Book: Regular Soldiers, Irregular War: Violence and Restraint in the Second Intifada,  Cornell University Press, 2020.

Theories of violence against civilians in conflict have tended to view combatants in homogeneous terms, as the obedient pawns of military elites or as violence-prone thugs. In contrast, my research shows that combatant participation in violence is variable: While in some circumstances soldiers embrace violence eagerly, in others they refrain or shirk from it. I analyze variation in soldier participation in violence through a case study of Israel's counterinsurgency campaign against the Second Intifada, the Palestinian insurgency of 2000-2005. The core argument is that levels of violence and restraint vary as a result of social control mechanisms at the small unit level. I show that shifting modes of military control produce three distinct types of combatant violence – strategic, entrepreneurial, and opportunistic – each associated with different behaviors and patterns of participation. The project was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation.