Below are publications that have benefited from valuable support from the ROCCA lab community!
Commitment Problems in Alliance Formation (by Brett Benson & Bradley Smith)
Link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ajps.12693
Abstract: If military alliances cause significant shifts in the distribution of power, why does anticipation of their formation or expansion provoke hostility from adversaries in some cases and not others? We develop a theory to explain this variation, advancing three arguments about the connection between alliances, commitment problems and war. First, we show that prospective allies can avoid provoking a common enemy by offering concessions to offset losses from an anticipated power shift from an alliance. Second, limits to an alliance’s power or implementation speed may make such bargains possible. Allies manipulate these factors to set the terms of cooperation to avoid provoking a shared enemy. Finally, when such bargains are not possible, incentives for preventive war exist but the outbreak of such wars may be avoided. Although preventive war cannot be ruled out altogether, the conditions that make it most attractive also make it unlikely to be carried out.
Hassling: How States Prevent a Preventive War (by Peter Schram)
Link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajps.12538
Abstract: Low‐level military operations outside of war are pervasive in the international system. These activities have been viewed as destabilizing by both academics and policy makers, as miscalculations or missteps in conducting low‐level operations can risk escalation to war. I show the opposite can be true: these operations can prevent escalation to a greater war. I examine a type of low‐level conflict that I call “hassling” in the common framework of bargaining and war. The critical feature of hassling is that it weakens a targeted state. I find that when a rising power rules out peaceful bargains, hassling the rising power can prevent a preventive war, with efficiency gains for the involved states. This intuition is formalized in a dynamic model of conflict and is explored through examinations of Israel’s Operation Outside the Box (2007), the United States’ involvement in Iraq (1991–2003), and Russia’s operations in Ukraine (beginning in 2014).
Managing Insurgency (by Peter Schram)
Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0022002719832963
Abstract: Why would an insurgent group turn away foreign fighters who volunteered to fight for its cause? To explain variation in foreign fighter usage, I present a novel perspective on what foreign fighters offer to militant groups. Because foreign fighters possess a different set of preferences from local fighters, integrated teams of foreign and local fighters can self-manage and mitigate the agency problems that are ubiquitous to insurgent groups. However, to create self-managing teams, insurgent leadership must oversee the teams’ formation. When counterinsurgency pressure prevents this oversight, foreign fighters are less useful and the leadership may exclude them. This theory explains variation in foreign fighter use and agency problems within al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI; 2004 to 2010) and the Haqqani Network (2001–2018). Analysis of the targeting of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, AQI’s former leader, further supports the theory, suggesting that leadership targeting inhibited oversight and aggravated agency problems within the group.
Rethinking Deterrence in Gray Zone Conflict
Link: https://www.e-ir.info/2022/01/05/re-thinking-deterrence-in-gray-zone-conflict/
This article was written by ROCCA undergrad researchers Catherine Delafield, Sarah Fishbein, and Estelle Shaya in collaboration with ROCCA Professor Peter Schram & Professors J Andrés Gannon, Erik Gartzke, and Jon Lindsay.
Rethinking Deterrence in Gray Zone Conflict (by Andrew Coe, Eliza Gheorghe, & Muhammet A. Bas)
Abstract: When international laws or norms are violated, an enforcer can punish the violator, offer concessions for its renewed compliance, or tolerate it. Punishment is often costlier than concessions or toleration but signals to other states that violation will be met with penalties rather than rewards or acceptance. By influencing other states’ expectations about what will happen if they get caught violating, the choice of response can thus encourage or discourage subsequent compliance. Anticipating this, an enforcer is more willing to punish when it faces a larger audience of potential nearterm violators. Focusing on the nuclear nonproliferation norm, we show statistically that enforcer responses appear to have affected whether states subsequently pursued the bomb historically and that this effect is stronger than other hypothesized determinants of proliferation decisions. We also use primary sources to document that policy makers recognized and heeded this influence in a range of cases.
Reducing Prejudice toward Refugees: Evidence That Social Networks Influence Attitude Change in Uganda (by Jennifer M. Larson & Janet I. Lewis)
Abstract: Interventions aimed at reducing prejudice toward refugees have shown promise in industrialized countries. However, the vast majority of refugees are in developing countries. Moreover, while these interventions focus on individual attitude change, attitudes often do not shift in isolation; people are embedded in rich social networks. We conducted a field experiment in northwestern Uganda (host to over a million refugees) and find that perspective-taking warmed individual attitudes there in the short term. We also find that the treatment effect spills over from treated households to control ones along social ties, that spillovers can be positive or negative depending on the source, and that peoples’ attitudes change based on informal conversations with others in the network after the treatment. The findings show the importance of understanding the social process that can reinforce or unravel individual-level attitude change toward refugees; it appears essential to designing interventions with a lasting effect on attitudes.
The Shadow of Deterrence: Why Capable Actors Engage in Contests Short of War (by J Andrés Gannon, Erik A. Gartzke, Jon R. Lindsay, & Peter Schram)
Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00220027231166345
Abstract: Defense policy makers have become increasingly concerned about conflict in the “gray zone” between peace and war. Such conflicts are often interpreted as cases of deterrence failures, as new technologies or tactics—from cyber operations to “little green men”—seem to increase the effectiveness of low-intensity aggression. However, gray zone conflict could also be a case of deterrence success, where challengers adopt a constrained form of aggression in response to a credible escalation threat. We develop a model that formalizes both scenarios and identifies distinct empirical patterns across the two cases. We use the model’s findings to empirically analyze Russian gray zone activity since the 1990s, finding that Russian activity appears, in part, to be restrained by NATO’s deterrent threat. Our model also shows that developing gray zone conflict capabilities can lead to more peace but could also backfire and provoke a challenger to escalate to war.
When Capabilities Backfire: How Improved Hassling Capabilities Produce Worse Outcomes (by Peter Schram)
Abstract: I formalize interactions between an endogenously rising challenger and a rival defender who can accept the challenger’s rise, go to war before the rise comes to fruition, or degrade the challenger’s growth through low-level conflict operations that I call “hassling.” The novelty here is that the defender has private information about its hassling capabilities; this implies that the challenger does not know how much it can rise without provoking the defender to hassle or go to war. I find that when the defender’s ability to hassle improves, it can provoke a strategic response in the challenger that undermines the defender’s ability to use its private information productively and results in lower utility for the defender. This model provides insight into both Saddam Hussein’s decision-making leading up to the 2003 US invasion and the stability-instability paradox.
Self-managing terror: Resolving agency problems with diverse teams (by Peter Schram)
Does Violence Against Journalists Deter Detailed Reporting? Evidence From Mexico (by Cassy Dorff, Colin Henry, and Sandra Ley)
Link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/00220027221128307
Abstract: Over the last 12 years, Mexico has become one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist. We examine how this risk-environment influences the content and strategies of reporting at one of Mexico’s most well known national newspapers, Reforma. We argue that as the risk environment worsens, journalists use less specific language about armed actors to report on violent events. To test our claims, we turn to three novel sources of data: the first captures granular information about attacks against journalists, the second uses natural language processing to measure changes in reporting overtime; and the third incorporates interviews from journalists themselves. We show that as violence against journalists increases, news story specificity decreases. Importantly, our findings reveal the ways in which journalists develop protection strategies to ensure high quality reporting, even under risky conditions and highlight the critical link between risk and information environments in areas of protracted violence.