Theodore Mclauchlin

Université de Montréal | UdeM · Department of Political Science

In Afghanistan, Libya, Liberia and beyond, armed rebellions have begun when armies fell apart. When does this occur? This paper conducts a large-N analysis of these army-splinter rebellions, distinct from both non-military rebellions from below and from coups, using new data. It finds that they follow a logic of state breakdown focusing on regime c...

Violence within armed groups in civil wars is important and understudied. Linking literatures on civil war violence and military politics, this article asks when this fratricidal violence targets soldiers who try to defect, and when it does not. It uses a unique data set of executions of officers on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. The...

Do Canadians’ preferences for Canada's role in the world depend on who Canada acts with and not just what Canada does? This question is particularly important in the context of overseas military intervention, which Canada never undertakes on its own. This paper presents a survey experiment measuring how support for a hypothetical peace operation ch...

This article examines the impact of military unit composition on desertion in civil wars. I argue that military units face an increased risk of desertion if they cannot develop norms of cooperation. This is a challenging task in the context of divided and ambiguous individual loyalties found in civil wars. Norms of cooperation emerge, above all, fr...

This article examines desertion in civil wars, focusing on the role of combatants’ hometowns in facilitating desertion. Analyzing data from the Spanish Civil War, the article demonstrates that combatants who come from hill country are considerably more likely to desert than combatants whose hometowns are on flat ground. This is because evasion is e...

Instability and conflict within African countries are on the rise. What are the best means for third parties to promote short-term crisis management and long-term conflict resolution in these situations? Often, these two tasks are at odds with one another, and certain approaches to intervention may be more or less effective. This study grapples wit...

Does repression increase or decrease unity within ethnic or nationalist movements? Conventional wisdom lends itself to two contradictory predictions. On one hand, it is said that conflict with an out-group is the surest path to unity in an in-group. On the other hand, repression exaggerates the gap between radicals and moderates in a movement. Chal...

What allows an armed group in a civil war to prevent desertion? This paper addresses this question with a focus on control in the rearguard. Most past studies focus on motivations for desertion. They explain desertion in terms of where soldiers stand in relation to the macro themes of the war, or in terms of an inability to provide positive incenti...

Two common strategies for maintaining military loyalty—individual incentives and ethnic preference—produce very different outcomes for defection of government troops when a rebellion arises outside the military. Since a strategy of individual incentives rests on a continuous judgment of regime strength, a rebellion can provoke a self-fulfilling pro...

Ethnic violence across many regions of Africa presents the international community with wrenching dilemmas and difficult decisions. While the images coming out of the Darfur region of Sudan are perhaps freshest in our minds, many other African countries have experienced outbreaks in the recent past – Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, the DRC, Rwanda, Liber...

Does repression increase or decrease a movement‘s internal fragmentation? Conventional wisdom lends itself to two contradictory predictions. On the one hand, it is frequently said that conflict with an out-group is the surest path to unity in an in-group. On the other hand, repression disrupts the existing organizational basis of a movement and the...

Abstract will be provided by author.

Abstract will be provided by author.