Atrocity over the Air: Violence, Collective Action, and Flight in Civil War
What explains the flight of civilians in civil war? Extant work has uncovered a series of variables shaping civilians' response to mass violence. However, violence was not strongly established as a causal determinant of displacement, and the social process behind this relationship requires further exploration. I develop a collective action theory of flight in civil war, arguing that civilians who struggle with uncertainty when making the decision to flee turn to rumour networks and social mimicking. Computer simulations show that these dynamics create a self-reinforcing process that leads to refugee stampedes. To test the theory, I use a natural experiment based on random variation in over-the-air radio reception to explore how exposure to news about the Deir Yassin massacre in the 1948 Palestine War impacted Palestinian decisions to flee. I find that villages with radio reception are more likely to flee after the massacre occurred; villages whose neighbours have reception are also more likely to flee; and flight as a result of the radio broadcasts further encourages the flight of neighbours. The study disentangles the far-reaching effects of salient violent events in war and provides robust evidence on a key social process underpinning refugee outflows.
Working Paper;
Presented in the Brasenose College Graduate Workshop and the T.E. Lawrence workshop at All Souls College at the University of Oxford.
My Neighbour, My Friend? The Logic of Intercommunal Cooperation During Armed Conflict
What determines whether the relationship between neighbouring communities will be violent or cooperative after war breaks out? Under what conditions does local interethnic collaboration to resist violence emerge and survives? In this study, I present a model explaining the behaviour of communal leaders and how they change patterns of displacement and create surprising cooperation in the shadow of widespread violence. I argue that they face uncertainty over the probability of occupation by the rival, which is what determines the character of inter-communal relations. They thus turn to macrolevel heuristics—signals from the interstate, state, and substate systems—to estimate this probability and guide their decision-making. I test the model using original data on displacement and inter-village mutual protection agreements during the Palestinian Exodus (1947-1949). I show that the agreements were signed where the UN partition plan indicated a mutual threat of occupation and repeated interaction, and that these stopped civilian displacement on the condition that military occupation happened before national and regional political developments provided new information. I support the mechanism with qualitative case study evidence and counter alternative explanations with a series of tests.
Under review;
Presented in the Brasenose College Graduate Workshop, DPIR PRS seminar and DPhil workshop, the T.E. Lawrence workshop at All Souls College and the DPIR DPhil work in progress lecture series, at the University of Oxford, and the Nuffield Conflict Dynamics Workshop and 35th Annual meeting of Italian Political Science Association (SISP).
Does social cohesion explain variation in violence within divided cities? In line with insights drawn from the ethnic politics, criminology, and urban geography literature we suggest that explaining variation in inter-group violence is not possible by relying on motivational elements alone, and attention to social cohesion is required as well. While cohesion can facilitate collective action that aids violent mobilization, it can also strengthen social order that contributes to the group’s capability to control and prevent unrest. We test these relationships using an application of a latent variable model to an integration of survey results, crime data, and expert-coded data in order to measure cohesion in East Jerusalem neighborhoods. We then analyze its impact on riots using three original geo-located datasets recording violence in the neighborhoods between the years 2013-2015. Our results reveal that even with controls for economic and political determinants of violence, as well as for spatial clustering and temporal explanations, neighborhood-level social cohesion is a robust explanatory variable - it negatively correlates with riots.
With Dan Miodownik
Published, Studies in Conflict and Terrorism
Open access: https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2022.2074394
Bloody Pasts and Current Politics: The Political Legacies of Violent Resettlement
How does guilt over historical events affect hawkish and nationalist voting? Recent studies have argued that profiteering from violence leads to support for the far right. We extend this fledgling literature with new theoretical insights and original data from Israel. Exploiting the coercion during the settlement of Jewish migrants on rural lands, we show that living on lands taken from Palestinians consistently led to hawkish right-wing voting—even seventy years after the violence occurred and despite the widespread rejection of guilt for actions during the war. On the basis of cognitive-dissonance theory, we also show that increased exposure to the ruins of the displaced villages increased right-wing voting and that the impact of intergroup contact is divergent: it decreased intolerant voting in most villages but increased it among Jewish communities that reside on violently taken land. The size of the effect did not decrease after the 1967 war but did increase after the Oslo negotiations. Our results are robust when matching is used to account for varied controls and spatiotemporal dependencies. The study explains the historic roots of rejection of compromise in Israel and advances our understanding of the impact of violent property transfers on the intractability of conflicts.
With Dan Miodownik
Forthcoming, Comparative Political Studies
Presented in the 2021 NEPS 20th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference and the T.E. Lawrence Graduate Workshop on Conflict and Violence in All Souls College, University of Oxford
Legacies of Survival: Historical Violence and Ethnic Minority Behavior
How is the electoral behavior of minorities shaped by past violence? Recent studies found that displacement increases hostility between perpetrators and their direct victims, but there has been paltry research on the communities that survived cleansing and were left behind. We argue that surviving communities exhibit the opposite pattern because of their different condition. Violence will cause vulnerability, fear and risk-aversion—leading the surviving communities to seek protection and avoid conflict by signalling loyalty and rejecting nationalist movements. In their situation as an excluded minority in the perpetrators’ state, they will be more likely to vote for out-group parties. Exploiting exogenous battlefield dynamics that created inter-regional variation in the Palestinian exodus, microlevel measurements that capture the damage of violence, and an original longitudinal data set, we show that more severely impacted surviving Palestinian villages in Israel have a much higher vote share to Jewish parties even seventy years later. Survey evidence supports our proposed mechanism, revealing that individuals who suffered from displacement are more likely to be fearful and insecure.
With Dan Miodownik
Forthcoming, Journal of Conflict Resolution
Presented in the 2022 Davis Institute 10th Euroasian Peace Science Conference, the 2022 International Studies Association Conference in Nashville, and the 21st NEPS Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference. To be presented in the Houses in Conflict Network (HiCN) 2022 Workshop.
Awarded a commendation in the Yonatan Fein Best Thesis Award Competition by the Israeli Political Science Association
The Impact of International Intervention on Attitudes towards the State: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
How do international interventions shape public opinion? Scholars consistently point at the problem of local legitimacy in international interventions and the challenge of sustainable state-building. However, and despite the extant literature on the effects of peacekeeping, there has been paltry quantitative research on how peace operations affect local political attitudes. In this research note, I argue that UN interventions aid state coercion by reinforcing its capability to deter but weaken the social legitimacy of the state by signaling its failure at independently keeping the peace and violating its sovereignty. Such interventions also lead to execrated nationalism that limits the ability of external actors to lead a long-term change. I test these claims with a natural experiment in Mali, exploiting an interrupted survey design to study the effect of security council authorization of an African-Union-led counterinsurgency operation. I find that this decision led to an increase in the favorable rating of the AU but a decrease in trust in the Malian army. It also increased both willingness to obey governmental decisions and nationalism. A Difference-in-Difference analysis shows that proximity to peacekeepers is associated with a willingness to obey the government also in the long term. The results lend strong support to recent models of foreign-imposed nation-building and stress the need to consider local popular opinion in international policy.
Working paper; presented in the 2022 UCL Conflict & Change Doctoral Workshop.