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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (26)
How does the presence of multiple combatants affect rebel groups’ ideological and demand positioning? Although violent forms of inter-group conflict have been widely studied in the civil war literature, rebel groups’ strategic use of ideology and demands has received scarce scholarly attention. We argue that the pressure of competition forces rebel...
Whether they train police forces in Afghanistan or provide military assistance to governments in Africa that are battling rebel groups, private military and security companies (PMSCs), or corporations that provide security and military services for profit, have been present in numerous conflicts around the globe. In 1984 only one international PMSC...
This chapter highlights key findings and theoretical contribution of the book. It delineates policy recommendations based on the study of PMSCs’ interventions into civil wars and suggests that awarding contracts based on non-cost factors such as companies’ reputation for corporate professionalism and positive media coverage could increase the selec...
What is the significance of local or conflict-level competition on PMSCs’ military effectiveness? And what is the mechanism through which such competition improves PMSCs’ accountability? This chapter argues that variation in local competition, the number of PMSCs that operate in a given conflict zone, affects the level of accountability to the clie...
This chapter describes existing international, domestic, and industry-wide approaches to improving PMSCs’ accountability in conflicts. It argues that monitoring PMSCs in the conflict zone remains a challenge for weak and strong states, though the problem is less severe for the latter, and limits PMSCs’ military effectiveness. The chapter argues tha...
Existing research on the impact of external interventions into civil wars focuses mostly on states and international organizations. With the expansion of private military and security companies’ (PMSCs) presence in civil wars, there is a need to better understand the impact of such non-state actors on conflict dynamics. This chapter highlights the...
The rise of global competition marked by the expansion of the private military and security industry has pushed companies to gain a competitive edge. To secure capital and, occasionally, to signal commitment to accountability in response to competition, some companies have changed their corporate structure and become publicly traded corporations. P...
This chapter presents the results of empirical analysis of local and global competition’s impact on PMSCs’ performance in civil wars from 1990 to 2008. Findings suggest that both market mechanisms contribute to conflict termination, but there is some limitation to the benefit. Mainly, local competition has a positive effect in major wars involving...
Why do individuals sympathize with others’ wars, an antecedent of the decision to become a foreign fighter? By collecting original public opinion data from Lebanon, in 2015, and Turkey in 2017, about the actors of conflict in Syria, we test the argument that an ethno-religious cleavage at home shapes the proclivity of individuals to support others’...
Domestic terrorist groups, like all violent nonstate actors, compete with governments for their monopoly on violence and their legitimacy in representing the citizenry. Battle for Allegiance shows violence is neither the only nor the most effective way in which nonstate actors and governments work to achieve their goals. As much as nonviolent strat...
PMSC training has the potential to improve state capacity, reduce the combatants’ opportunity and willingness to fight, and prolong the duration of peace. However, the benefit of PMSC training-related intervention over other types of PMSC interventions depends on the level of conflict complexity. Analysis of novel data on PMSC interventions and pea...
How does the presence of multiple combatants affect rebel groups’ ideological positioning? Although violent forms of inter-group conflict have been widely studied in the civil war literature, rebel groups’ strategic use of ideology has so far received scarce scholarly attention. We argue that the pressure of competition forces rebel groups to diffe...
Why does one terrorist group employ actions that win the hearts and minds of its constituency while another resorts to tactics that alienate their support? The paper investigates terrorist groups' strategy of building reputation in their constituency/in-group population and non-constitu-ency/out-group population. Studying all domestic terrorist gro...
Violence against civilians is not the only tool among the arsenal of terrorists; it is only one of many. Up until now, there did not exist any quantitative data on the different strategies adopted by terror groups that measured the group’s popularity or its public support. The Reputation of Terror Groups dataset (RTG) addresses this void. To unders...
The article analyzes the impact of private military companies (PMCs) on the duration of civil wars in Africa from 1990 to 2008. We develop an “opportunity structure” theory to argue that while PMCs are profit-oriented entities, the prevalent opportunities in conflicts will determine how they behave in war zones. Empirical findings for civil wars wi...
The paper investigates how states manage multiple rivalries when faced with immediate threats. We argue that accommodation of one rival allows states to shift resources from the management of another rival to deal with the costs of immediate threats. By examining enduring rivalries from 1966 to 1999, we show that states' reliance on accommodation i...
The article investigates how rebel interdependencies shape civil war outcomes. The author argues that alliances between rebel groups will have serious repercussions on the management of conflict. By examining civil war outcomes between 1946 and 2008, the author shows that the presence of multiple groups, alliances among rebels, the cumulative capab...
The paper investigates how states manage multiple rivalries when faced with an immediate threat. We argue that accommodation or cooperative gestures towards one rival allow states to shift resources from the management of one rivalry to another in order to deal with the costs of immediate threats By examining enduring rivalries from 1966-1999, we s...
Multimethod analysis of earthquakes’ effects in two enduring rivalries demonstrates that natural disaster can promote rapprochement, political steps toward warmer relations that make it difficult for interstate rivalry to continue. Public expression of compassion and support for rapprochement create audience costs for leaders who otherwise would ma...
What role have states involved in a rivalry with another state played in shaping the dynamics of their rival's civil wars? How can the existence of an interstate rival affect rebel calculations whether to continue fighting or stop the violence and negotiate? And to what extent does rival intervention differ in its impact on civil war duration from...