“Civil War as a Social Process: Actors and Dynamics from Pre- to Post-War,” European Journal of International Relations (published online June 6, 2022).
Abstract: What accounts for overarching trajectories of civil wars? This article develops an account of civil war as a social process that connects dynamics of conflict from pre- to post-war periods through evolving interactions between non-state, state, civilian, and external actors involved. It traces these dynamics to the mobilization and organization of nascent non-state armed groups before the war, which can induce state repression and in some settings escalation of tensions through radicalization of actors, militarization of tactics, and polarization of societies, propelled by internal divisions and external support. Whether armed groups form from a small, clandestine core of dedicated recruits, broader networks, social movements, and/or fragmentation within the regime has consequences for their internal and external relations during the war. However, not only path-dependent but also endogenous dynamics shape overarching trajectories of civil wars. During the war, armed groups develop cohesion and fragment in the context of evolving internal politics, including socialization of fighters, institution-building in the areas that they control, which civilians can collectively resist, competition and cooperation with other non-state and state forces, and external influence. After the war, armed groups transform to participate in continuing conflict and violence in different ways in interaction with multiple actors. This analysis highlights the contingency of civil wars and suggests that future research should focus on how relevant actors form and transform as they relate to one another to understand linkages between conflict dynamics over time and on continuities and discontinuities in these dynamics to grasp overarching trajectories of civil wars.
Ethnopolitics Symposium on Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia, Cornell University Press, 2021 (published online May 18, 2022).
See my introduction to the Symposium here and response to commentaries by Nina Caspersen, Jesse Driscoll and Ed Schatz here.
“Sources of Evidence and Openness in Field-Intensive Research on Violent Conflict,” Politics, Groups, and Identities Vol. 9, No. 4 (2021): 851-857.
Abstract: This article engages with Steven Lubet’s arguments in Interrogating Ethnography on reliability of evidence and replication of findings in ethnographic research. It draws on eight months of immersive fieldwork on Abkhaz mobilization in the Georgian-Abkhaz war of 1992–1993 to show that field-intensive researchers who work on sensitive political topics leverage multiple sources to develop their insights and engage in reflexivity while prioritizing the safety of their research participants. It is these practices that underlie the trustworthiness of research and form the basis for the evaluation of research results rather than verification standards proposed by Lubet that do not, and cannot, apply to this kind of research.
“The Qualitative Transparency Deliberations: Insights and Implications” (Alan M. Jacobs and Tim Büthe et al.), Perspectives on Politics Vol. 19, No. 1 (2021): 171-208.
Abstract: In recent years, a variety of efforts have been made in political science to enable, encourage, or require scholars to be more open and explicit about the bases of their empirical claims and, in turn, make those claims more readily evaluable by others. While qualitative scholars have long taken an interest in making their research open, reflexive, and systematic, the recent push for overarching transparency norms and requirements has provoked serious concern within qualitative research communities and raised fundamental questions about the meaning, value, costs, and intellectual relevance of transparency for qualitative inquiry. In this Perspectives Reflection, we crystallize the central findings of a three-year deliberative process—the Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD)—involving hundreds of political scientists in a broad discussion of these issues. Following an overview of the process and the key insights that emerged, we present summaries of the QTD Working Groups’ final reports. Drawing on a series of public, online conversations that unfolded at www.qualtd.net, the reports unpack transparency’s promise, practicalities, risks, and limitations in relation to different qualitative methodologies, forms of evidence, and research contexts. Taken as a whole, these reports—the full versions of which can be found in the Supplementary Material—offer practical guidance to scholars designing and implementing qualitative research, and to editors, reviewers, and funders seeking to develop criteria of evaluation that are appropriate—as understood by relevant research communities—to the forms of inquiry being assessed. We dedicate this Reflection to the memory of our coauthor and QTD working group leader Kendra Koivu.
“Committed to Peace: The Potential of Former FARC-EP Midlevel Commanders as Local Leaders in the Peace Process,” SPERI Briefs, SPERI and the Centre for the Comparative Study of Civil War, December 15, 2020.
Drawing on field research conducted between 2018 and 2020, this research brief recasts our understanding of the potential role of former midlevel commanders of the FARC-EP, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia—People’s Army. Midlevel commanders of armed groups are characterised as “spoilers” of peace, but this brief outlines how they can also play important roles in negotiations, disarmament, reincorporation, and formal and informal peacebuilding efforts. The brief offers new insights into the skills and standing that midlevel commanders develop during war and calls on national and international actors to integrate former midlevel commanders into the peace process in Colombia, rather than stigmatising them and seeing them as an obstacle to the peace process. Their knowledge of the local dynamics of armed conflict and violence, the conditions in ex-combatant communities and the organisation of armed groups can be drawn upon to help advance the peace process in the areas of security, development and disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration.
“Evidence from Researcher Interactions with Human Participants” (with Mark A. Pollack and Leonardo R. Arriola), APSA Organized Section for Qualitative & Multi-Method Research, Qualitative Transparency Deliberations, Working Group Final Reports, Report II.2, February 12, 2019.
In this report of Qualitative Transparency Deliberations (QTD) Working Group II.2 on Evidence from Researcher Interactions with Human Participants, we examine how transparency is understood by scholars who regularly engage with human subjects; assess the benefits and costs of transparency practices for evidence from research with human participants; and present practical recommendations for researchers, editors, reviewers, and funders. Our findings draw on contributions posted to the QTD online forum, offline consultations with scholars from across the discipline, and related published materials. We find broad support for the principle of transparency among scholars working with human research participants, but our consultations also make clear that the meaning of transparency should be understood as part of research integrity writ large. The scholars we consulted were nearly unanimous in emphasizing the importance of openness and explicitness – e.g., by specifying how information from human subjects research is collected and analyzed or interpreted – for the integrity of the research enterprise. Transparency requirements must be weighed against the ethical obligation to protect human subjects, the epistemological diversity within the discipline, and the workload imposed on researchers using qualitative data.
“Ethics, Empathy, and Fear in Research on Violent Conflict,” Journal of Peace Research, Vol. 53, No. 2 (2019): 190-202.
Abstract: The discussion of ethics in the social sciences focuses on ‘doing no harm’ and ‘giving back’ to research participants, but does not explore the challenges of empathy and fear in research with participants in political violence and war. Drawing on 180 in-depth interviews on the Georgian–Abkhaz war of 1992–93 collected over eight months between 2010 and 2013 primarily in Abkhazia, but also Georgia and Russia, I argue that researchers can come to empathize with some but fear other participants in past and present violence. These emotional responses can influence researchers’ ability to probe and interpret interviews and respondents’ ability to surpass strong positions to explore dilemmas of participation in violence. By empathizing with not only ‘victims’ and ‘non-fighters’ as I had expected based on my pre-existing moral-conceptual categories, but also participants in the war, I found that individuals adopted multiple overlapping roles and shifted between these roles in the changing conditions of violence. In contrast, failing to empathize with and fearing those who continued to participate in violence after the war of 1992–93 limited my ability to fully appreciate the complexity of their participation, but shed light on the context of violence in contemporary Abkhazia. This analysis shows that reflection on the role of empathy and fear in shaping our interactions with research participants can help advance our understanding of participation in violence and this difficult research context.
“Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States” (with Jennifer Murtazashvili et al.), Caucasus Survey, Vol. 6, No. 2 (2018), 163-81.
Author-critic forum on Jesse Driscoll’s (2015) book.
“Collective Threat Framing and Mobilization in Civil War,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 110, No. 3 (2016): 411-27.
Abstract: Research on civil war mobilization emphasizes armed group recruitment tactics and individual motivations to fight, but does not explore how individuals come to perceive the threat involved in civil war. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork with participants and nonparticipants in the Georgian-Abkhaz war of 1992–93, this article argues that social structures, within which individuals are embedded, provide access to information critical for mobilization decisions by collectively framing threat. Threat framing filters from national through local leadership, to be consolidated and acted on within quotidian networks. Depending on how the threat is perceived—whether toward the self or the collectivity at its different levels—individuals adopt self- to other-regarding roles, from fleeing to fighting on behalf of the collectivity, even if it is a weaker actor in the war. This analysis sheds light on how the social framing of threat shapes mobilization trajectories and how normative and instrumental motivations interact in civil war.
“Evolving Norms of Protection: China, Libya, and the Problem of Intervention in Armed Conflict,” Cambridge Review of International Affairs, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2016): 812-30.
Abstract: This article examines the influence of civilian protection norms on China’s response to the 2011 crisis in Libya. It argues that Responsibility to Protect—an emerging norm commonly associated with the Libyan case—did not play a major role in China’s abstention on Resolution 1973 (2011) authorizing international intervention in Libya. For China, Responsibility to Protect is merely a concept and could not serve as the basis for intervention. Instead, Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict, as a normative foundation for civilian protection endorsed by China, offers a more appropriate lens for understanding China’s vote. Protection of Civilians, however, does not accommodate China’s unprecedented evacuation of Chinese nationals from Libya. This operation proceeded from a third logic of Protection of Nationals Abroad, which poses dilemmas for China’s strict adherence to the principles of sovereignty and non-interference and brings to bear domestic interests and notions of protection.
“Particularized Protection: UNSC Mandates and the Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict” (with Brian L. Job), International Peacekeeping, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2016): 240-273.
Abstract: The protection of civilians at risk in armed conflict has, since the late 1990s, become institutionalized at the United Nations (UN), gaining acceptance as a normative rationale for UN peacekeeping. However, the bulk of civilians in need of protection in armed conflict are unlikely to attain it. The article develops an argument on ‘particularized protection’—particularized in that UN Security Council (SC) mandates are formulated and adjusted over time to direct mission protection to specific subsets of civilian populations, that is, those relevant to the UN itself, the host state, other states, NGOs and the media, leaving most local civilians receiving little effective protection. Particularized protection, we argue, is a result of the institutional dynamics involving actors producing mandates—the UNSC—and those providing protection—peacekeeping missions—whereby mandates are specified to direct mission protection to selected, particularized groups. We demonstrate these dynamics in two cases, Côte d’Ivoire and Somalia.
“Responsibility to Protect and UN Peacekeeping: A Challenge of Particularized Protection,” AP R2P Brief, Vol.6 No.4 (2016): 1-7.
This policy brief identifies one set of situations in which Responsibility to Protect (R2P) and Protection of Civilians concerns overlap, namely, armed conflict situations with United Nations (UN) peacekeeping missions mandated to protect civilians where R2P crimes may be or are occurring, and addresses the challenge of “particularized protection” in such situations. This refers to the direction of international protection efforts by the UN Security Council and peacekeeping missions on the ground to specific groups in the civilian population at risk. The significance of recognizing this challenge lies in the limited protection that UN peacekeeping missions in armed conflicts provide to civilian populations at large, even when mandated to do so by the UNSC in the context of potential or actual mass atrocity crimes—some of the gravest violations of human rights.
“Border Violence in ‘Post-Conflict’ Abkhazia,” Ethnogeopolitics, Vol. 3, No. 3 (2015): 69-92.
Abstract: In the two decades since the end of the 1992-93 Georgian-Abkhaz war, the border area between Georgia and Abkhazia has seen multiple, diverse forms of violence. This area was relatively peaceful before the war and was barely touched during the war. As the war ended, it became the epicenter of organized political violence in Abkhazia. This article seeks to explain why violence has persisted in the Georgian-Abkhaz border area into the post-war period. While major approaches to this problem are developed at the macro, state level, I turn to how events developed among key actors the micro level to explain the observed variation. I locate violent events in the Gali region in the contested zone, predominantly controlled by the Abkhaz, and argue that a complex, embedded social structure of violence based on fear emerged between armed actors on both sides of the border and the local population in Gali. In this structure local residents are subjected to pressure from both sides to collaborate, and as a consequence suffer reprisals. This in turn supports the continuation of violent conflict between Abkhaz and Georgian forces.
Mobilization in Civil War: Latent Norms, Social Relations, and Inter-Group Violence in Abkhazia, doctoral dissertation, 2014.
Abstract: What explains individual and small group mobilization for inter-group violence? How does participation in inter-group violence inform high-risk action in subsequent cycles of mobilization? This dissertation poses four puzzles of violent mobilization across the pre-, civil war, and post-war stages in the conflict cycle to analyze mobilization in civil war. These puzzles place the question of civil war mobilization in a historical trajectory of conflict and include pre-war violent mobilization despite the risks of state repression and inter-group opposition; immediate mass mobilization on a weaker side in the war at the stage of civil war onset; retention of fighters in the course of civil war; and protracted violent mobilization in the post-war period. Analysis is based on over 150 in-depth interviews with participants and non-participants in mobilization and extensive archival and secondary material gathered through fieldwork over 2010-2013 in Abkhazia—a case of civil war and Georgia’s breakaway territory,—Georgia, and Russia. The wide scope of Abkhaz mobilization in the pre- (1921-1992), civil war (1992-1993), and post-war (1993-2008) periods allows examining within-case temporal and spatial variation, tracing the process of mobilization across the conflict cycle, and drawing generalizable conclusions. The study adopts a normative, socially-embedded approach to mobilization in civil war and critically engages with rationalist approaches to civil war. Explanation of mobilization is achieved through the conceptual and theoretical development of the latent normative framework activation mechanism. This normative framework for action, comprising underlying social norms, emergent understandings of history and identity, and resultant prescribed action, forms in the pre-war period, to be activated at the civil war onset stage through threat-framing triggers at the micro, meso, and macro levels of the social structure. Individuals and small groups adopt varying mobilization roles depending on whether threat perception is self- or collectivity-oriented. The normative framework transforms and continues to affect mobilization in the course of the war and in the post-war period. This research contributes to our conceptual and theoretical understanding of participation and organization of inter-group violence, the interaction between norms and social relations in civil war mobilization, research methods in conflict zones, and the understudied case of Abkhazia.
“China as a Global Norm-Shaper: Institutionalization and Implementation of the Responsibility to Protect” (with Brian L. Job), in Alexander Betts and Phil Orchard (eds), Implementation and World Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
Abstract: This chapter reflects upon and extends the Betts and Orchard’s theoretical framework by considering the case of China’s engagement with the emerging international norm, Responsibility to Protect (R2P). The tensions embedded in R2P as a “composite norm” are exposed, and the ways in which China has responded to these tensions. While not accepting an expansive interpretation of R2P, neither has China sought to reject it. Having attacked the norm within the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2001 and accepted it as institutionalized at the UN World Summit in 2005, China has consistently advanced a particular interpretation of R2P, impacting the evolution in the understanding of the norm and conditioning its implementation. China’s agenda has thus been as a norm-shaper, following a “bottom-up-and-back” dynamic, which involves both top-down and bottom-up logics of norm-shaping at the stages of institutionalization and implementation of the emerging international norm.
“Demokratischer Frieden nach außen und innen? Der Forschungsstand zum Civil Democratic Peace” (mit Hans-Joachim Spanger), in: Hans-Joachim Spanger (Hg.), Der demokratische Unfrieden, Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2012.