Cascades of Violence

War and crime are cascade phenomena. War cascades across space and time to more war; crime to more crime; crime cascades to war; and war to crime. As a result, war and crime become complex phenomena. That does not mean we cannot understand how to prevent crime and war simultaneously. This book shows, for example, how a cascade analysis leads to an understanding of how refugee camps are nodes of both targeted attack and targeted recruitment into violence. Hence, humanitarian prevention also must target such nodes of risk. This book shows how nonviolence and nondomination can also be made to cascade, shunting cascades of violence into reverse. Complexity theory implies a conclusion that the pursuit of strategies for preventing crime and war is less important than understanding meta strategies. These are meta strategies for how to sequence and escalate many redundant prevention strategies. These themes were explored across seven South Asian societies during eight years of fieldwork

Judging Their Own: When and Why States Pursue Accountability for Human Rights Violations of Security Forces

abstract: What explains why governments and militaries pursue accountability against some human rights violations committed by members of their armed forces during ongoing conflicts, but not other violations? Further, what are the consequences of such prosecutions for their military and governmental objectives? The theory put forth by this study suggests that rather than only the natural outcome of strong rule of law, domestic prosecutions within a state’s security apparatus represents a strategic choice made by political and military actors. I employ a strategic actor approach to the pursuit of accountability, suggesting that the likelihood of accountability increases when elites perceive they will gain politically or militarily from such actions. I investigate these claims using both qualitative and quantitative methods in a comparative study across the United States and the United Kingdom. This project contributes to interdisciplinary scholarly research relevant to human rights studies, human rights law, political science, democratic state-building, democratic governance, elite decision making, counter-insurgency, protests, international sanctions, and conflict resolution. Particularly, this dissertation speaks to the intersection of strategy and law, or “lawfare” a method of warfare where law is used as means of realizing a military objective (Dunlap 2001). It provides generalizable results extending well beyond the cases analyzed. Thus, the results of this project will interest those dealing with questions relating to legitimacy, human rights, and elite decision making throughout the democratic world.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Political Science 201

Evolutions in Suicide Bombing: Exploring the Relationship Between the Tactic and Its Application by Non-state Armed Groups Across Various Conflict Zones Over Time

The following dissertation considers variations in the use of suicide bombing by Non-State Armed Groups (NSAGs), at the organizational level of analysis. It is both a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the conditions under which insurgents that accept the practice’s legitimacy have applied it to a range of specified target sets. The broad focus of this endeavor centers on unpacking insurgent groups’ behaviors across a number of unique battlespaces, but the main question I seek to answer is: what decision dynamics accompany violent non-state actors’ use of suicide bombing and how do we interpret their behavioral interaction across various conflict zones, so as to better illuminate why they continue to attack in this way? Put differently, what does suicide bombing, as an operational-level tactic as opposed to a presumably fully developed strategy, reveal about NSAGs who use it? I also explore a more narrowly tailored sub-set of questions that aim to uncover why insurgents that do use it, do so in different ways, which also entails an analysis of non-suicide bombing attacks against the same range of target sets. To that end, I explore the ways suicide bombing is used by several organizations, within a variety of combat venues, as a means for better understanding its uses; namely, adapting to and shaping, unique battlespaces. I find that organizations such as al-Qa’ida (AQ) are more sensitive to branding/re-branding dynamics associated with the targeting of civilians, while others such as Islamic State (IS) incorporate suicide bombing as a key component of their war arsenal against civilian, security, and competitor target sets. This may explain why it generally tended to be the case in multiple venues that AQ didn’t practice suicide bombing against IS, but IS did so against AQ. The exploratory nature of my work can be seen in the methodological approach I take, which extracts data points and re-forms them as variables that can be scrutinized further. This has implications for policy, theory, and epistemology. In policy terms, I elucidate the need to consider suicide bombing as an instrumental means for achieving objectives that are positioned below the threshold of a fully developed strategy. Theoretically, in contrast to a leading explanation for the practice, I am able to say with some confidence that the presence of foreign militaries has had little to no impact on the use of suicide bombing. Epistemologically, disaggregating target types, based on the dataset’s existing narratives, is a viable path for better understanding how suicide bombing violence is used by non-state actors

Analysis and Assessment of Islamic State’s military strategy in Iraq (2011-2015)

Because many militant groups from the Islamist political landscape and beyond have suffered extinction, survival of insurgent groups in a context of insecurity and rivalry is not a fact. In 2010, the Islamic State in Iraq was near extinction and considered as defeated by a myriad of enemies regrouping 400 000 fighters (the US and Iraqi forces and militias). Four years later, it was able to control a significant part of the Iraqi and Syrian soil, outperform all Islamist groups in history, proclaim a caliphate and export its model, which will have long-lasting consequences at regional and international levels. This thesis seeks to explain the group’s resurgence from 2011 to 2015 by adopting a provincial perspective and with the theoretical framework of the indirect approach. By introducing a categorisation of operations based on their confrontational nature, this investigation tries to understand IS’ military effort in Iraq from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. In addition, a study of its relations with challenging social structures (tribes and insurgent groups) and an analysis of the group’s propaganda frames give us the possibility to determine how the group introduced more flexibility in its overall strategy and articulated a particular discourse in order to attract deprived Sunni Iraqis during the 2012 Iraqi protests. The main contribution of using this model is to explain IS’ past resurgence and enrich the existing literature with a complementary explanation of the group tactics and rapid morphing from a guerrilla to conventional warfare. This research project possesses the following creative elements: it provides a detailed and in-depth account of Islamic State’s strategy, applies theoretical frameworks from security studies to it and offers a better understanding of the group´s political behaviour by analysing its interactions with a range of actors ranging from its social incubator to competitive social structures and ideological rivals. It aims to expand on the idea of the Islamic State as an insurgent group that has adopted a repertoire of different strategies to establish an expansive caliphate by closely examining its adoption of the indirect approach and its execution at the operational levels of war

Organizational images : towards a model of organizations

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, June 2012.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-94).This study develops a general theoretical framework for the analysis of organizational behavior by focusing on the notion that organizations develop unique information-processing frameworks, which it labels "organizational images" or "images of operations," that strongly determine their behavior. The model is then used to draw inferences about the forms of counterinsurgency strategies practiced by the US military in the second war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan. The paper argues that militaries tend to view the tasks they undertake in terms of the coercive application of force, and that this tendency tends to determine the forms of counterinsurgency strategies they chose, leading them to eschew strategies that rely on bargaining with enemy forces. The purported dominance of this coercive "image of operations" is then investigated in military field reports from the war in Afghanistan.by Krishnan, Neel.S.M

Organizational learning dysfunction in counterinsurgency

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 2008.Includes bibliographical references.Two puzzles dominate the study of organizational learning and counterinsurgency. First, militaries often struggle to develop effective strategies to address the problem of counterinsurgency. Second, their strategic performance seldom improves over successive counterinsurgency campaigns. This study offers a theoretical explanation for these dominant patterns of learning dysfunction. It argues that a set of closely held, professional beliefs - the military operational code - and bureaucratic preferences distort the organizations' initial response, subsequent adaptation and interwar retention. The military operational code leads militaries to misunderstand counterinsurgency in a systematic and debilitating fashion; bureaucratic interests lead them to reject the most effective strategies once they have been uncovered. When militaries manage to break with this dysfunctional pattern, it because their professional judgment is constrained; high civilian participation and/or resource scarcity force often force militaries to adopt political strategies that are less congenial but more effective in restoring state authority. This study tests the theory against six empirical cases: Indochina, the Indochina-Algeria interlude, Algeria, British Palestine, Malaya, and Thailand. These cases strongly suggest that the dysfunctional learning patterns are the product of broadly shared, professional beliefs and bureaucratic interests rather than the common, alternative explanations based on experience, culture or normative and material constraints.by Colin F. Jackson.Ph.D