Framing the Narrative: Female Fighters, External Audience Attitudes, and Transnational Support for Armed Rebellions

Female combatants play a central role in rebel efforts to cultivate and disseminate positive narratives regarding the movement and its political goals. Yet, the effectiveness of such strategies in shaping audience attitudes or generating tangible benefits for the group remains unclear. We propose and test a theory regarding the channels through which female fighters advance rebel goals. We argue that female fighters positively influence audience attitudes toward rebel groups by strengthening observers’ beliefs about their legitimacy and their decision to use armed tactics. We further contend that these effects directly help them secure support from transnational non-state actors and indirectly promote state support. We assess our arguments by combining a novel survey experiment in two countries with analyses of new cross-national data on female combatants and information about transnational support for rebels. The empirical results support our arguments and demonstrate the impact of gender framing on rebel efforts to secure support

Waging War among Civilians: The Production and Restraint of Counterinsurgent Violence in the Second Intifada

Theories of violence against civilians in conflict have tended to view combatants in homogenous terms, as the obedient pawns of military elites, or as uniformly prone to violence due to passionate emotions or economic opportunism. In contrast, this study shows that combatant participation in violence is variable: While in some circumstances soldiers embrace violence eagerly, in others they attempt to shirk it or refuse to commit it outright. What accounts for this variation in violence and restraint? Why are some individuals, and some combat units, more likely to act violently than others? This dissertation examines these questions through a study of Israeli soldiers in the Second Intifada, employing interview, survey, and observational data. The core argument is that variation in combatant violence and restraint is a consequence of organizational control within the military. Drawing on theories in organizational and management studies, I define organizational control broadly to include not only formal mechanisms such as rules, discipline, and enforcement, but also informal mechanisms, such as the inculcation of values, norms, and beliefs through training and leadership. Through organizational control, the military seeks to align the preferences and beliefs of combatants regarding the use of violence with those of military leaders, ensuring that combatants both produce the violence demanded of them (strategic violence) and at the same time do not surpass or subvert such violence so that it no longer serves military interests but their own (opportunistic violence). I show that effective organizational control leads to participation patterns consistent with the preferences of armed group leaders - maximal participation in strategic violence and minimal participation in opportunistic violence. In contrast, weak control leads to participation patterns inconsistent with the preferences of armed group leaders - reduced participation in strategic violence and increased participation in opportunistic violence. When leader preferences are uncertain and control is ambiguous, new, entrepreneurial forms of violence emerge from the military's lower levels

Replication Data for: Contested Ground: Disentangling Material and Symbolic Attachment to Disputed Territory

copy directly from abstract in PSRM publicatio