Jacob N. Shapiro

Princeton University | PU · Department of Politics

How can societies effectively reduce crime without exacerbating adversarial relationships between the police and citizens? In recent decades, perhaps the most celebrated innovation in police reform has been the introduction of community policing, where citizens are involved in building channels of dialogue and improving police-citizen collaboration...

Why do modern states allow parts of their territory to be governed by non‐state actors? We study this question using the Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) in Pakistan, a British Colonial law abrogated only in 2018, which left governance to pre‐colonial tribal councils in large parts of modern day Pakistan. In areas where the FCR did not apply, the B...

Previous research suggested that supervised machine learning can be utilized to detect information operations (IO) on social media. Most of the related research assumes that the new data will always be available in the exact timing that models set to be updated. In practice, however, the detection and attribution of IO accounts is time-consuming. T...

For nearly seventy years, CERN has been a center of gravity for physics and a model for how to support large-scale research collaboration across numerous different countries. Given the challenges facing democracy today related to the information environment, a similar level of effort is required for research on the information environment.

This article introduces a dataset on the covert use of social media to influence politics by promoting propaganda, advocating controversial viewpoints, and spreading disinformation. Influence efforts (IEs) are defined as: (i) coordinated campaigns by a state, or the ruling party in an autocracy, to impact one or more specific aspects of politics at...

Policy debates on strategies to end extremist violence frequently cite poverty as a root cause of support for the perpetrating groups. There is little evidence to support this contention, particularly in the Pakistani case. Pakistan's urban poor are more exposed to the negative externalities of militant violence and may in fact be less supportive o...

Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision is probably the most influential book in the field of intelligence studies. As David Sherman explains, however, government officials attempted to block its publication due to security concerns that seemed to focus on Wohlstetter’s passing reference to World War II SIGINT. Because Sherman’s hi...

Easier said than done High-profile instances of police brutality in the last few years have brought attention to patterns of abuse that have existed since the inception of modern policing. There have been many calls for police reform, a process that in many countries has taken the form of increased police engagement with communities. Blair et al ....

Despite ongoing discussion of the need for increased regulation and oversight of social media, as well as debate over the extent to which the platforms themselves should be responsible for containing misinformation, there is little consensus on which interventions work to address the problem of influence operations and disinformation campaigns. To...

Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic, yet few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in lower-income countries, where large-scale vaccination is just beginning. We analyze COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 survey samples covering 10 low-...

With the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic came a flood of novel misinformation. Ranging from harmless false cures to dangerous rhetoric targeting minorities, coronavirus-related misinformation spread quickly wherever the virus itself did. Fact-checking organizations around the world took up the charge against misinformation, essentially crowdso...

Since 2015, there has been a huge increase in laws that ostensibly seek to counter misinformation. Since the pandemic began, this trend has only accelerated. Both authoritarian and democratic governments have introduced more new policies to fight misinformation in 2019 and in 2020. In authoritarian states pandemic-related misinformation provided a...

Background As vaccination campaigns are deployed worldwide, addressing vaccine hesitancy is of critical importance to ensure sufficient immunization coverage. We analyzed COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 samples covering ten low- and middle- income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa, and South America, and two higher income countries (Russia an...

Scholars of civil war and insurgency have long posited that insurgent organizations and their state enemies incur costs for the collateral damage they cause. We provide the first direct quantitative evidence that wartime informing to counterinsurgent forces is affected by civilian victimization. Using newly declassified data on tip flow to Coalitio...

We study how easy it is to distinguish influence operations from organic social media activity by assessing the performance of a platform-agnostic machine learning approach. Our method uses public activity to detect content that is part of coordinated influence operations based on human-interpretable features derived solely from content. We test th...

This chapter discusses the challenges of studying sensitive attitudes and topics in fragility, conflict, and violence settings and summarizes the most common approaches to overcoming them. The first section reviews the challenges involved in studying sensitive attitudes and the factors that could introduce bias and affect the validity of such resea...

The movement of many human interactions to the internet has led to massive volumes of text that contain high-value information about individual choices pertaining to risk and uncertainty. But unlocking these texts’ scientific value is challenging because online texts use slang and obfuscation, particularly so in areas of illicit behavior. Utilizing...

Societal-scale data is playing an increasingly prominent role in social science research; examples from research on geopolitical events include questions on how emergency events impact the diffusion of information or how new policies change patterns of social interaction. Such research often draws critical inferences from observing how an exogenous...

In emerging democracies, elections are encouraged as a route to democratization. However, not only does violence often threaten these elections, but citizens often view as corrupt the security forces deployed to combat violence. We examine the effects of such security provision. In Afghanistan's 2010 parliamentary election, polling centers with sim...

Historians and some scholars of international relations have long argued that historical contingencies play a critical role in the evolution of the international system, but have not explained whether they do so to a greater extent than in other domains or why such differences may exist. The authors address these lacunae by identifying stable diffe...

As the world's most traded commodity, oil production is typically well monitored and analyzed. It also has established links to geopolitics, international relations, and security. Despite this attention, the illicit production, refining, and trade of oil and derivative products occur all over the world and provide significant revenues outside of th...

Recent empirical evidence suggests an ambiguous relationship between internal conflicts, state capacity and tax performance. In theory, internal conflict should create strong incentives for governments to develop the fiscal capacity necessary to defeat rivals. We argue that one reason that this does not occur is because internal conflict enables gr...

Politically-driven corruption is a pervasive challenge for development, but evidence of its welfare effects are scarce. Using data from a major rural road construction programme in India we document political influence in a setting where politicians have no official role in contracting decisions. Exploiting close elections to identify the causal ef...

Contemporary development assistance often takes the form of subcontracted state-building. Foreign donors hire for-profit firms to provide services and to improve or create institutions in developing countries, particularly those experiencing internal conflict. This arrangement creates two counterproductive dynamics: first, it introduces agency prob...

How natural disasters affect politics in developing countries is an important question, given the fragility of fledgling democratic institutions in some of these countries as well as likely increased exposure to natural disasters over time due to climate change. Research in sociology and psychology suggests traumatic events can inspire pro-social b...

Military commanders in wartime have moral obligations to abide by international norms and humanitarian laws governing their treatment of noncombatants. How much risk to their own forces they must take to limit harm to civilians in the course of military operations, however, is unclear. The principle of proportionality in the law of armed conflict a...

How natural disasters affect politics in developing countries is an important question given the fragility of fledgling democratic institutions in some of these countries as well as likely increased exposure to natural disasters over time due to climate change. Research in sociology and psychology suggests traumatic events can inspire pro-social be...

A large literature has emerged in political science that studies the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This article summarizes the lessons learned from this literature, both theoretical and practical. To put this emerging knowledge base into perspective, we review findings along two dimensions of conflict: factors influencing whether states or substate...

Challenging conventional wisdom, previous research in South Asia and the Middle East has shown that poverty and exposure to violence are negatively correlated with support for militant organizations. Existing studies, however, provide evidence consistent with two potential mechanisms underlying these relationships: (1) the direct effects of poverty...

When studying sensitive issues, including corruption, prejudice, and sexual behavior, researchers have increasingly relied upon indirect questioning techniques to mitigate such known problems of direct survey questions as underreporting and nonresponse. However, there have been surprisingly few empirical validation studies of these indirect techniq...

A large literature has emerged in political science that studies the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This paper summarizes the lessons learned from this literature, both theoretical and practical. To put this emerging knowledge base into perspective we review findings along two dimensions of conflict: factors influencing whether states or sub-state g...

Recent work has shown that the introduction of mobile communications can substantially alter the course of conflict. In Afghanistan and India targeting mobile communications is a central part of the insurgent campaigns. The opposite was true in Iraq. There insurgents instead threatened providers who did not do enough to maintain mobile phone networ...

Does improved communication provided by modern cellphone technology affect the rise or fall of violence during insurgencies? A priori predictions are ambiguous; introducing cellphones can enhance insurgent communications but can also make it easier for the population to share information with counterinsurgents and creates opportunities for signals...

This article presents the BFRS Political Violence in Pakistan dataset addressing its design, collection and utility. BFRS codes a broad range of information on 28,731 incidents of political violence from January 1988 to November 2011. For each incident we record the location, consequences, cause, type of violence and party responsible as specifical...

A long-standing research tradition on political culture argues that greater support for core liberal values leads to a rejection of destructive political activities and reduced support for violent politics. In this vein, many contemporary analysts of security policy contend that a lack of democratic values in the Middle East promotes the developmen...

From 2004 to mid-2007, Iraq was extremely violent. Iraqi civilian fatalities averaged more than 1,500 a month by August 2006; by late fall the US military was suffering a monthly toll of almost 100 dead and 700 wounded.

This chapter explores the managerial challenges inherent in terrorism by analyzing 108 memoirs written by participants in terrorist organizations that carried descriptions of individual's activities in those organizations. This approach addresses one of the key challenges in studying the internal dynamics of terrorist organizations: the relative de...

This chapter turns to the Middle East, assessing the organizational evolution of the main Palestinian terrorist groups from 1989 through 2005. In addition to testing hypotheses about the relationship between preference divergence and control, the Palestinian case allows one to compare an Islamist group (the religious-nationalist Hamas) to a secular...

How do terrorist groups control their members? Do the tools that groups use to monitor their operatives and enforce discipline create security vulnerabilities that governments can exploit? This is the first book to systematically examine the great variation in how terrorist groups are structured. Employing a broad range of agency theory, historical...

Participating in insurgency is physically risky. Why do people do so? Using new data on 3,799 payments to insurgent fighters by Al Qa'ida Iraq, we find that: (i) wages were extremely low relative to outside options, even compared to unskilled labor; (ii) the estimated risk premium is negative; and (iii) the wage schedule favors equalization and pro...

Americans are inclined to remember their nation's wars victoriously. "Let it be remembered," President Barack Obama told the Minneapolis American Legion veterans of the Vietnam War on August 30, 2011, "that you won every major battle of that war." He repeated this message on May 28, 2012, during the commemoration ceremony of the fiftieth anniversar...

Most interpretations of prevalent counterinsurgency theory imply that increasing government services will reduce rebel violence. Empirically, however, development programs and economic activity sometimes yield increased violence. Using new panel data on development spending in Iraq, we show that violence reducing effects of aid are greater when (a)...

How do terrorist groups control their members? Do the tools groups use to monitor their operatives and enforce discipline create security vulnerabilities that governments can exploit? The Terrorist's Dilemma is the first book to systematically examine the great variation in how terrorist groups are structured. Employing a broad range of agency theo...

Around the world, publics confronted with terrorism have debated whether Islamic faith gives rise to a uniquely virulent strain of non-state violence targeted at civilians. These discussions almost always conceive of "Islam" in general terms, not clearly defining what is meant by Islamic religious faith. We engaged this debate by designing and cond...

Terrorist groups repeatedly take actions that are ultimately politically counter-productive. Sometimes these are the result of deliberate calculations that happen to be mistaken - Al-Qaeda’s decision to conduct the 9/11 attacks is the most obvious example of an ultimately self-defeating operation. Sometimes they reflect the challenges groups face i...

Why did violence decline in Iraq in 2007? Many policymakers and scholars credit the "surge," or the program of U.S. reinforcements and doctrinal changes that began in January 2007. Others cite the voluntary insurgent stand-downs of the Sunni Awakening or say that the violence had simply run its course with the end of a wave of sectarian cleansing;...

Terrorist groups repeatedly include operatives of varying commitment and often rely on a common set of security-reducing bureaucratic tools to manage these individuals. This is puzzling in that covert organizations are commonly thought to screen their operatives very carefully and pay a particularly heavy price for record keeping. The authors use t...

Discussions of how to deal with terrorism around the world have repeatedly touched on whether Islam contributes to a uniquely virulent strain of non-state violence targeted at civilians. These popular debates almost always conceive of “Islam” in general terms, not clearly defining what is meant by Islamic religious faith. We address this debate by...

Political scientists have long been interested in citizens' support level for such actors as ethnic minorities, militant groups, and authoritarian regimes. Attempts to use direct questioning in surveys, however, have largely yielded unreliable measures of these attitudes as they are contaminated by social desirability bias and high nonresponse rate...

A long tradition of research into political culture argues that greater support for core liberal democratic values leads to a rejection of destructive political activities and reduced support for violent politics. Policymakers have long drawn on this line of enquiry, arguing that "exporting" democracy can reduce violent political activity such as t...

Does improved communication as provided by modern cell phone technology affect the production of violence during insurgencies? Theoretical predictions are ambiguous. On the one hand, cell phones are assumed to enhance communication among insurgents, thus making it possible for them to coordinate more effectively. On the other hand, mobile communica...

Combating militant violence - particularly within South Asia and the Middle East - stands at the top of the international security agenda. Much of the policy literature focuses on poverty as a root cause of support for violent political groups and on economic development as a key to addressing the challenges of militancy and terrorism. Unfortunatel...

This project will conduct econometric analysis of the relationship between terrorist activity and several variables including economic outcomes, development spending (mostly foreign aid), and public opinion. The PIs will use a range of data sources that they have developed such as the newly created database of geo-located incidents of political vio...

Two big assumptions fuel current mobilization against and policy discussions about the U.S. war on terror and its implications for human rights and international cooperation. First, terrorism creates strong pressures on governmentsespecially democraciesto restrict human rights. Second, these restrictions are not only immoral and illegal, but also c...

We use data from an innovative nationally representative survey of 6,000 Pakistanis in April 2009 to study beliefs about political Islam, Sharia, the legitimacy and efficacy of jihad, and attitudes towards specific militant organizations. These issues are the forefront of US policy towards Pakistan. Four results shed new light on the politics of mi...

We analyze a seemingly simple question: when should government share private information that may be useful to terrorists? Policy makers’ answer to this question has typically been ‘it is dangerous to share information which can potentially help terrorists.’ Unfortunately, this incomplete response has motivated a detrimental increase in the amount...

This program is designed to improve causal inference via a method of matching that is widely applicable in observational data and easy to understand and use (if you understand how to draw a histogram, you will understand this method). The program implements the coarsened exact matching (CEM) algorithm, described below. CEM may be used alone or in c...

Most aid spending by governments seeking to rebuild social and political order is based on an opportunity-cost theory of distracting potential recruits. The logic is that gainfully employed young men are less likely to participate in political violence, implying a positive correlation between unemployment and violence in locations with active insur...

Do armed actors in civil war reap strategic benefits from limiting civilian casualties and abiding by the laws of war? Furthermore, do civilians reward and punish armed actors for their behavior toward civilians? We study the strategic impact of civilian casualties in the Iraqi Civil War using original geo-coded data on Coalition-insurgent violence...

Rebuilding social and economic order in conflict and post-conflict areas will be critical for the United States and allied governments for the foreseeable future. Little empirical research has evaluated where, when, and how improving material conditions in conflict zones enhances social and economic order. We address this lacuna, developing and tes...

Islamist militancy in Pakistan has long stood atop the international security agenda, yet there is almost no systematic evidence about why individual Pakistanis support Islamist militant organizations. An analysis of data from a nationally representative survey of urban Pakistanis refutes four influential conventional wisdoms about why Pakistanis s...

A review of international terrorist activity reveals a pattern of financially strapped operatives working for organizations that seem to have plenty of money. To explain this observation, and to examine when restricting terrorists' funds will reduce their lethality, we model a hierarchical terror organization in which leaders delegate financial and...

This chapter organizes the conjectures from a rationalist literature on terrorist organizations, analyzing the strategic issues that they face and the consequences of their actions. From this perspective, terrorism is seen as one of a set of rebel tactics that is chosen in response to changes in five factors: funding, popular support, competition a...

An effective terrorism alert system in a federal government has one central task: to motivate actors to take costly protective measures. The United States' color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS) failed in this mission. In federal systems, national leaders cannot compel protective actions by setting an alert level; they must convince c...

This study, conducted by the faculty and research fellows of the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point, serves multiple purposes, the most important of which is contributing to the depth of knowledge about the al-Qa'ida movement. Evidence supporting the conclusions and recommendations provided in this report is drawn from a collection of n...

Evidence for the club theory has been collected on four groups: the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah and Sadr’s Militia (Berman, 2003; Berman and Laitin, 2005). One goal of this research project is to broaden the scope of the argument, looking at domestic conflicts beyond the four cases listed above, including nonreligious organizations in the analysis, a...

Combating militant violence—particularly within South Asia and the Middle East—stands at the top of the international security agenda. Despite the extensive literature on the determinants of political attitudes, little is known about who supports militant organizations and why. To address this gap we conducted a 6000-person, nationally-representati...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract Prodigious levels of bureaucracy in conventional, licit organizations are hardly sur- prising. Almost all organizations need to control agents with diverse preferences oper- ating in environments in which observable outcomes provide only noisy signals about actions. Bureaucracy eases this challenge by structuring interactions within the or...

Weinstein for tremendously helpful comments and criticisms.

Discussions of how to deal with terrorism around the world have repeatedly touched on whether Islam contributes to a uniquely virulent strain of non-state violence targeted at civilians. These popular debates almost always conceive of ―Islam‖ in general terms, not clearly defining what is meant by Islamic religious faith. We address this debate by...

Islamist militancy in Pakistan has long stood at the top of the international security agenda, yet there is almost no systematic evidence about why individual Pakistanis support Islamist militant organizations. We address this problem by using data from a nationally representative survey of urban Pakistanis to assess the correlates of support for s...