Steve Shellman’s research while affiliated with William & Mary and other places

Many scholars of contentious politics claim there is no such thing as a group that uses only one tactic, yet scholars, pundits, and the public routinely use single-minded terms like protestors, dissidents, and terrorists. Other scholars and research programs suggest that some groups are specialists who tend to stick to a single tactic to achieve their goals, such as non-violence, violence, or specific kinds of violence, like terror. We make the claim that both sides of the debate are empirically valid and that both types of group exist. That is, some groups tend to specialize in a single tactic while others use a variety of tactics. This paper examines the empirical distribution of group types by examining the mix of tactics that groups employ. The analysis helps resolve part of the debate and pushes scholarly thinking in new directions about how often, why, and when groups operate across this spectrum.

Automated event data extraction techniques have revolutionized the study of conflict dynamics through the ability of these techniques to generate large volumes of timely data measuring dynamic interactions among actors around the world. In this paper, we describe our approach for adapting these techniques to extract data on sentiments and emotions, which are theorized to crucially contribute to escalating and de-escalating conflict. Political scientists view political conflict as resulting from a series of strategic interactions between groups and individuals. Psychologists highlight additional factors in political conflict, such as endorsements and condemnations, the public's attitude toward its leaders, the impact of public attitudes on policy, and decisions to engage in armed conflict. This project combines these two approaches to examine hypotheses regarding the effects that different emotional impulses have on government and dissident decisions to escalate or de-escalate their use of hostility and violence. Across the two cases examined-the democratic Philippines and authoritative Egypt between 2001 and 2012-we found consistent evidence that intense societal fear of dissidents and societal disgust toward the government were associated with increases in dissident hostility. Conversely, societal anger toward dissidents was associated with a reduction in dissident hostility. However, we also found noticeable differences between the two regimes. We close the article with a summary of these similarities and differences, along with an assessment of their implications for future conflict studies.

Socio-Cultural Analysis (SCA) has evolved rapidly over the past decade as conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have forced the DOD to reappraise the techniques used to collect information about the populations in conflict zones. As these two major conflicts wind down, the DOD must recognize that SCA must evolve again due the changing responsibilities of phase zero operations while preparing for future conflicts. Given the challenges of declining DOD budgets while improving our SCA capabilities, the chapters in this white volume describe many of the issues facing the DOD for phase zero operations and collecting the socio-cultural information necessary should conflicts escalate. Most of the chapters’ discussions were heavily influenced by LTG Flynn et al.’s “Left of bang: The value of socio-cultural analysis in today’s environment” PRISM article. “Left of bang…” was also revised and included in the SMA/ERDC organized White Volume “National Security Challenges: Insights from Social, Neurobiological, and Complexity Sciences,” available at http://www.nsiteam.com/publications.html. The target audiences are planners, operators, and policy makers. With them in mind, the articles are intentionally kept short and written to stand alone. All the contributors have done their best to make their articles easily accessible.