Written by Jennifer Hodge, Andreas Juon, Kit Rickard and Sigrid Weber.
The civil war in Syria, the strained peace in Northern Ireland, and extrajudicial killings in the Philippines represent extreme cases of political turbulence afflicting civilians across the globe. The causes, consequences and solutions to these events often transcend international borders. The here summarised workshop, that took place on 24/25th February at University College London, supported and hosted by UCL’s Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS), the School of Public Policy/Department of Political Science, and the Global Governance Institute (GGI), brought together doctoral students working on armed conflict and political violence. Participants presented their research and scholars from the UCL Department of Political Science’s Conflict & Change research cluster gave feedback on their academic work. The workshop took a broad perspective on the causes, dynamics and consequences of violent political turbulence. Research touched upon the questions of how civil wars unfold, when armed actors specifically attack civilians, and how external actors and different identity groups shape the dynamics of armed conflict. The workshop also focused on the effects of state’s repressive behaviour on civilian’s choices to vote, protest, and seek peace.
Day 1: 24th February 2020
The first day started with a welcome note by Prof Kristin M. Bakke and Dr Zeynep Bulutgil. In their introduction, they outlined the significance of workshops as a forum to exchange ideas and as an opportunity to receive valuable feedback on research. They not only foster important connections with people inside and outside one’s field that could lead to important future collaborations, but they also make the academic world more enjoyable by building a network of friendly faces.
The first panel was dedicated to work on ethnicity, nationalism and conflict identities. Paola Galano Toro from ETH Zurich kicked off this first series of presentations by presenting her PhD project on nationalism and state-building in Latin America. In contrast to post-Westphalia developments in Europe, she argues that colonial legacies left behind a highly fragmented ethnic landscape in many Latin American states, where nationalism was consequently driven by only a small segment of society. The exclusionary nationalism propagated by this segment’s elite weakened the role of war in bringing about the modern state in Latin America. Instead of fostering the emergence of strong states, it led to a legacy of states with very low capacity, especially in remote areas. Using quantitative methods and historical data, she seeks to test her argument in the coming years. Oguzhan Turkoglu, the next presenter from Trinity College Dublin, focused on the case of Northern Ireland after Brexit. He argues that a central driver of the strength of social identities is their importance for individuals’ sense of self-worth. Following Brexit, British identity should offer fewer psychological benefits and hence be less attractive to individuals living in Northern Ireland. However, this effect should be crucially moderated by previous exposure to conflict, which he expects to “freeze” identities. Using the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, he traced this effect quantitatively by comparing Northern Irish individual’s national identification before and after Brexit. Next up was Dennis Atzenhofer from the ETH Zurich. He presented his PhD project on the role of incendiary speeches in provoking political violence. He plans to use historical data on the location and content of Adolf Hitler’s speeches and political and xenophobic violence in surrounding areas to probe this relationship. By combining spatial statistical methods with machine learning-based text analysis, he will investigate these relationships quantitatively. The final presentation of the panel was Sam Erkiletian from University College London, who plans to conduct a study of how re-education camps work to de-radicalize prisoners of war. His argument is based on a social psychological framework whereby socialization into radical views plays an important role in this process, and whereby the success of re-education depends on reversing this process of socialization. Using historical data from recently opened US archives, he plans to investigate his arguments in the case of U.S. prisoners of war during the Korean war.
The second panel switched to external forces and their role in conflict dynamics. Christoph Dworschak, based at the University of Essex, presented fine-grained new data on the composition of peacekeeping forces in Sub-Saharan Africa. In his paper, he argues that heterogeneity of peacekeeping forces is a double-edged sword: While unit heterogeneity brings advantages by providing different skills, national heterogeneity in their composition engenders severe drawbacks, as culturally dissimilar forces struggle to coordinate. Conducting a quantitative analysis, he showed that these relationships indeed play a key role in influencing the local success of peacekeeping. The next presentation by Kit Rickard from University College London demonstrated his expertise on the Northern Irish conflict. In his work, he formulates a novel theory of how external support in civil wars might stoke local conflict dynamics, whereby different factions compete with one another over the supply of easily exchangeable support like weapons. Applying his theory to Northern Ireland, he conducted a detailed process tracing of how such dynamics played out during the Troubles. Specifically, he showed how external support from the Soviet Union and Libya exerted pressure on the Republican side and helped engender successive splits in the IRA. The final presentation of this panel was Egehan Altinbay from Middle East Technical University discussion of non-state actor diplomacy in International Peace Conferences. In his PhD he analyses the inclusion of different types of rebel groups in the peace conferences organised to solve the Syrian civil war. During his talk he outlined the reasons why some groups are included in Syria’s peace conferences and others are excluded; and described how rebel groups interact during negotiations.
The third panel turned from external factors to processes within insurgent groups and their impacts on conflict dynamics. The first presenter was Adam McCauley from the University of Oxford, who outlined a new theory on conditions where rebel leaders choose to decentralize or centralize insurgencies. In particular, he focused on how insurgent leaders react to both group-internal and external factors to shape their command and control structures. He demonstrated his theory on the example of Mus’ab al Zarqawi, who led a brutal insurgency in post-Saddam Iraq. Natasja Rupesinghe, also based at the University of Oxford, presented her work on Jihadist rule in Central Mali. Building on extensive fieldwork, she showed how often-overlooked practices of “micro-governance” by insurgent groups play a key role in enabling them to hold onto power. For example, she outlined the decisive role of a Jihadist group’s ad-hoc mobile courts, which were perceived as being free of the country’s otherwise usual corruption, in enabling it to exert local influence. The third presenter was Marius Mehrl from the University of Essex, who re-investigated prominent theories that the presence of female rebels decreased the occurrence of wartime rape. Specifically, he tested an existing publication’s controversial finding that the presence of female combatants reduces the likelihood of wartime rape. He showed that even slight alterations to this article’s statistical model, for example replacing a linear time trend with time-fixed effects, crucially changed the findings. In sum, besides a methodological contribution, his analysis found renewed support for the original claim, whereby female rebels are indeed associated with less war-time rape. A final contribution to the panel was Clara Voyvodic’s presentation on the strategies of co-option by non-state armed groups. The Oxford-based PhD student focuses her research on the ambiguous relationship of Colombian rebels to state-led infrastructure projects: On the one hand, these are natural targets for violence against the state. On the other, rebels might also exploit these infrastructural factors for their own purposes and abstain from engaging in destructive behaviour against them. Building on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, she traced the existence of such trade-offs on a specific case.
The final panel of the day was concerned with processes of mobilization, demobilization, and reconciliation. In a first presentation, Daniel Odin Shaw from the University of Glasgow presented a new framework for conceptualizing and measuring post-war demobilization. Showing that detail matters, he not only outlined factors related to initial processes of designing the transition to peace (for instance, the inclusiveness of the new political institutions), but also factors related to its implementation (for example, whether different groups demobilize asymmetrically over time). In his PhD thesis, he seeks to turn these fine-grained concepts into a dataset which will enable the analysis of complex implications for post-war demobilization. In a second presentation, Johanna Amaya-Panche from the University of Essex turned towards the next step in post-conflict processes: reconciliation. Specifically, she was concerned with whether foreign aid can foster reconciliation between former wartime enemies and whether it can, in turn, build local trust supporting sustainable transitions from war to peace. Presenting preliminary evidence of the Colombian case, she showed that EU development aid indeed increased trust and fostered reconciliation in recipient municipalities. The final presentation of the day was by Amanda Hall, based at the University of St Andrews, who took us back to the Northern Irish case. Presenting her PhD thesis, she showed how established definitions of peace may fail to capture appropriately contested post-conflict environments, such as Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement. Rather than speaking of peace, she argues, the continuing social tensions and episodes of violence reflect a continuation of the conflict by other means, leading her to use the term “strained peace”.
Day 2: 25th February 2020
Day two of the workshop started with a panel on non-military targets and civilian victimization. Theresa Leimpek from ETH Zurich kicked off the panel by presenting her interview and survey findings from field research in Sri Lanka. She investigates the concept of insurgent’ mobility control or the idea that insurgents not only seek to control civilian mobility through forced displacement but also through strategic confinement. Speaking to this research on the interaction between armed groups and civilians on the move, Sigrid Weber from University College London then presented her work on population movements and their effects on dynamics of civilian targeting in civil wars. In a sub-national regression analysis with hand-coded and machine-learnt data on territorial control in the Iraqi civil war against the Islamic State, she shows how armed actors responded with violence to population groups fleeing into their territories. Andreas Juon from University College London then presented his co-authored paper with Livia Rohrbach from the University of Copenhagen to show how ethnofederal state systems can increase local conflict risks through the creation of new marginalised subnational minorities, using Ethiopia as a case study for mixed methods analysis. The panel was rounded off by Markus Trengove, a Political Theory PhD student at University College London, who outlined his conceptual work on the permissibility of civilians resorting to physical violence. He tries to understand if and how civilian violence against the rich and powerful can be understood as self-defence against the structural violence of the state.
The second panel discussed the causes and consequences of state repression with empirical evidence from Turkey, the Philippines and Sub-Saharan Africa. Oguzhan Turkoglu from Trinity College Dublin presented work on the question of how repression can change political attitudes in the younger population. Using individual-level survey data and town-level election data, he shows that young Kurdish voters in Turkey respond stronger to state repression than their older peers, suggesting that the Kurdish youth alienates from repressing parties and reorients towards repressed parties in mayoral elections. This study shows that repressive policies may politicize the youth over time and may lead to renewed outbreaks of protest or political violence. Felix Olsowski from the University of Mannheim then discussed his ongoing research on the question whether independent judges can reduce state repression in non-democratic regimes. Using data on extrajudicial killings and the appointment of judges in the Philippine’s war on drugs, he points out an important dilemma: In light of an independent judiciary, non-democratic regimes might switch tactics and use more extra-judicial killings to avoid costly interactions in independent court. This regression analysis implies that an independent judiciary might not be enough to effectively improve civilian’s safety in non-democratic regimes. Jemima Ackah-Arthur from the London School of Economics and Political Science added to the discussion on state repression by asking why state responses to terrorist attacks vary on the local level in Nigeria and Kenya. Using qualitative evidence and the mapping terrorist events, she argues that the timing and location of terrorist attacks may explain why states sometimes react strongly to civilian casualties but not always. If terrorist attacks are in proximity to elections and target areas that show electoral support for the ruling party, government’s security responses in Nigeria and Kenya from 2010 to 2016 seem to be more comprehensive. The research of Oguzhan Turkoglu, Felix Olsowski and Jemima Ackah-Arthur shows how important it is to understand state repression in the context of elections: voters’ preferences - in particular in the younger population--can be affected by repression, and knowing this, governments have incentives to adjust their internal security policies to the electoral cycle and the institutions limiting their control like the judiciary.
The workshop ended with a panel on localized initiatives for peace and their effects on violent patterns. Emily Silcock, Economic Advisor at Ethiopian Ministry of Science and Higher Education, discussed her research on the announcement of peace conferences in Syria. She shows in a Quasi-Difference-in-Difference regression analysis that conflict parties that were invited to local peace negotiations target more civilians after the announcement of such a conference because they aim to increase their bargaining position in the upcoming peace talks. More than 100 peace conferences have been announced in Syria since the outbreak of the civil war. Her study makes a direct link to civilian suffering in response to these failed attempts to achieve peace. Claudia Wiehler, from the Centre for Security Studies at ETH Zurich, presented her initial PhD research. She argues for a more comprehensive analysis of patterns of violence and non-violence during conflicts that should be studied with Relational Event Modelling. Even during ongoing fighting, armed actors make humanitarian agreements and interact peacefully with each other. Further research should try to understand how these different patterns of peaceful and violent interaction emerge and whether the centralization of authority in armed groups could explain their interactions with other conflict parties. Jennifer Hodge from University College London presented her ongoing survey research on civilians’ willingness to engage in protests for peace during repressive times. Survey experiments in Armenia, Northern Ireland and Ukraine will shed light on the question why some civilians protest for peace. The last presentation was given by Cigdem Unal, who is based at the University of Pittsburgh. She finds cross-country evidence that terrorist attacks mobilise people to engage in public protest. Overall, the panel showed that violence, repression, and terrorism are interlinked with local initiatives to achieve agreements between armed actors, to mobilise civilians and to reach peace.