Robert A. Pape

• PhD
• Managing Director at University of Chicago

Why do some individuals with military experience support the insurrection of January 6? With US military veterans playing a central role in the assault on the US Capitol, answering this question is of immediate scholarly and policy concern. To better understand the impact of military service, we conducted the first nationally representative survey...

The Islamist group ISIS has been particularly successful at recruiting Westerners as terrorists. A hypothesized explanation is their simultaneous use of two types of propaganda: Heroic narratives, emphasizing individual glory, alongside Social narratives, which emphasize oppression against Islamic communities. In the current study, functional MRI w...

What are the local political, economic, and social conditions of the communities that sent insurrectionists to the US Capitol in support of Donald Trump? Using a new dataset of the home counties of individuals charged for the Capitol insurrection, we tested two prominent theories of electoral populism and support for populist leaders like Donald Tr...

The Islamist group ISIS has been particularly successful at recruiting Westerners as terrorists. A hypothesized explanation is their simultaneous use of two types of propaganda: Heroic narratives, emphasizing individual glory, alongside Social narratives, which emphasize oppression against Islamic communities. Functional MRI was used to measure bra...

This study presents an identity-centered narrative theory of high-risk political activism to explain how narratives engage with social identities, and how variation in narratives can be strategically deployed by political actors to engage different mobilization pools. Narratives are stories that persuade through identification with plot and charact...

Why do some individuals engage in high-risk mobilization in support of foreign militant groups, willingly sacrificing their possessions and even their lives as “martyrs”, when there is no imminent threat to the community within which they live or strong ties to the communities for which they sacrifice? We develop a new theory of high-risk mobilizat...

The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats presents the updated and expanded Database on Suicide Attacks (DSAT), which now links to Uppsala Conflict Data Program data on armed conflicts and includes a new dataset measuring the alliance and rivalry relationships among militant groups with connections to suicide attack groups. We asses...

The Islamic State (ISIS) was uniquely effective among extremist groups in the Middle East at recruiting Westerners. A major way ISIS accomplished this was by adopting Hollywood-style narrative structures for their propaganda videos. In particular, ISIS utilized a heroic martyr narrative, which focuses on an individual’s personal glory and empowerme...

Why are some people capable of sympathizing with and/or committing acts of political violence, such as attacks aimed at innocent targets? Attempts to construct terrorist profiles based on individual and situational factors, such as clinical, psychological, ethnic, and socio-demographic variables, have largely failed. Although individual and situati...

Does the religious calendar promote or suppress political violence in Islamic societies? This study challenges the presumption that the predominant impact of the Islamic calendar is to increase violence, particularly during Ramadan. This study develops a new theory that predicts systematic suppression of violence on important Islamic holidays, thos...

The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is mobilising sympathisers in the US at rates much higher than seen for previous terrorist groups, including al-Qaeda. To understand this new American face of ISIS, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) study examined 112 cases of individuals who perpetrated ISIS-related offences, were indic...

High rates of missing perpetrator information in political violence data poses a serious challenge for studies into militant group behavior and the microdynamics of conflict more generally. In this article we introduce multiple imputation (MI) as the best available method for minimizing the impact of missing perpetrator information on quantitative...

In a recently published piece, Robert Pape makes some misleading and erroneous comments on my published work. First, Pape writes, “Alex Bellamy, a staunch advocate of R2P [the responsibility to protect initiative], catalogues episodes of mass atrocities to clarify ‘R2P’s preventive agenda,’ with a total of twenty-one qualifying for intervention fro...

When should the United States and other members of the international community intervene to stop a government from harming its own citizens? Since World War II, the main standard for intervention has been the high bar of genocide, although the international community has rarely acted to stop it. The main alternative—the "responsibility to protect"—...

ALMOST every month for the past two years, Chechen suicide bombers have struck. Their targets can be anything from Russian soldiers to Chechen police officers to the innocent civilians who were killed on the subway in Moscow this week. We all know the horror that people willing to kill themselves can inflict. But do we really understand what drives...

Cutting the Fuse offers a wealth of new knowledge about the origins of suicide terrorism and strategies to stop it. Robert A. Pape and James K. Feldman have examined every suicide terrorist attack worldwide from 1980 to 2009, and the insights they have gleaned from that data fundamentally challenge how we understand the root causes of terrorist cam...

Research on terrorism is now in the midst of a period of rapid progress, much of which is embodied in the articles in this volume. Although our understanding of the phenomenon is still in its early stages, knowledge about the causes, conduct, and consequences of terrorism is accumulating. Important methodological advances have helped to make this p...

The commonly accepted interpretation is that a religious motive—the desire to please God—is the principal reason why people volunteer for suicide missions. American political scientist Robert A. Pape rejects this view. For him the common thread linking suicide bombers is a political objective— driving out an occupier from one’s homeland, which they...

Scott Ashworth, Joshua Clinton, Adam Meirowitz, and Kristopher Ramsay (2008) allege that I have committed the sin of sampling on the dependent variable by considering only the universe of suicide terrorist attacks rather than the universe of all imaginable instances when potential or actual terrorists might have committed suicide attacks, and so ca...

Traducción de Dying to Win por Marta Pino Moreno. El terrorismo suicida está en auge en todo el mundo, pero existe gran confusión en torno a los motivos que mueven esta tendencia. En este libro, el politólogo Robert Pape ha recopilado datos pioneros con el fin de estudiar los factores estratégicos, sociales e individuales que explican esta crecien...

The George W. Bush administration's national security strategy, which asserts that the United States has the right to attack and conquer sovereign countries that pose no observable threat, and to do so without international support, is one of the most aggressively unilateral U.S. postures ever taken. Recent international relations scholarship has w...

MANY Americans are mystified by the recent rise in the number and the audacity of suicide attacks in Iraq. The lull in violence after January's successful elections seemed to suggest that the march of democracy was trampling the threat of terrorism. But as electoral politics is taking root, the Iraqi insurgency and suicide terrorism are actually ga...

A former Air Force chief of staff argues that precision air weapons have changed warfare more than Robert Pape lets on; Pape fires back.

Precision air weapons have revolutionized modern warfare, but not by making it easier to kill enemy leaders. Decapitation alone still doesn't work; wars are still won by pummeling troops in the field. The new weaponry makes it easier to hammer the enemy's forces from the air--but only when they are kept in place by ground forces.

Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but the most common explanations do not help us understand why. Religious fanaticism does not explain why the world leader in suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a group that adheres to a Marxist/Leninist ideology, while existing psychological explanations have been contradicted by the w...

When do states pursue costly international moral actions? Although states, private charities, and the United Nations often engage in relatively inexpensive international moral efforts, such as development aid or disaster relief, states almost never pursue more expensive international moral goals requiring signi cant costs in national income, lives,...

Do economic sanctions "work"? Although the traditional answer to this question has been negative, Robert A. Pape contends that the past decade has witnessed "increased optimism about the utility of economic sanctions" by international relations scholars. In questioning this alleged optimism, he raises issues concerning the concept of eco- nomic san...

Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. I thank Randall Clark, Chaim Kaufmann, Michael Mastanduno, John Mearsheimer, Bradley Thayer, and Dennis Zacharopoulos for their thoughtful comments, and Patsy Carter and Stelios Zachariou for their timely research assistance. I would also like to thank the Earhart Foundation...

AIR POWER IS becoming increasingly important to American grand strategy. Air power projects force more rapidly and at less risk of life than land power and more formidably than naval power. These are valuable attributes for unpredictable crises that occur in places where the American public is unwilling to shed much blood. Thus, from Iraq to Bosnia...

Robert A. Pape is Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996). I greatly appreciate the comments of Robert Art, Michael Desch, Daniel Drezner, Fouad ElNaggar, Nelson Kasfir, Chaim Kaufmann, Lisa Martin, Michael Mastanduno, Jo...

The end of World War II in the Pacific is the most successful case of military coercion among modern nation-states. On August 15, 1945, Japan unconditionally surrendered to the United States, although it still possessed a two-million-man army in the home islands which was prepared and willing to meet any American invasion, as well as other forces o...

Robert A. Pape, Jr., is a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Post-doctoral Fellow in the Program for International Peace and Security Research, University of Michigan. He is currently completing a book on coercive bombing and bargaining. I greatly appreciate the careful comments of Daniel Bolger, Michael Brown, John Chapman, Michael Desch, Brian Do...