High stakes and low bars: How international recognition shapes the conduct of civil wars

When rebel groups engage incumbent governments in war for control of the state, questions of international recognition arise. International recognition determines which combatants can draw on state assets, receive overt military aid, and borrow as sovereigns—all of which can have profound consequences for the military balance during civil war. How do third-party states and international organizations determine whom to treat as a state's official government during civil war? Data from the sixty-one center-seeking wars initiated from 1945 to 2014 indicate that military victory is not a prerequisite for recognition. Instead, states generally rely on a simple test: control of the capital city. Seizing the capital does not foreshadow military victory. Civil wars often continue for many years after rebels take control and receive recognition. While geopolitical and economic motives outweigh the capital control test in a small number of important cases, combatants appear to anticipate that holding the capital will be sufficient for recognition. This expectation generates perverse incentives. In effect, the international community rewards combatants for capturing or holding, by any means necessary, an area with high concentrations of critical infrastructure and civilians. In the majority of cases where rebels contest the capital, more than half of its infrastructure is damaged or the majority of civilians are displaced (or both), likely fueling long-term state weakness

Threat perception and policy preferences

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Political Science, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 193-216).This dissertation develops and tests a new individual-level theory specifying the relationship between threat perception and policy preferences. The project takes a unified approach to studying the space of danger-mitigating political behaviors. It is designed to demonstrate that a single psychological model can apply to both citizens and elites and in both domestic and foreign policy issue areas. The first paper develops Threat-Heuristic Theory, a new individual-level model of the psychological processes linking the detection of danger to specific policy preferences for mitigating it. The paper presents a review of the literature in biology and cognitive science regarding evolved systems of threat perception and response, on which the theory draws. The paper demonstrates that the theory's core explanatory variable, threat classification, is not a proxy for other constructs already incorporated into political science. The paper also illustrates that the domain of complex dangers, characterized by low levels of agreement in threat classification, contains issues of interest to political science. The second paper applies the theory to explain variation in preferences for specific forms of immigration restriction in the U.S. The paper highlights the importance of understanding threat classification in order to move beyond explanations of pro/anti-immigrant sentiment towards a model that captures preferences for real-world policy options. The third paper applies the theory to a small number of elite policy-makers in order to explain their support for particular measures included in U.S. national security strategies of the early Cold War and of the first George W. Bush Administration. The paper demonstrates how "bad strategy' and problematic policy preferences can arise systematically through the operation of Threat-Heuristic Theory's psychological model and need not be solely explained by bureaucratic politics or error.by Marika Landau-Wells.Ph. D

Supplementary materials for Marika Landau-Wells, "High Stakes and Low Bars: How International Recognition Shapes the Conduct of Civil Wars," International Security, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Summer 2018), pp. 100–137, doi:10.1162/isec_a_00321

Supplementary materials for Marika Landau-Wells, "High Stakes and Low Bars: How International Recognition Shapes the Conduct of Civil Wars," International Security, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Summer 2018), pp. 100–137, doi:10.1162/isec_a_00321. The materials include: 1) Appendix A (list of civil wars); 2) Appendix B (list of recognition events); 3) a detailed bibliography of the sources used in process tracing; 4) a list of the instances of recognition in the Libyan civil war; 5) a file containing the dataset of civil wars; 6) a file containing the dataset of extraconstitutional transfers; 7) a codebook for the variables in both data files; 8) R code for replicating the descriptive statistics in the article; and 9) a ReadMe file

Political preferences and threat perception: opportunities for neuroimaging and developmental research

© 2019 Elsevier Ltd People have preferences for how their social environment is organized and governed. One influential explanation of variation in these preferences focuses on individual differences in sensitivity to threats. Recent research demonstrates that this relationship is a function not only of the degree of sensitivity (greater or lesser), but also of the danger in question (i.e. immigration or climate change) and the kind of potential harm it poses (i.e. physical pain or contamination). Since many political issues are not unambiguously of one kind, the structure of an individual's reactions to perceived political threats is also uncertain. We argue that future research should (i) use functional neuroimaging to test these structures and (ii) investigate the role of social learning in their transmission

Policy-based and Affective Partisanship Depend on Dissociable Neural Systems

Political partisanship is often conceived as a lens through which we view politics. Behavioral research has distinguished two types of “partisan lenses” - Policy-based and Affective – that may influence our perception of political events. Little is known, however, about the mechanisms through which partisanship operates within individuals. We addressed this question by collecting neuroimaging data while participants watched videos of speakers expressing partisan views. A “partisan lens effect” was identified as the difference in neural synchrony between each participant’s brain response and that of their partisan ingroup vs. outgroup. A policy-based partisanship lens effect was observed in socio-political reasoning and affective responding brain regions. An affective partisanship lens effect was observed in mentalizing and affective responding brain regions. These data suggest that policy-based and affective partisanship are supported by related but distinguishable neural and therefore psychological mechanisms, which may have implications for how we characterize partisanship and ameliorate its deleterious impacts