Desistance from Right-Wing ExtremismPete G. Simi, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of NebraskaResearch Grant, 2012 The research grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation provided the funds to conduct intensive life history interviews with an initial sample of thirty-five former North America–based far-right extremists. Interviews for this project were completed between 2012 and 2014, although additional subjects have since been interviewed and the sample is now 102 former far-right extremists. The HFG project focused on examining the disengagement process from far-right extremism, although the design of the life history protocol also meant that unique data regarding childhood and adolescent experiences, the entry process into extremism, and different facets of the person’s involvement were also collected. While far-right extremism has a long history in the United States and across the globe, the recent resurgence of far-right movements has spurred renewed interest in the topic. The attention directed toward the “alt-right,” the electoral success of populist candidates, and a surge of far-right violence underscore the need to understand the factors that help explain involvement as well as the factors that lead people to leave these movements and what can be done to help facilitate disengagement. The results from the life history interviews shed light on several of these issues and are now being used in partnership with Life After Hate to provide intervention services to assist individuals in the disengagement process. First, the interview findings helped generate a multidimensional risk factor model for how individuals become involved in far-right extremism (Simi, Sporer, and Bubolz 2016). In short, we found that individuals reported experiencing a number of untreated trauma during childhood, such as physical and sexual abuse, parental abandonment, and family substance abuse. In line with decades of research, individuals also reported experiencing heightened levels of negative emotions such as depression and anger as a consequence of the trauma. In turn, individuals engaged in various forms of misconduct as part of a downward spiral. As such, involvement in extremism provided a mechanism for individuals to address these problems by offering generic solutions such as a surrogate family, protection, and shelter. Our findings suggest that hate may have addictive qualities and, in some cases, result in potentially permanent consequences that make leaving more complicated than previously thought. The interview data also produced important findings about the disengagement process suggesting the following: a lack of organizational trust and dissatisfaction with leadership (Windisch, Ligon, and Simi 2017); the importance of anger in the disengagement process (Simi, Windisch, Harris, and Ligon 2018), and the development of positive relationships with individuals from different racial and religious backgrounds (Bubolz and Simi 2015). We also found violence was an important factor in terms of promoting disengagement. In some cases, individuals involved in high levels of violence reported experiencing “burnout,” while other individuals reported experiencing moral apprehension from either direct involvement or vicarious involvement (e.g., watching the television coverage of the casualties from the Oklahoma City bombing). To examine the long-term consequences of extremism, we discussed the overlap between identity residual and addiction processes in a recent article in the American Sociological Review (Simi, Blee, DeMichele, and Windisch 2017). Our findings suggest that hate may have addictive qualities and, in some cases, result in potentially permanent consequences that make leaving more complicated than previously thought. BibliographySimi, Pete, Kathy Blee, Matthew DeMichele, and Steven Windisch. 2017. “Addicted to Hate?: Identity Residual among Former White Supremacists.” American Sociological Review 82, 6: 1167-87.Simi, Pete, Karyn Sporer and Bryan Bubolz. 2016. “Narratives of Childhood Adversities and Adolescent Misconduct as Precursors to Violent Extremism: A Life-Course Criminological Approach.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 53, 4: 536-63.
An Unexpected Peace: Understanding Resilient Order and Violence in Multi-Gang EnvironmentsViridiana Rios, Department of Political Science, Purdue UniversityMario Arriagada, Open Society Foundations, New YorkResearch Grant, 2014, 2015 Rival criminal organizations sometimes coexist peacefully in the same territory. Mexican drug cartels, known worldwide for their violent battles for turf (Molzahn et al. 2012), are not the exception. Until the nineties, criminal organizations would peacefully share border entries to the U.S. according to certain rules of territorial pricing (Blancornelas 2004, Mauleon 2010). In more recent years, while there is evidence that gangs have violently fought for turf in 348 Mexican municipalities, we also know that they peacefully coexisted in 99 others (Coscia and Rios 2012). We studied why rival criminal organizations sometimes coexist peacefully and sometimes not. We also found evidence that peace is more common where marijuana is produced and not eradicated by the government or where the federal government has the same party identification as local governments. For this study, we brought together social science and journalism to create a natural, experimental setting to study why criminals restrain their violent confrontations in some places and not in others. First, we identified a random sample of places where multiple criminal gangs were operating simultaneously and where inter-gang violence remained contained. Second, we gathered an extensive dataset of the main economic, social, and geographical characteristics of non-violent cases and matched it with a balanced control sample of violent cases. Finally, we traveled to every municipality in our sample to conduct investigative journalism and semi-structured interviews. Our results show that Mexican criminal organizations coexist peacefully when they are located farther away from the U.S. border and outside the main routes of illegal trafficking. In Yucatán, for example, we found that violence had migrated from one municipality to another exactly at the time that a new highway was constructed. We also found evidence that peace is more common where marijuana is produced and not eradicated by the government or where the federal government has the same party identification as local governments. We interpret this as evidence that enforcement operations in economically (or politically) valuable territories for criminal operations are a trigger for violence. Other international cases of peace among criminal organizations follow similar patterns. BibliographyDell, M. (2015). Trafficking networks and the Mexican drug war. The American Economic Review, 105(6), 1738-1779.Calderón, G., Robles, G., Díaz-Cayeros, A., & Magaloni, B. (2015). The beheading of criminal organizations and the dynamics of violence in Mexico. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59(8), 1455-1485.Holland, B. E., & Rios, V. (2017). Informally Governing Information: How Criminal Rivalry Leads to Violence against the Press in Mexico. Journal of Conflict Resolution , 61(5), 1095-1119.Lessing, B. (2015). Logics of violence in criminal war. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59(8), 1486-1516.Ríos, V. (2015). How government coordination controlled organized crime: The case of Mexico’s cocaine markets. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59(8), 1433-1454.Shirk, D., & Wallman, J. (2015). Understanding Mexico’s drug violence. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59(8), 1348-1376.
Aggression and Morality: Links in Early ChildhoodJudith G. Smetana, Clinical and Social Psychology, University of RochesterResearch Grant, 2015 Differences in aggressive behavior emerge in early childhood, become more stable with age, and can lead to significant psychological problems, including violence in adulthood. It is, therefore, imperative to understand the factors that contribute to the development of aggressive tendencies early in life. Although aggression involves intentional harm to others, surprisingly little research has examined whether deficits in children’s moral judgments of issues involving harm and unfairness toward others are implicated in children’s aggressive behavior. Our research investigated this issue, taking advantage of recent advances in how researchers define and measure moral judgments and aggression. Moral development research has shown the importance of distinguishing children’s judgments of moral transgressions, which entail negative consequences for others, from judgments of transgressions involving more arbitrary, agreed-on social-conventional norms (like those pertaining to manners). Additionally, aggression research has shown that it is not sufficient to consider only whether a child is aggressive but that we must also question why. Some children have difficulty controlling feelings of anger and frustration, leading to a reactive form of aggression that is impulsive, “hot-blooded,” and aimed at responding to perceived threats from others. Considering callous-unemotional tendencies may prove essential for understanding the role of moral judgments in the development and maintenance of young children's deliberate, calculated aggression. In contrast, other children exhibit callous-unemotional tendencies, which reflect a lack of empathy, remorse, or concern for others, and use aggression in a proactive, “cold-blooded” manner to obtain rewards and accomplish goals. We tested whether deficits in children’s ability to distinguish between moral and conventional norms was associated with increases in aggression over time and whether this link was stronger for children showing greater callous-unemotional tendencies. A socioeconomically and ethnically diverse sample of 135 4- to 7-year-olds, 128 of their parents, and 49 teachers participated in the study. Children were told stories about hypothetical, everyday moral and conventional transgressions using an iPad and were asked to make several types of judgments for each story. At the beginning of the study and then nine-months later, parents and teachers rated children’s aggressive behavior, and teachers rated children’s callous-unemotional tendencies. We found that, controlling for gender and age, children who had difficulty differentiating between moral and conventional norms were more aggressive at the beginning of the study and showed greater increases (relative to their peers) in aggression over time, but only if they also possessed callous-unemotional tendencies. The ability to make distinctively moral judgments did not predict aggression among children who were capable of empathy and concern for others. Our findings suggest that considering callous-unemotional tendencies may prove essential for understanding the role of moral judgments in the development and maintenance of young children’s deliberate, calculated aggression. Further research needs to be directed toward studying the emergence (and amelioration) of these tendencies in early childhood. This developmental period is particularly critical to target, as the opportunities for successful intervention are greater than in later childhood or adolescence, when destructive patterns are more established. BibliographyJambon, M., & Smetana, J. G. (under review). Callous-unemotional traits moderate the association between children's early moral understanding and aggression: A short-term longitudinal study.
When Comrades Go to War: Post-Liberation Movements, Elite Politics and the Internal Dynamics of Africa’s Great WarHarry Verhoeven, Politics and International Relations, University of OxfordPhilip Roessler, Government, College of William & MaryResearch Grant, 2013 Funding by the HFG enabled vital fieldwork in six African countries (Angola, Congo, Eritrea, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda), which helped detail the day-by-day, week-by-week chronicle of Africa’s Great War, a conflict that had its roots in the Rwandan Genocide of 1994 and erupted in two phases (1996 and 1998), claiming the lives of more than four million Africans. These findings were written up in a monograph, Why Comrades Go To War. Liberation Politics and the Outbreak of Africa’s Deadliest Conflict. We found in our research and argue in the book that Africa’s Great War was not a conflict between old enemies or distant strangers but rather between ideological fellow travelers and revolutionaries who had long waged the same struggle for a new, leftist Africa. Ironically, but not coincidentally, it was this very intimacy that would be the undoing of what initially seemed like a triumph (the ouster of Mobutu, arch-symbol of authoritarianism and decadence in Africa) but quickly turned into a fratricidal nightmare between leftist liberation movements from across the continent. The initial revolutionary euphoria of liberating Africa's third-biggest country rapidly gave way to distrust between the comrades, now turned ministers and generals. The seeds of Africa’s Great War were sown in the revolutionary struggle against Mobutu—the way the revolution came together, the way it was organized, and, paradoxically, the very way it succeeded. The overthrow of the ancien regime proved a Pyrrhic victory because the protagonists ignored the philosophy of Julius Nyerere, the godfather of Africa’s liberation movements: they put the gun before the unglamorous but essential task of building the domestic and regional political institutions and organizational structures necessary to consolidate peace after revolution. Thus, the initial revolutionary euphoria of liberating Africa’s third-biggest country rapidly gave way to distrust between the comrades, now turned ministers and generals. In the absence of robust institutions to settle disputes, divide the spoils of victory, and balance competing visions for the revolution, political disagreements and misperceptions became sources of great tension and later catastrophic physical violence. A mere 15 months after what should have been a “second independence,” the outcome was Africa’s Great War.
Political Economy of Memory: The Making, Unmaking and Remaking of the Nigeria-Biafra WarGodwin Onuoha, Democracy, Governance and Service Delivery (DGSD) Programme, Human Sciences Research Council, South AfricaResearch Grant, 2014 This research examines the memories of wars, conflicts, and violence in postcolonial Africa. Its point of departure is the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–1970). Referred to by multiple names, like “Nigeria-Biafra War,” “Biafran War,” “Nigerian Civil War,” “War of National Unity,” “War against Infidels,” the Nigeria-Biafra War was a global event, generally regarded as a defining moment in the postcolonial global order because it foreshadowed the array of devastating conflicts that would eventually threaten the survival of most postcolonial African states. The war was the first major conflict in postcolonial Africa, and in many ways, it represented the end of the “old wars” and the first of the “new wars.” Certainly, it was the first to approximate what we now call “black-on-black” genocide in postcolonial Africa; the first televised African war; the only conflict in postcolonial Africa that had both major super powers of the Cold War on the same side; and the war that launched the modern humanitarian-aid industry as we know it today. Official memories conceal and disenfranchise other memories, but also perform the ideological task of projecting the state as the sole owner of war memories in post–civil war Nigeria. Almost fifty years after the war, the individual and collective memories of the Nigeria-Biafra War still dominate national discourse in a manner that elicits passion, discord, and contestation in contemporary Nigeria. Drawing on a political economy approach, this research focused on the following. First, it offered new insights into memory studies by examining how memories are constructed, contested, resisted, appropriated, and structured in a postwar Nigerian context. Second, it explored how memories of wars, conflicts, and violence can underlie a group’s identity and sustain that identity and, ultimately, translate into a basis for future violence. Third, it explores the politics of “dominant” and “subordinate” memories of war and violence in a contested political space. The research was mainly qualitative and most of the fieldwork was done in the five southeastern states of Nigeria. Fieldwork comprised visiting key locations and cities in this region as landscapes of memory and where the activities of neo-Biafran movements took place. The research provides a historical and contemporaneous analysis of memories of the Nigeria-Biafra War. It demonstrates the nuances in the making of Nigeria-Biafra War memories and why these memories continue to stymie and stunt Nigeria’s post–civil war nation-building project from becoming a more just and inclusive one. It unveiled the making of “official” memories by the state and the interrogation and contestation of these memories by opposing forces. Official memories conceal and disenfranchise other memories, but also perform the ideological task of projecting the state as the sole owner of war memories in post–civil war Nigeria. The research complicates this official narrative by exploring memory production in the Nigerian state as a continuously contested and conflicting project. This involves interrogating the ownership, production, and consumption of extant official war memories, understanding the different forces at play in inscribing and entrenching or subverting and challenging these memories, and the manifold ways in which diverse identities, classes, regions, and intellectual traditions simultaneously project memories of the war in post–civil war Nigeria. Bibliography2016: "Shared Histories, Divided Memories: Mediating and Navigating the Tensions in Nigeria-Biafra War Discourses,"Africa Today, Vol. 63, No. 1: 2-21.2017: "Bringing 'Biafra' Back In: Narrative, Identity and the Politics of Non-Reconciliation in Nigeria,"National Identities, (Forthcoming DOI link: https://doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2017.1279133).(Forthcoming): Memory, Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in Post-Civil War South- eastern Nigeria, APN Working Papers Series, African Peacebuilding Network (APN), Social Science Research Council, New York.
Ways of War: Toward a Global Military HistoryTonio A. Andrade, History, Emory UniversityResearch Grant, 2012 My research, supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, focused on an emerging field of study: global military history, resulting in the publication of a book, The Gunpowder Age (Princeton University Press, 2016), which compares Chinese and Western European military history from 900 to 1900 AD. Scholars have long argued that China’s military traditions, technologies, and techniques fell behind those of the West shortly after gunpowder arrived in Europe in the early fourteenth century, with Europeans “perfecting” guns while China stagnated. My research showed, however, that China maintained military superiority or parity with the West for much longer: well into the eighteenth century. Drawing on Chinese and Western sources—such as military manuals published in profusion in both China and the West during the 1500s and 1600s—The Gunpowder Age shows that China was undergoing many of the same developments that were revolutionizing warfare and society in western Europe at precisely the same time. For example, the famous Ming general Qi Jiguang (1528–88) adopted advanced muskets earlier than has been appreciated and, strikingly, employed advanced musketry drilling techniques some forty years before they seem to have appeared in Europe (these techniques have been considered a hallmark of Europe’s famous “Military Revolution”). In general, Ming China showed many of the cascading changes that historians have argued typified the European Military Revolution—a replacement of cavalry by infantry, a rapid increase in the complexity of military hierarchies, a proliferation of printed drilling manuals, and a rapid increase in the ratio of firearms to traditional weapons. Countries that achieve too much military success may tend in the long run to become vulnerable to adversaries from regions where warfare is more frequent. China maintained its military parity into the eighteenth century, but then found itself outclassed by the western states, whose military prowess continued increasing, whereas China’s atrophied, leaving China vulnerable to Great Britain, which easily bested it in the Opium War of 1839-42. Why? Not just because Britain was undergoing industrialization but also—and perhaps more importantly—because by 1839, China had enjoyed nearly a century of relative peace under the overwhelming regional dominance of the powerful Qing Dynasty. Thanks to Qing power, China enjoyed during this period what appears to be the least warlike period in its millennia-long history. (There were, of course, many wars and rebellions, so we are speaking relatively, comparing the incidence of conflict to other periods in China’s bloody history.) As a result, its once dynamic military institutions and technologies had atrophied. I believe, therefore, that China’s nineteenth-century weakness was an aberration and that, in order to truly understand the military pattern of the Chinese past, one must pay attention to the frequency of warfare in and around China. It’s an old idea, but one that today can be applied more rigorously and with greater precision, thanks to a profusion of data from China. China’s so-called “stagnation” was a short-term state, due to the unprecedented power of its last imperial dynasty. What does this study tell us about human violence and warfare in general? For one, it suggests that countries that achieve too much military success, such as the Qing dynasty’s unprecedented hegemony of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, may tend in the long run to become vulnerable to adversaries from regions where warfare is more frequent. In any case, it suggests that a careful and nuanced study of the frequency of warfare may shed significant light on patterns of global history.
Armed Politics and the State in Post-Colonial AsiaPaul Staniland, Political Science, University of ChicagoResearch Grant, 2013 & 2014 The political relationships between governments and armed groups differ dramatically. Sometimes they are locked in intense conflict, in other contexts they cut live-and-let-live deals, and in yet others they cooperate closely or even become merged together. My ongoing book project, using fieldwork and archival research funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, seeks to explain how these different armed orders emerge and change. It uses detailed data from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Burma/Myanmar to establish patterns of armed order across space and time within these countries. Research in New Delhi, Kashmir, northern Thailand, Myanmar, and Nagaland is complemented with extensive archival and secondary source research to systematically measure peace deals, ceasefires, combat operations, and informal cooperative. These allow me to identify armed orders of alliance, limited cooperation, and military hostilities, as well as the collapse or incorporation of groups. Tactical calculations and the agency of the armed groups themselves help explain more fine-grained patterns of armed order. I argue theoretically that the threat perceptions of central governments are deeply conditioned by their ideological projects: the definitions and boundaries of the nation and the role of the state within it that key elites seek to construct and defend. Ideas about politics help leaders and their security services decide which armed groups are deeply threatening, which are politically unproblematic, and which are unsavory or tolerable. These political foundations of state and regime form the basis of state strategy, but tactical calculations and the agency of the armed groups themselves help explain more fine-grained patterns of armed order. This argument helps us understand why governments often devote massive repression toward groups that are militarily weak or disorganized, while cooperating with or ignoring much more powerful groups. These complex interactions between states and armed actors create diverse forms of political order in the contemporary world. Bibliography"Politics and Threat Perception: Explaining Pakistani Military Strategy on the North West Frontier." With Asfandyar Mir and Sameer Lalwani. Security Studies (forthcoming). "Armed Politics and the Study of Intrastate Conflict." Journal of Peace Research Vol. 54, No. 4 (July 2017)."Armed Groups and Militarized Elections." International Studies Quarterly Vol. 59, No. 4 (December 2015), pp. 694-705. "Militias, Ideology, and the State." Journal of Conflict Resolution Vol. 59, No. 5 (August 2015), pp. 770-793.
Torture, Taxes, and the Colonial State in Madras, c. 1800–1858Derek L. Elliott, University of CambridgeDissertation Fellowship, 2013 For over a century and a half, the publication of the Madras Torture Report remained the singular instance of a metropolitan state openly acknowledging the use of illegal violence by its functionaries. It was not until 2012, when the British government declared in High Court that Kenyans were tortured during the anticolonial Mau Mau Rebellion that another such admission occurred. To date, these are the only instances of self-proclaimed liberal regimes admitting torture. More recently, the United States of America, which is widely acknowledged to have used torture under the guise of national security, has stopped short of actually admitting to the practice. Nonetheless, torture in Madras remains an understudied and relatively unknown aspect of South Asian history. This thesis examines the Madras “torture question,” as it was known among contemporaries, and argues that the structure of the British East India Company’s government in Madras long knew of and did little to end the violence exercised by its officials in the collection of revenue. Instead, its policies and laws sought to maximize taxation at the expense of the justice and good governance it claimed as the justification, legitimization and hallmark of its rule. The British East India Company operated an extractive and coercive system of government that had deep impact, sometimes leaving physical scars as reminders, on the lives and bodies of those existing on the margins of its rule. The thesis looks at the structure of Company governance in India and begins with the cooperative efforts of British and Indian reformers who brought torture to the public’s attention, resulting in the Madras Commission of Enquiry. I then move on to discuss the investigatory proceedings and findings of the Commission. The chapters that follow deal with the economic conditions of Madras and the administrative structures that prioritized revenue extraction. Additionally, nonstate responses to revenue violence are examined in a chapter on missionaries, which questions their popular image as humanitarian reformers. Finally, the adjudications of cases of revenue violence are looked at in detail to demonstrate how the Company was able to legally absolve itself of complicity in the use of extrajudicial violence for the ends of state. The research undertaken demonstrates that the Company operated an extractive and coercive system of government that had deep impact, sometimes leaving physical scars as reminders, on the lives and bodies of those existing on the margins of its rule. It focuses specifically on revenue violence used in the collection of taxes primarily due on land by raiyats and other agricultural cultivators during the first half of the nineteenth century, with a particular attention on the 1850s, ending with the outbreak of the 1857 Rebellion. In the mofussil, away from the centers of Company power, torture to secure taxes in land was a regular and overlooked fact of Indian agricultural life. By looking at this kind of physical coercion, so central to the exigencies of the state, this research contributes to a growing body of scholarship seeking to expose the violence inherent in the colonial project.
The Neural Circuitry of Aggression, Sex and Sexual AggressionDavid J. Anderson, Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience, California Institute of TechnologyResearch Grant, 2014 Mating and aggression are innate (or instinctive) behaviors that are performed without training. Interestingly, among animals, these two seemingly different behaviors appear to be inextricably intertwined: aggressive encounters are often associated with mating, when males exhibit their dominance for sexual opportunities. However, male-female interactions are primarily sexual (mating) and male-male interactions tend to be aggressive, while aggression toward females is more often the exception than the norm. What brain mechanisms are responsible for separating sexual behavior toward females, and violent aggression toward males, under normal conditions? To investigate the brain mechanisms, we used a technique called microendoscopy that allowed us to image deep-brain (hypothalamic) neuronal activity in male mice engaged in social behaviors. We recorded over two hundred neurons on average in each mouse (total 25 mice), and the mice had no trouble fighting or mating because of the microendoscope neural implant. In sexually and socially experienced adult male mice, neurons were strongly active during interactions with conspecifics, but not with a toy. It was immediately clear that characteristic, yet separate, ensembles of neurons were active during interactions with male or female conspecifics. But surprisingly, in inexperienced adult males, common populations of neurons were activated by both male and female conspecifics. The sex-specific ensembles gradually emerged as the mice acquired social and sexual experience. These observations indicated that interactions with males and females was required for the distinct representations of males and females in the adult mouse brain. These observations reveal an unexpected requirement of experience for behaviors that were traditionally viewed as "hard-wired" or innate. We performed another set of experiments where adult male mice were permitted to investigate (touch, smell, etc.) but not mount or attack other female or male mice. In this case, we did not observe female- or male-specific ensembles or divergent representations in the brain, suggesting that sensory exposure itself was insufficient. However, providing male mice with brief sexual experience was sufficient to generate neuronal ensembles that were specific to males and females, divergent neural representations of conspecific sex and aggression towards males. This experiment demonstrated that social interactions are necessary for the formation of male and female specific neuronal ensembles. These observations reveal an unexpected requirement of experience for behaviors that were traditionally viewed as “hard-wired” or innate. Social experience was required for the formation of neuronal ensembles that themselves control social behavior. Bibliography Remedios R, Kennedy A, Zelikowsky M, Grewe BF, Schnitzer MJ, Anderson DJ. (2017) Social Behaviour Shapes Hypothalamic Neural Ensemble Representations Of Conspecific Sex. Nature. In Press. Kennedy A, Asahina K, Hoopfer E, Inagaki H, Jung Y, Lee H, Remedios R, Anderson DJ. (2015) Internal States and Behavioral Decision-Making: Toward an Integration of Emotion and Cognition. Cold Spring Harb Symp Quant Biol. 79:199-210.
Competitive Intervention and its Consequences for Civil WarsNoel Anderson, Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyDissertation Fellowship, 2015 This project explores two interrelated puzzles about external intervention and internal war. The first asks why rebels, governments, and third-party interveners often continue to invest in costly and protracted conflicts rather than sue for peace and a negotiated settlement. The second considers the consequences of these behaviors for temporal variation in the average duration and global prevalence of civil wars. A central finding that emerges concerns the critical role of competitive intervention—two-sided, simultaneous military assistance from different third party states to both government and rebel combatants—in the dynamics and intractability of civil wars across time and around the globe. Developing a generalizable theory of competitive intervention, the project explains the distortionary effects this form of external meddling has on domestic bargaining processes, describes the unique strategic dilemmas it entails for third-party interveners, and links its varying prevalence to international systemic change. It uncovers a feature of this form of intervention—namely, that “not losing” is often more important than “winning.” In doing so, it moves beyond popular anecdotes about “proxy wars” by deriving theoretically grounded propositions about the strategic logics motivating competitive intervention in civil wars. It also uncovers a heretofore overlooked feature of this form of intervention—namely, that “not losing” is often more important than “winning” from the perspective of third-party interveners under the shadow of inadvertent escalation. The theory is tested with a mixed-method design that combines statistical analyses of all civil wars fought between 1975 and 2009 with detailed case studies of competitive intervention in Angola (1975–1991) and Afghanistan (1979–1992). The project’s theoretical and empirical results shed new light on the international dimensions of civil war, address ongoing debates concerning the utility of intervention as a conflict management tool, and inform policy prescriptions aimed at resolving some of today’s most violent internal conflicts.
