Week 3 - Micro/ Meso Explanations of War - Collective Action Flashcards
(21 cards)
Why rebel?
Dissatisfaction with the status quo
o Relative political, economic, social deprivation (Gurr, 1970)
o Political opportunity
What is the ideal scenario of a violent rebellion and why is it harder than it sounds?
Violent rebellion is an option to change the status quo.
- Ideal scenario:
o Find fellow disgruntled citizens to join your cause
o Build an insurgency
o Force government to concede - Sounds easier than it is. Why?
o Rebellion may end victorious (Zimbabwe 1980)
o But chances of losing are high (Chechnya)
-> In both cases participation is highly risky and costly.
What is a public good and what are its criteria?
Public good: A good that is hard or even impossible to produce for private profit. It meets two criteria:
- Non-rivalry: its benefits fail to exhibit consumption scarcity; once it has been produced, everyone can benefit from it without diminishing other’s enjoyment.
- Non-excludability: once it has been created, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to prevent access to the good.
What is the relation of rebellion and public goods according to Kalyvas & Kocher 2007?
‘Rebel groups typically claim public goods as their goals, with secession, autonomy, democratization, and redistribution appearing to be the most common.’ (Kalyvas & Kocher 2007, 181)
Explain the rebels dilemma.
- For rebellions to successfully organize, individuals have to participate.
- But participation is costly! Why would anyone subject themself to these costs and risk?
- If the rebellion should succeed, everyone would benefit from the system change, even those who don’t’ participate.
-> Free Riding!
Explain Free-Riding according to Olson 1965
For each individual, it may be rational to not contribute (or minimally contribute), but reap the benefits from others contributing (Olson 1965)
What are the (selected) solutions to the rebels dilemma?
- Changing material incentives to participate
- Ideology
- Rebel institutions/ self-government
- Introducing hierarchy (e.g. through decentralization)
(There are more, these were the selected in the slides)
What did Kalyvas and Kocher 2007 say regarding: Beyond initial rebellion: is free-riding really so free?
- How costless is the nonparticipation in rebellion really?
- The rebel’s dilemma is only valid if collective action is risky relative to nonparticipation
- Relative risk of nonparticipation is dependent on government behavior:
o Large-scale, indiscriminate violence by governments against civilians may increase cost of nonparticipation, and stimulate growth of rebellion
What did Parkinson 2013 say to the role of organizational and social context beyond the individual mobilization?
- Not all rebels fight at the frontlines: public relations, smugglers, accountants, diplomats, informants, etc.
- Everyday social networks (kindship, marriage, friendship, colleagues) central to mobilization, organization, growth, and resilience of rebellion
- Social networks (e.g. among women) as backbone of rebellion
What did Shesterinina 2016 say to the role of social structures and threat perception beyond the individual mobilization?
- High-risk mobilization particularly hard to explain, especially when rebels lack weapons, training, or other resources
- How do individuals form their threat perception in civil war?
- Social structures and networks filter information and lead to collective threat framing
When does a rebellion become a civil conflict?
- Involves the state and at least one organized and armed non-state actor
- A contested incompatibility that concerns government and/or territory where the use of armed force [reaches a certain threshold] (see UCDP, as discussed in session 1)
What are the types of civil conflicts and what are the respective goals?
Territorial conflicts
- Separatist conflicts: Non-state actor wants to separate a territory to form an independent state (e.g. S. Sudan/Sudan)
- Irredentist conflicts: Non-state actor wants to detach a territory from one country and ‘reunite’ it with territory in/of another country (e.g. Catholics in Northern Ireland/Ireland, Serbs in Croatia/Bosnia-Herzegovina)
Conflicts about the government
- Non-state actors try to seize control of the government (e.g. Free Syrian Army in Syria)
Regarding the types of civil conflict, what are the types of warfare according to Kalyvas & Balcells 2010?
- Conventional warfare: military technologies between state and non-state actors are symmetric. Non-state actors can directly confront the state.
- Irregular warfare: (or insurgency/asymmetric warfare): asymmetric military capabilities that priviledge the state. Non-state actors can challenge and harass the state, but lack the capacity to confront in a direct and frontal way.
- Symmetric, non-conventional warfare: both sides lack advanced military capabilities (e.g. in case of weak states)
Regarding the types of civil conflicts, what about the number of actors?
- Conventional two actor conflicts with one non-state armed group challenging the state
- Multi-actor conflicts
o Multiple non-state actors
o External supporters (on either side)
o Tend to last longer
o Veto players make solutions harder (Cunningham 2006)
o Infighting, free-riding?
Summarize civil conflicts as dynamic processes, the implications of this and what was said as more generally to this.
- Civil conflict is only possible if at least two armed actors (government and non-state) are involved
- Implication:
o To understand conflict, we have to look at rebel behavior, government behavior, and interaction (⇒ strategic interaction)
o Both rebel behavior (and characteristics) and state behavior (and characteristics) crucial to understanding civil conflict
More generally: conflict outbreak, dynamics, duration, and termination are highly complex, may be driven by different factors, and therefore need to be analyzed separately.
What are the political economy explanations of civil war onset?
- Collier & Hoeffler (1998, 2004): opportunity structure favorable to greedy bandit rebellion
- Fearon & Laitin (2003: 88) “the conditions that favor insurgency, in particular state weakness marked by poverty, a large population, and instability”
- Both explanations:
o focus on structural conditions
o mechanism: rebellion individually beneficial
o unit of analysis: country-year
o GDP per capita main indicator for both!
o Subsequent, related work: natural resources (diamonds, contraband, oil, etc.) that create political economies of conflict that sustain long conflict
What role does ethnicity play in civil conflict? Explain nationalism and the approach of cederman, wimmer and min.
- Nationalism: ‘collective action designed to render the boundaries of the nation congruent with those of its governance unit’ (Michael Hechter)
- Cederman, Wimmer and Min (2010)
o Drawing on Gurr (1998, 2000)
o Distinction between included and excluded groups
= Grievances: politicized ethnicity -> collective action
= Appropriate unit of analysis: group-level
Name some consequences of civil conflict and the key predictor of future conflict.
- Economic consequences (development in reverse)
- Social consequences (health and education)
- Long-term psychological consequences
- Forced internal and international displacement
- Risk of long-term militarization and violence, beyond conflict
- Conflict recurrence: previous conflicts as key predictor for future conflicts
Explain the assumption and the aims of conflict prediction.
- Assumption: with enough lead time, policymakers (both domestic and international) and first responders could make better choices of how to deal with upcoming crises, and possibly even work to prevent them.
- Conflict prediction aims to build models that will help assesses the probability of civil conflict. These models may aim at predicting conflict onset, escalation, continuation, and geographic diffusion.
- To build prediction models we need to have some theoretical understanding about why and how conflict occurs
- But: Significant relationship does not mean something is also useful for prediction
- To evaluate explanations for conflict: test the predictive power!
Explain Early warning and early action with regard to civil conflict.
- Early warning: Can our explanations for civil conflict onset help us explain where and when conflict is likely to erupt? -> Empirical (scientific) question
- Early action: How can we use early warning to prevent and mitigate the escalation of political violence into civil conflict? -> Political question
What did Parkinson argue regarding success prediction of a rebellion?
- Parkinson argues that ‘although back-end military practices such as resupply, logistics, and finance are understudied, these roles are central to sustaining rebellion’ (p. 430)
