Institutionalizing Instability: The Constitutional Roots of Insecurity in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic

Nigeria’s return to democracy has been a tumultuous era; the Fourth Republic has been characterized by insurgencies and violence throughout the country. Though seemingly disparate movements, the violence of the Fourth Republic has its roots in the country’s constitution. Three aspects of the 1999 Nigerian constitution stand out as particularly problematic: the centralization of the police at the federal level with limited sub-national oversight, the ambiguous concept of indigeneity, and the overlapping, often contradictory land tenure systems endorsed. All of these allude to the precariousness of Nigerian federalism under the current constitution; ultimately, the police centralization primes the country for violence, while the indigeneity rules and land tenure system make it more difficult to negotiate stable post-conflict settlements. The country’s recent experience with Boko Haram will be used to illustrate how these constitutional tenets facilitate instability

Front Lines and the Home Front: Three Papers on Women’s Contributions to Non-State Armed Groups and the Gender Dynamics of Conflict

Women have always contributed to conflict dynamics, both through their active support to armed groups and as the targets of violence by these groups. In recent years, efforts to chronicle women’s participation as combatants in non-state armed groups and to systematically document the violence that women and girls face in war have enabled a much richer understanding of women’s experiences in violent contexts. Through three papers on the gender dynamics of conflict, this dissertation contributes to the study of women and war. In the first paper, I use new data on political violence targeting women to consider variation in rebel groups’ patterns of violence targeting women. Through a comparison of Boko Haram and Al Shabaab, I show that there is considerable variation in the scale and nature of violence targeting women between these two ideologically similar non-state armed groups. This paper underlines that there are important intra-ideological differences that drive rebel groups’ pattern of violence targeting women. In the second paper, I use the Women’s Contributions to War (WCW) dataset an original dataset that collects information on women’s non-combat contributions to non-state armed groups and the presence of all-female units affiliated with the armed group, to assess the effect of women’s participation on rebel groups’ practice of sexual violence. In this article, I introduce the concept of regulatory sexual violence, which I define as the use of sexual violence to mark and maintain wartime hierarchies. I hypothesize that in rebel groups without an ideology, regulatory sexual violence is more likely to emerge and that it is especially likely to emerge in non-ideological rebel groups with female combatants. Cross-national statistical analysis confirms this hypothesis, finding that non-ideological rebel groups with female combatants are the most likely to engage in sexual violence against civilians. This finding has implications for our understanding of rebel socialization processes, as well as civilian protection efforts. In the third paper, I consider the post-conflict political implications of women’s wartime mobilization into successful non-state armed groups (meaning those that were victorious or who achieved a peace agreement). I consider both what drives the oft-noted post-conflict increases in women’s rights, as well as why these gains are so frequently ephemeral. In cross-national statistical analysis, I find that female combatants are associated with gains in both women’s share of legislative seats and increases in their post-conflict political status. Women’s contributions in non-combat roles and the existence of all-female units are not associated with significant post-conflict gains for women. Through a qualitative case study of women in revolutionary and post-conflict Ethiopia, I find that women can, to some degree, leverage their identities as combat veterans to justify and legitimize their political demands. However, the proximity of these women to the rebel group also comes with the threats of marginalization, cooptation, and subordination to the broader political agenda. The findings presented in this paper document the political implications of the heterogeneity of women’s wartime experiences and shed light on the gendered aspects of the legacies of political violence

Appendix for Valerie M. Hudson and Hilary Matfess, "In Plain Sight: The Neglected Linkage between Brideprice and Violent Conflict," International Security, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Summer 2017), pp. 7–40.

This appendix contains the results of statistical tests conducted for Valerie M. Hudson and Hilary Matfess, "In Plain Sight: The Neglected Linkage between Brideprice and Violent Conflict," International Security, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Summer 2017), pp. 7–40