Troubled Peace: Explaining Political Violence in Post-Conflict SettingsFrancesca Grandi, Political Science, Yale UniversityDissertation Fellowship, 2013 My research is about violence after war. Contrary to received wisdom, violent societies are not a natural outcome of war. Violence is not ubiquitous in post-war countries. It does not emerge everywhere all the time; its distribution varies significantly across time and space. Explaining where violence occurs allows us to understand why it does–which is the objective of my dissertation, a history-grounded investigation in the nature and impact of post-conflict violence and the dynamics of its variation. My project explains why the winners of a war kill their former enemies after the hostilities have officially ended. They do so to convert their military advantage into political dominance. The winners cleanse the territories under their control as a way to consolidate their military victory and sanction their political power. Post-conflict targeted assassinations are therefore a strategy to establish political hegemony and, as such, they occur in the areas where the winners’ influence concentrates. In other words, my explanation centers on the forward-looking, strategic dimension of postwar violence, which most existing accounts overlook by privileging past dynamics, i.e., revenge, justice demands, or the conflict’s “root-causes.” The end of a war, no matter how decisive its military settlement, does not automatically lead to a definitive political solution. Most often, a transitional period begins, during which the question of who governs and how to distribute power ought to be solved. In other words, the winners have to transform their military advantage into a political victory. This process happens during the time lag between the official end of the hostilities and the return of “normal” politics. It is during this time that the foundations of a new political system are laid and so are the bases for durable peace or renewed conflict. Violence plays a crucial role in this transition from civil war to peaceful democratic politics. It intertwines with the emerging electoral competition. It becomes an integral part of the political contestation process and a strategy to influence the post-war allocation of power. The fast-changing political system at war’s end creates a sense of urgency, which is the underlying condition for targeted extra-judicial assassinations of former enemies. But violence emerges only under specific conditions. The war experience and its military resolution forge the winning actors’ preferences, particularly in regards to how political power should be distributed and attained. The wartime legacies combine with forward-looking expectations to create a series of mismatches, which give the winners incentives to kill, and organization, which gives them the capacity to do so. The mismatches create a more complicated net of incentives than the dichotomies of winner-loser or military vs. political actors would predict. Instead, the causes of post-war targeted killings during transitions rest in the relative strength of the parties within the winning coalition and the relative position of party affiliates within these parties. My empirical strategy focuses on a structured, sub-national comparison of post-WWII Italy. I generalize these findings to contemporary settings, by developing a topology of post-conflict violence, by mapping cases of post-conflict violence across the world since 1945, and by testing my theoretical findings in a contemporary case study–post-Qadhafi Libya. My research bridges academia and practice by providing a basis for more suited data collecting strategies and more tailored intervention policies in post-conflict settings, with the ultimate goal of increasing international peacebuilding and conflict prevention capacity.
A Sea of Blood and Tears: Ethnicity, Identity and Survival in Nazi-Occupied Volhynia, Ukraine 1941-44Jared McBride, University of California, Los Angeles, Dissertation Fellowship, 2013 My dissertation, “A Sea of Blood and Tears”: Ethnic Diversity and Mass Violence in Nazi-Occupied Volhynia, Ukraine 1941-1944, examines the region of Volhynia in western Ukraine under Nazi occupation. Volhynia was one of the most violent regions during World War II in all of Eastern Europe, as it was home to Soviet partisan warfare, a Ukrainian nationalist uprising, brutal Nazi occupation policies, the genocide of Jews, and widespread inter-ethnic violence. What once was a mosaic of ethno-religious communities living in relative stability until the 20th century had dissolved into civil war by 1941. By 1944, roughly one quarter of its population was dead and many others displaced. My project explains how individuals who once peacefully co-existed as neighbors became involved in political violence during the Nazi occupation. In short, it asks how an average Volhynian who has never harmed anyone in his or her life prior to the war becomes an ethnic cleanser or genocidaire. Drawing on ten years of research in five countries, the study employs a “bottom-up” view of this time period by using newly available archival sources, including previously classified KGB documents, to recreate the biographies of various Volhynian participants and dissect the membership of local political groups involved in violence. In researching Ukrainian or Polish nationalist formations, Soviet partisan groups, collaborators in the Nazi auxiliary police, or peasants involved in ethnic cleansing, I consider participants’ social and political background as well as their actions during the occupation, in order to uncover their motivations for participation in violence. Additionally, the project questions the role of ideologies, whether ethno-nationalism or Soviet communism, in influencing the actions of average Volhynians. The findings of this research challenge static conceptualizations of political and social groups during times of war and unrest, as well as the analytical triad of perpetrators, victims, and bystanders found in research on ethnic violence. Historically, these studies have tended to essentialize identities and conceive of group formation as pre-determined. In contrast, I show that although ideologies such as nationalism and communism influenced the decision-making processes of some Volhynians, many more became involved in violence as a result of social upheaval, material needs, forms of coercion, and pre-war social networks. Moreover, as a result of my biographical tracing, I demonstrate how Volhynians often shifted their identities and group associations, as well as their stances toward violence, throughout the occupation. These findings move the onus from purely cultural (tribal or ethnic hatreds) or ideological (people are programmed to kill) motivations for violence to a more nuanced understanding that takes social interaction into account and understands subjects as dynamic individuals. As such, A Sea of Blood and Tears can inform future studies of ethnic and political violence in borderland regions beyond Ukraine as well as contribute to discussions in genocide studies and social scientific research on political violence.
The Strategic Use of Emotion in ConflictRoger Petersen, Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyResearch Grant, 2006 Conflicts involve powerful experiences. The residue of these experiences is captured by the concept and language of emotion. Indiscriminate killing creates fear; targeted violence produces anger and a desire for vengeance; political status reversals spawn resentment; cultural prejudices sustain ethnic contempt. These emotions can become resources for political entrepreneurs. A broad range of Western interventions are based on a view of human nature as narrowly rational. Correspondingly, intervention policy generally aims to alter material incentives (“sticks and carrots”) to influence behavior. In response, poorer and weaker actors who wish to block or change this Western-implemented “game” use emotions as resources. This book examines the strategic use of emotion in the conflicts and interventions occurring in the Western Balkans over a twenty-year period. The project concentrates on the conflicts among Albanian and Slavic populations (Kosovo, Montenegro, Macedonia, South Serbia), along with some comparisons to Bosnia. In response, poorer and weaker actors who wish to block or change this Western-implemented "game" use emotions as resources. BibliographyPetersen, Roger. Western Intervention in the Balkans: The Strategic Use of Emotion in Conflict. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Longitudinal and Contextual Analyses of Violent Crime in the European UnionPatricia L. McCall, Sociology, North Carolina State UniversityResearch Grant, 2009, 2010 The purpose of this research is to explore the extent to which retrenchment in welfare support is related to homicide trends across European countries between 1994 and 2010. Using a longitudinal decomposition design that allows for stronger causal inferences compared to typical cross-sectional designs, we examine these potential linkages between social support spending and homicide with data collected from a heterogeneous sample of European nations, including twenty Western nations and nine less frequently analyzed East-Central nations, during recent years in which European nations generally witnessed substantial changes in homicide rates as well as both economic prosperity and fiscal crisis. Results suggest that even incremental, short-term changes in welfare support spending are associated with short-term reductions in homicide specifically, impacting homicide rates within two to three years for this sample of European nations. Results suggest that even incremental, short-term changes in welfare support spending are associated with short-term reductions in homicide.
Beijing-Seoul Families and Neighborhoods StudyClifton R. Emery, School of Social Welfare, Yonsei UniversityResearch Grant, 2011, 2012 What do neighbors, friends, and extended family members do in response to domestic violence and child abuse, and does it make a difference? Are there cultural differences in this informal social control of family violence, and do such differences explain cultural differences in the prevalence and severity of domestic violence and child maltreatment? These are the principal questions the Families and Neighborhoods Study (FNS) attempts to answer, using newly developed measures of informal social control on random probability samples of cities. The FNS also tests propositions developed from Emery’s (2011) theoretical typology of domestic violence. The principal investigator (PI) received funding from HFG in 2011 and 2012 to carry out the FNS survey in Beijing, China, and Seoul, South Korea. In 2011 the study team interviewed 506 adults in a representative random probability sample of 506 families in Beijing. In 2012 the study team followed up with 541 interviews of adults in a representative random probability sample of families in Seoul. The findings from both cities suggest that whether your neighbors do anything, and especially what they do, may matter. The findings also suggest that the neighborhood collective efficacy measure may not be the best way to capture informal social control of family violence, as the data do not show the expected relationships between collective efficacy and family violence, but do show relationships between the PI’s informal social control measures and family violence. Based on the promising findings from the HFG-funded study, the FNS has now expanded to include data from representative samples from Beijing, Seoul, Hanoi, Ulaan Baatar, Kathmandu (collected and currently under analysis or review), Philadelphia (collection in progress) and Madrid (planned for summer 2014). In one of the twists of fate that so frequently baffle academics, the findings from the first two cities (Seoul and Beijing) remain in the peer review process while findings from later waves of data collection have already been published. This fact frustratingly prevents a detailed discussion of the Beijing-Seoul findings here. It is hoped that this omission can be corrected soon as the Seoul findings are presently under revision for the Journal of Interpersonal Violence. The findings from both cities suggest that whether your neighbors do anything, and especially what they do, may matter. In Hanoi, the FNS found that acts of informal social control by neighbors that try to protect the child are associated with less very severe abuse of the child (Emery, Trung & Wu, 2013). The same study found that when very severe abuse did occur, abuse-related externalizing behavior problems were lower when parents reported protective informal social control by neighbors (ibid). The goals of current data collection include making possible East-West comparisons of informal social control and the assessment of causal relationships via experimental techniques on population-based surveys. The FNS has also found important relationships between variables suggested by Emery’s (2011) typology and intimate partner violence in Kathmandu and Ulaan Baatar. BibliographyEmery, C.R., Trung, H. & Wu, S. Neighborhood Informal Social Control of Child Maltreatment: A Comparison of Protective and Punitive Approaches. Child Abuse & Neglect, June, 2013. DOI: 10.1016/j.chiabu.2013.05.002.Emery, C.R. Disorder or Deviant Order? Re-Theorizing Domestic Violence in Terms of Order, Power and Legitimacy. A Typology. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 16(6): 525-540, November-December, 2011.
Seeing Like a Peacebuilder: An Ethnography of International InterventionSéverine Autesserre, Political Science, Barnard CollegeResearch Grant, 2010, 2011 Why do international peace interventions so often fail to reach their full potential? To answer this question, I conducted several years of research in conflict zones around the world, including in Burundi, Congo, Israel and the Palestinian Territories, South Sudan, and Timor-Leste. My main finding is that everyday elements such as the expatriates’ social habits, standard security procedures, and habitual approaches to collecting information on violence strongly impact the effectiveness of intervention efforts. A number of interveners challenge the dominant modes of thinking and acting. The publications based on this research demonstrate that individuals from all parts of the world and all walks of life, who would have little in common outside of the peacebuilding arena, share a number of practices, habits, and narratives when they serve as interveners in conflict zones. These shared modes of operation enable foreign peacebuilders to function in the field, but they often have unintended consequences that decrease the effectiveness of international efforts. The way that interveners construct knowledge of their areas of deployment prevents them from fully grasping the contexts in which they work. Consequently, they tend to rely on overly simplistic narratives that obscure the complex causes of and potential solutions to violence. The foreign peacebuilders’ everyday practices also create and perpetuate firm boundaries and a wide power disparity between themselves and local people. These dynamics create numerous obstacles to the peace efforts and frequently prompt local counterparts to evade, resist, or reject international initiatives. A number of interveners challenge the dominant modes of thinking and acting. Their peacebuilding efforts are usually more effective than those of their peers who follow the prevailing practices. However, these individuals often end up either forced to conform or so frustrated that they change careers and leave the peacebuilding field. Despite their marginalization, these dissenters are tremendously important: By looking at their alternative modes of operation, we can begin to specify the conditions under which peace interventions can be more effective. BibliographyPeaceland: Conflict Resolution and the Everyday Politics of International Intervention (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Publisher's webpage for the book"Dangerous Tales: Dominant Narratives on the Congo and their Unintended Consequences," African Affairs 111 (443), pp. 202-222, Spring 2012.
Diaspora and Conflict: The Liberians of Staten IslandJonny Steinberg, Institute for Security Studies, PretoriaResearch Grant, 2008, 2009 This is a study of a community of Liberian refugees and economic migrants in a housing project in the New York City borough of Staten Island. The purpose was to examine the ways in which a diaspora takes conflict from home with it, and, in particular, the ways in which diasporas, frozen in the moment of their flight and caught up in old resentments, might transmit conflict back to the home country. The research results were published in two forms. The first was a book titled Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City. It documented and analyzed a conflict that raged in Staten Island’s Liberian community from 2003 to 2008. I argued that the community had erected a stage on which it had played out, in miniature, so to speak, its deep fears about the nature of the postwar settlement taking shape back home. The very distance from home is what gave the theater its credibility; in the mutual anonymity of exile, people invented horrendous histories for their neighbors, such that it appeared that the most horrendous of the characters who had prosecuted the war back home were living on Staten Island. The conflict was thus incubated in exile. It was not, though, to the best of my knowledge, transmitted back home inasmuch as I saw no evidence of Staten Islanders funding conflict in Liberia. The conflict was thus incubated in exile. The second research product was an article published in the journal African Affairs; it documented and interpreted the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) work among the Liberian diaspora in the United States. The TRC undertook this work on the grounds that the diaspora was intimately involved in Liberia’s civil war and that no process of reconciliation would be complete without its involvement. I argued that the TRC’s diaspora project failed, in large part because the body’s work was seen as a substitute for an endeavor to bring to justice those who had prosecuted the war. BibliographyJonny Steinberg, Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York, London and Johannesburg, 2011. Jonny Steinberg, "A Truth Commission Goes Abroad: Liberian Transitional Justice in New York," African Affairs, 110 (2011), pp. 35-53
The Farm KillingsJonny Steinberg , Political Science, Centre for the Study of Violence and ReconciliationResearch Grant, 2000 Shortly after South Africa’s first democratic elections were held in 1994, White agricultural associations raised the cry that their members were being killed in increasing numbers by predatory criminals. A moral panic followed. The killings were dubbed “farm murders” and were said to be orchestrated by shadowy forces, possibly connected to the new government, and aimed at driving White people off the land. I spent eighteen months conducting intensive ethnographic work in several farming districts around the country. My research findings were presented in two forms. The first was a research monograph (published by the Institute for Security Studies) as well as a string of newspaper and magazine articles. The idea that there was an epidemic of “farm murders,” I argued, was mostly manufactured by the creation of the category “farm murder” as a specific recordable crime. When the murder of farmers is placed back in its proper context and compared to other rural murders, it becomes apparent that middle-class rural people, in general, and not just White farmers, became highly vulnerable to predatory crime during the transition to democracy. The idea that White farmers were targeted in particular had no empirical basis. When the murder of farmers is placed back in its proper context and compared to other rural murders, it becomes apparent that middle class rural people in general, and not just White farmers, became highly vulnerable to predatory crime during the transition to democracy. The second research product was a book titled Midlands, which won South Africa’s premier nonfiction award, the Sunday Times‘s Alan Paton Prize. It documented a single killing of a White farmer and analyzed the motives of the killers. I argued that a series of unwritten rules governing the relationship between the landed and their tenants was being renegotiated by a combination of cunning, wits, and violence, and that the murder was an extreme and tragic moment in this process of renegotiation. BibliographyJonny Steinberg, Midlands, Johannesburg, 2002.Martin Schönteich and Jonny Steinberg, Attacks on Farms and Smallholdings: An Evaluation of the Rural Protection Plan, Pretoria: Institute for Security Studies, 2000.Categories: Criminology, Sub-Saharan Africa
War and Economic Development in Vietnam and Sierra LeoneEdward Miguel, Economics, University of California, BerkeleyResearch Grant, 2006 The negative consequences of war on society are severe. Armed conflict displaces populations, destroys capital and infrastructure, damages the social fabric of communities, endangers civil liberties, and can create health and famine crises. There is currently a large literature on the conditions that lead to the outbreak of armed violence, but the long-term economic impacts of war remain relatively understudied empirically. The goal of this research project was to investigate both the short- and long-run legacies of armed conflict resulting from the U.S. bombing of Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s and from the 1991–1992 civil war in Sierra Leone. One publication that resulted from this project is “The Long Run Impact of Bombing Vietnam” (co-author Gerard Roland), forthcoming in the Journal of Development Economics. Many poverty trap models of economic growth predict that sufficiently severe war damage to the capital stock could lead to a “conflict trap” that condemns an economy to long-term underdevelopment. Despite this prediction, results from our research suggest that this is not necessarily always the case. We find no long-run impacts of U.S. bombing on local Vietnamese poverty rates, consumption levels, or population density over twenty-five years after the end of wartime bombing. Vietnam was able to recover largely due to the central government’s heavy postwar investment in both physical and human capital and reallocation of resources toward the most heavily bombed regions. We find no long-run impacts of U.S. bombing on local Vietnamese poverty rates, consumption levels, or population density over twenty-five years after the end of wartime bombing. A second publication, “War and Local Collective Action in Sierra Leone” (co-author John Bellows), in the Journal of Public Economics in 2009, carries out statistical analysis in Sierra Leone and similarly shows that despite war’s horrific humanitarian costs, the legacies of civil conflict are not always catastrophic. We find that individual exposure to the brutal civil war in Sierra Leone has lead to increased political participation, community activism, and local public good provision. This political mobilization has been coupled with, and may partially explain, the economic expansion Sierra Leone has experienced in early postwar years. These results run counter to the claims that civil war’s legacies are always major long-run impediments to African economic and political development. Moreover, since Sub-Saharan Africa is the most conflict-prone region today, these results offer some hope that even the poorest and most violent African nations can avoid the persistent negative economic and social consequences that civil conflict can potentially lead to. However, caution must be called for in drawing broad lessons from this research regarding war’s impacts on economic growth in general. Unlike many other poor countries, postwar Vietnam benefited from relatively strong and centralized political institutions with the power to mobilize human and material resources in the reconstruction effort. Sierra Leone may be a special case of civil conflict as well; the war there was not fought along ethnic or religious lines. Though our findings may help make sense of the rapid economic growth and political consolidation that some countries have experienced following protracted armed conflict, more empirical evidence is needed before general claims about the effects of war on long-run economic performance can be made with confidence. The research that resulted from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation grant also provided key material for two books that I have written in recent years, Economic Gangsters (Princeton University Press, 2008, co-author Raymond Fisman) and Africa’s Turn? (MIT Press, 2009). Both books emphasize the important role that violence and war have played in shaping contemporary economic and political development patterns around the world. I also recently wrote a literature survey article entitled “Civil War” (co-author Chris Blattman), for the Journal of Economic Literature in 2010.
An Anatomy of Sectarian Violence: Jews and Christians in Premodern PolandMagdalena Teter, History, Wesleyan UniversityResearch Grant, 2007 Based on extensive research in nearly twenty archives in Poland and Rome, this project combines political, legal, and cultural historical approaches and tells a story of the role the sacred and sacrilege played in the contest for power between church and state. Sacrilege, treated increasingly as crime not as sin, became a token of broader power struggles and contested social and economic relations, as it moved the sacred to the public arena of courts. Far more than the Church’s efforts to educate the laity, the lay courts’ classification of Catholic spaces as the only “sacred spaces” and their adjudication of crimes of “sacrilege” were crucial for the (re-)Catholicization of Poland, and the shaping of the country’s religious identity. In Poland, the contest over the sacredness of the Eucharist, a major Catholic dogma challenged by the Reformation, became manifest in lay courts’ adjudication of crimes against property and religious symbols, especially those linked to the Eucharistic rituals. The mishandling of sacred symbols and objects transformed sins into crimes and led to harsh sentences, including burning at the stake. In places without political triggers, accusations of religious crimes did not result in prosecution, much less in religious violence against Jews. The project crucially casts a new light on the most infamous case of sacrilege, the accusations against Jews for stealing and desecrating the host, situating it within a broader context of the politics of crime—most specifically that of sacrilege, illuminating its post-Reformation character. They were triggered in places with specific political needs, religious, economic, or related to power struggles between local authorities and royal power. In places without political triggers, accusations of religious crimes did not result in prosecution, much less in religious violence against Jews. This project establishes that religion and, sometimes, religious violence were used in establishing religious boundaries and doctrines not only by religious institutions but also by secular courts. In post-Reformation Poland, it was the secular courts that became enforcers of Catholic doctrines, an ironic twist on the nobility’s efforts to remove religious cases from ecclesiastical courts to prevent religious persecution in Poland. Even though the context is largely Christian power struggle, Jews were central but not exclusively singled out. Courts and their judges, consciously or subconsciously, attached sacredness to Catholicism; public criminal executions, coupled with the word of mouth, left a permanent mark on religious boundaries in a country with one of the most diverse populations in Europe. BibliographyTeter, Magda. Sinners on Trial: Jews and Sacrilege after the Reformation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011.
