the course of my research, I visited archives and localities in Ayacucho and Puno, focal regions of the conflict, and major document repositories in Lima. Throughout six months of ethnographic and archival work, I was able to document quantitatively and qualitatively the merged impact of this socioenvironmental catastrophe.

Quantitatively, I collected statistical information about the harvest failures of the 1983–1986 period and their impact on the domestic, local, regional, and national economies. Qualitatively, I compiled testimonies—archivally and ethnographically—about the experience of rural villagers and the collapse of their agrarian livelihoods amid violence, drought, and floods. 

Since receiving a Harry Frank Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar grant, I have been able to publish some partial results of this project in the form of research articles in both peer-review journals and public outlets. In particular, I coordinated the publication of a special issue of Global Environment on “The Environmental and Ecological Impact of Guerrilla and Irregular Warfare.” In that issue, I published the introduction to the dossier, titled “Irregular Conflicts, Disrupted Ecologies: The Environmental Impacts of Unconventional Warfare in the Global South,” as well as an article titled “The Enduring Climate of Conflict: Drought, Impoverishment, and the Long Aftermath of Civil War in Peru.”

Additionally, in collaboration with Adrián Lerner, I co-organized a dossier for Historia Ambiental Latinoamericana on “Modelando Regiones Naturales: Capitalismno, Medio Ambiente y la Geografîa del Perú Pos-Colonial,” co-authoring an introduction with the same title. 

Bibliography

1. Javier Puente. The Rural State: Making Comunidades, Campesinos, and Conflict in Peru’s Central Sierra. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022.

A New Kind of War: A History of the 1946–1949 Greek Civil War

Spyridon Tsoutsoumpis, Centre for Advanced Studies Sophia

Research Grant, 2017

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The grant provided by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation allowed me to study one of the lesser-known conflicts that took place in 20th-century Europe—the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). Existing studies have focused on the international dimension of the civil war, viewing it as a direct by-product of rivalry between the Soviet and Western camps. This research has therefore omitted to address several pertinent questions: How did ordinary civilians and combatants experience this conflict? What led soldiers from both sides of the divide to fight and endure the tribulations of warfare, deprivations, and fear? What was the impact of the civil war in local and national social and financial networks? What were the social and political legacies of the civil war? I ventured to challenge perceptions and address the gaps in the existing scholarship by examining the ground dynamics of the civil war.

The grant enabled me to conduct research in numerous archives and libraries in Greece, Albania, Bulgaria, North Macedonia, and Britain. This extensive research served both to affirm my original hypothesis but also to open new avenues for enquiry. Archival evidence as well as published and unpublished testimonies indicated that the state and its allies lacked both the means and the willingness to pursue a civil conflict with the left. Moreover, the evidence showed that despite its pledge to demobilize, the left kept its clandestine structures intact and remained the de facto force in much of the countryside.

Ultimately the outbreak of the civil war was not the by-product of a grand conspiracy or a vindictive sect of ultraconservatives but rather the outcome of profound state weakness, the feebleness and inability to provide leadership of political elites on both sides of the divide, and an exceptionally polarized political culture.

The void in power and the inability of the state to address the problems of poverty, unemployment, and rampart criminality, as well as the obsessive fear of communism among the middle strata of the peasantry and the petit bourgeoisie led to the organization of multiple clandestine organizations that waged a low-key form of warfare against the left, which responded with its own brand of brutal counterviolence. Ultimately the outbreak of the civil war was not the by-product of a grand conspiracy or a vindictive sect of ultraconservatives but rather the outcome of profound state weakness, the feebleness and inability to provide leadership of political elites on both sides of the divide, and an exceptionally polarized political culture. 

The same weakness characterized the conduct of the civil war. This conflict has been conceptualized as a conventional conflict waged between two clearly demarcated camps. My research shows that the weakness of the state allowed the right-wing militias to persevere and morph into large, powerful organizations that exercised their own form of rough justice in the countryside. Many of these groups acted in a mafia-like capacity, extorting and robbing civilians of all political persuasions and using their force to pursue private and political vendettas. The presence of the militias accelerated the pace of conflict and led to unprecedented levels of violence as the civil war fragmented into a myriad of local conflicts waged by private militias, gangs, and insurgent bands who fought over control of rents and  resources and used their arms to settle local scores.

The situation changed after the advent of the Marshall Plan. US aid allowed the state to reorganize its forces and helped the government to re-equip and retrain the army that had suffered considerable setbacks at the hands of the insurgents. However, government victory was not the simple product of brutish violence and overwhelming military superiority. US funds also allowed the government and the army to engage in extensive state-building and to set the foundations of the welfare state. The military engaged in widespread “hearts and minds” operations by providing medical aid and food and by rebuilding the shattered infrastructure across the countryside. These operations had a positive impact on the lives and prospects of civilians and soldiers alike. Ultimately, the government won because it was able to build and provide a plausible alternative to the utopian program of the left. This helped both to provide legitimacy for the badly battered administration and gradually delegitimize the political program of the insurgents.

What difference do these findings make to our understanding of the history of the Greek Civil War and more broadly of civil conflicts in 20th-century Europe? First, they demonstrate the importance of local and national cleavages and point to the need for more rigorous microresearch into the foundations of warfare. Secondly, they demonstrate the salience and role of nonstate actors in the conduct of civil wars. Finally, they exhibit the enduring role of hearts-and-minds operations and the importance of adopting humane and flexible policies rather than overwhelming force when faced with radical insurgencies. 

In Search of Popular Sovereignty: British Rule and the Great Revolt (1936–39) in Palestine

Charles Anderson, Western Washington University

Research Grant, 2018

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My first book project is a history of the popular rebellion by the Palestinians in the 1930s against British rule and the Zionist settler project it fostered. The “Great Revolt” (1936–39), as Palestinians call it, was an independence struggle that rejected Jewish state-building and aimed to preserve Palestine for its Indigenous Arab majority. The revolt was at the time the greatest mass mobilization in Palestinian national history; it was also the most protracted anticolonial rebellion anywhere in the Arab world during the interwar period.

My book examines the social origins, organization, and history of this complex event, the defeat of which paved the way for Israel’s creation and the shattering of Palestinian society in 1948, and for the regional turmoil that has ensued since.

One of the primary aims of my research is to investigate the roles of peasants, workers, youth, and their allies in making the revolt in a way that deepens our understanding of their leadership capacities. Although Arab society in Palestine is usually understood as rigidly hierarchical, dominated by patriarchal families that had an interlocking grasp on landowning, trade, and government office, British rule and the growth of Jewish colonization under its wings brought about profound social, political, and economic changes.

The “youth trend” became the largest, most organized constituency within Palestinian politics, and using its hands-on methods, cycled through various tactics in the early 1930s from social uplift to street protest, to forms of direct action that sought to emulate and override state functions.

The resulting destabilization of Arab society, coupled with the failure of Palestinian elite diplomacy to make progress toward national goals and independence, produced radicalization. This process fostered a shorter Palestinian rebellion in 1929, followed by a hothouse period of increasing stridency and self-organization (1929–36), and finally issuing in militant anticolonial revolution (1936–39). Fearing for their own dominance and distrusting mass mobilization, Palestinian elites tried to suppress, control, or harness the growth of restive currents, but they were largely borne along by the tide.

The first part of my book examines generational and political-economic transformations in Arab society and the emergence of newly assertive constituencies among youth and the peasantry. Beginning in the late 1920s young men began to aggregate into youth associations and scout groups which promoted patriotic ideals and encouraged attention to everyday problems of Palestinian communities (e.g., land loss, labor market competition, impoverishment).

The “youth trend” became the largest, most organized constituency within Palestinian politics, and using its hands-on methods, cycled through various tactics in the early 1930s from social uplift to street protest, to forms of direct action that sought to emulate and override state functions. Paradoxically, its efforts typically failed, but they generated Arab approbation and encouraged militant action. Some of the key problems youth sought to remedy stemmed from the deteriorating condition of the Arab countryside, where British policies exacerbated peasant indebtedness and produced a burgeoning, alienated “landless class.”

British bias towards the Zionist enterprise, manifested in a variety of domains from tax policies to land tenure, was predicated on a colonial version of trickle-down economics that saw Jewish settlers as the economic core of the colony whose rising prosperity would lift all boats. Instead, growing Arab destitution led to dispossession and displacement to urban shantytowns, where the first secret revolutionary organization took hold among former peasants. 

The Great Revolt has primarily been seen in its paramilitary dimension as an armed insurrection, but as detailed in the second section of my book, the key to its power lay in its organizational ingenuity. In each phase the uprising yielded dynamic new institutions—from popular committees to revolutionary courts to an intelligence apparatus—that proved essential to mounting and sustaining the rebellion while bolstering the newfound authority of its supporters.

Building on prerevolt impulses towards tactics that emulated the popular sovereignty desired by Palestinians, these institutions rallied public participation and forged a government-in-the-making aimed at overthrowing and replacing the British regime. By providing the revolt with a sound organizational basis that integrated much of the population into rebel frameworks, the insurgents were able to establish an alternative regime to the colonial state, to endure through great hardship, and for a brief period, to conquer much of the country.

During its long campaign against the rebellion, the British counterinsurgency escalated from the use of collective punishments (e.g., fines, home demolitions, curfews) to a liberal version of total war that targeted Palestinian society as a whole. British suppression of the revolt was harsher than has been understood, relying on mass incarceration, the systematic use of human shields (i.e., hostages employed on the battlefield), the barring of free movement, and ultimately, the reconquest and occupation of most of the country.

My book reveals that the scope of official violence was obfuscated by the military and has been hidden from researchers. With their society in ruins and their movement crushed, the Palestinian people were deemed unworthy in British eyes of any subsequent role in determining the future of Palestine.

Violence Reduction and Social Inclusion in Ecuador: Legalizing Street Gangs and Declining Rates of Homicide

David Brotherton, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Research Grant, 2018

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The year of research I conducted on this project was characterized by both internal crises within the three groups I have been studying for many years and massive sociopolitical upheavals in Ecuador. These crises had an impact on the amount of field research that could be achieved, while at the same time creating new research questions and areas of study on the topic of societal violence, and in particular the issue of homicide reduction.

In March, we restarted our field work in Quito in collaboration with our partners at the Catholic University (PUCE). We wanted to understand better how the relationship between this mainstream institution and a major national street organization (gang) had evolved as part of the ongoing policy of gang legalization.

[D]espite a freezing of relationships between the state and these street organizations, the prosocial gains made during the decade of gang legalization are still relevant.

We documented the various projects of this collaboration, including (i) the educational and professional development programs that were offered to the members, (ii) the establishment of a new program of trauma therapy being offered to individuals and groups, (iii) the economic ties that were evolving, and (iv) the deepening social and cultural ties between the institution and the organization.

In many ways, it is a test case of how non-state institutions can play remarkably effective roles in helping street gangs transition to a more prosocial identity and series of practices. This special relationship and its evolution were studied through ongoing participant and nonparticipant observations and both formal and informal interviews with members of both the institution and the group, providing one of the three cases demonstrating how gang legalization has worked across state and non-state institutional terrains. (The other cases are (i) the private university FLACSO in Quito, which had developed a close relationship with the group in the early stages; and (ii) the Ministry of the Interior, which maintained a close relationship with the Latin Kings for ten years.) 

In June, our research shifted to the street organization known as the Masters of the Street on the Pacific Coast. Thirty life history interviews were carried out with group members as well as many hours of field observations and interviews with ancillary members of the group. Four areas of the group’s history were explored: (i) an early period of activity during the first decade of the millennium when significant numbers were involved in intergroup violence and spent time incarcerated; (ii) a subsequent period, which coincided with gang legalization, when the group significantly reduced its engagement in violent acts; (iii) the transnational characteristics of the group with a particular emphasis on its ideology and cultural symbolism; and (iv) the significance of members’ migratory experiences as they moved from rural areas to the city and the consequences of those experiences for the group’s deescalation of violence.

This intense research period with the Masters provided important data to show another dimension of the remarkable impact of gang legalization and the sustained fall in homicide rates. 

The latter part of the research year focused on two areas: (i) the escalating prison crisis and the role the street organizations could play in reducing tensions between inmates, and (ii) the national uprising and how this affected the relationship between the street organization and the government.

Unfortunately, due to the deteriorating political conditions, we were unable to explore the prison relationship with the groups, although this remains an important area that we wish to develop in future endeavors.

The second area of study provided an extraordinary example of a government’s radical policy change from social inclusion to repression and exclusion. We gathered data on the various experiences of both the Latin Kings and the Masters as their members took part in the protests and strikes, and then their experiences as the groups were demonized and declared a public enemy to be targeted by security forces. 

In sum, the experience demonstrated the difficulties of doing sustained research during a period of heightened political instability as well as the vulnerability of these groups for government targeting as the political demands of the moment require.

Interestingly, despite a freezing of relationships between the state and these street organizations, the prosocial gains made during the decade of gang legalization are still relevant. To date, we have not seen any of the groups return to a path of violence. It is a remarkable finding given the falling level of government legitimacy in the country and the rejection of so many progressive ideals of the previous decade.  

Resisting Genocidal Violence 

Nicole Fox, California State University, Sacramento

Hollie Nyseth Brehm, California State University, Sacramento

Research Grant, 2018

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According to our sample, those who saved others during the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi were a diverse group of individuals in terms of socioeconomic status (ranging from wealthy to very poor), age (25–62 years old at the time they rescued), religious identity (Muslim, Seventh Day Adventist, Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal), and gender (men and women). Although this was part of our research design, it is worth noting that the communities in which they lived also varied significantly in terms of the level and onset of violence, as well as whether they were urban or rural. While we are still in the midst of data analysis, we have six important findings thus far.

The majority of the people with whom we spoke did not rescue alone. Rather, they rescued with the help of their partners, children, neighbors, or extended family, often in a concerted, sustained, and planned series of actions. Rescue involved hiding people in homes or helping people cross borders and checkpoints. It also included more transient encounters in which brief assistance—like food—was provided. Notably, these efforts were often undertaken by several people or even through large social networks.

Our findings indicate that rescue is not often undertaken by a single individual but rather by a network of individuals engaging in a form of collective action with the shared goal to save others.

This finding is important because existing research frames rescue as an individual act. However, our findings indicate that rescue is not often undertaken by a single individual but rather by a network of individuals engaging in a form of collective action with the shared goal to save others. In turn, viewing rescue as collective action rather than as a series of individualistic acts will surely result in important theoretical and practical insights, as a robust body of research has identified the factors associated with successful collective action in other contexts.

Many people rescued several times, and the majority of people with whom we spoke began their rescue efforts by saving someone they knew: a distant family member, someone from their religious network, a neighbor or employee. Indeed, it is difficult to dehumanize an individual someone knows personally, and identity-based ties (e.g., familial) often supersede conflict-based identities that may pit people against one another. As such, we find that social ties matter tremendously and that, for many, rescuing people they knew was a gateway for rescuing strangers. However, a third of the individuals in our sample only rescued people they did not know. In our future analyses, we will assess the factors associated with rescue of strangers, which will yield important implications for understanding rescue when social ties are not a prominent factor.

While the majority of people during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda did not choose to rescue, those who did made a significant difference that cannot be overemphasized. Our sample of 160 people represented almost two thousand cases where individuals were saved from death. Those who were rescued grew up to be mothers, fathers, doctors, teachers, community organizers, soccer players, friends, and leaders in their community and abroad. The true impact of saving these lives will never be known and cannot be quantified.

We found that religious beliefs were often a precursor to individuals’ decisions to rescue when their lives were at risk. Specifically, the belief that they were doing right by God assured rescuers that if they died while saving others, they would be rewarded in the afterlife, thus lowering their death anxiety in a way that allowed them to take high risks to save others. This finding aligns with and extends previous research, and we similarly found that religious social networks shaped rescue efforts, including where these efforts took place (e.g., religious spaces or homes of religious individuals), how they unfolded, and who they impacted. However, it was rescuers’ religious practices—such as abstaining from drinking or refusing to lie—that served as social buffers from intense recruitment to genocidal violence and from being discovered once they were hiding people. The documentation of these religious buffers is new, and we look forward to further analyzing these buffers going forward.

Women’s role in rescue is often underemphasized. However, many women were involved in rescue efforts, and we seek to amplify their stories. We also find that women in our sample often used the constraints of their gender to save others, meaning that they were rescued in gendered ways. For example, mothers saved children, pretending they were their own, or breast-fed other babies who were not their own. They also found their role as mothers/daughters as motivating to save others. This sheds light on how women used their roles as caregivers, mothers, and daughters to rescue even when their choices were constrained by patriarchal societal norms and mass violence.