Carrots, Sticks, and Insurgent Targeting of Civilians

How do conciliatory and coercive counterinsurgency tactics affect militant group violence against civilians? Scholars of civil war increasingly seek to understand intentional civilian targeting, often referred to as terrorism. Extant research emphasizes group weakness, or general state attributes such as regime type. We focus on terrorism as violent communication and as a response to government actions. State tactics toward groups, carrots and sticks, should be important for explaining insurgent terror. We test the argument using new data on terrorism by insurgent groups, with many time-varying variables, covering 1998 through 2012. Results suggest government coercion against a group is associated with subsequent terrorism by that group. However, this is only the case for larger insurgent groups, which raises questions about the notion of terrorism as a weapon of the weak. Carrots are often negatively related to group terrorism. Other factors associated with insurgent terrorism include holding territory, ethnic motivation, and social service provision

Anatomizing Chemical and Biological Non-State Adversaries Identifying the Adversary, Final Report

PASCC ReportThis literature review forms part of the first phase of the Anatomizing Chemical and Biological Non-State Adversaries Project. As such, it serves three different functions. First, the review provides context for the overall study by introducing and specifying many of the basic concepts involved and can serve as a primer for those less familiar with the issues surrounding chemical and biological (CB) terrorism. Second, it synthesizes the existing literature on chemical and biological non-state adversaries and identifies the major areas of agreement and disagreement amongst scholars in the field. Third, it engages with the scholarship in an attempt to form the basis for inferring a set of preliminary qualitative indicators of the most likely future non-state perpetrators of CB violence, which is a core objective of Phase I of the project.This material is made possible in part by support from the Project on Advanced Systems and Concepts for Countering WMD (PASCC), Center on Contemporary Conflict, Naval Postgraduate School, under Grant No. N00244-12-1-0033. PASCC is supported by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency

Public Management and Network Specificity. Effects of colleges’ ties with professional organizations on graduates’ labour market success and satisfaction

Contains fulltext : 112155.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access)Research on managerial networking in the public sector reports positive effects of network activity on performance. However, little is known about which network relations influence different aspects of performance. We argue that for specific organizational goals, organizations should direct their networking activities towards specific types of organizations. We explore how different types of network relations of Dutch colleges for nursing studies affect the performance of these colleges. We analyse the effect of ties with professional organizations on: (1) graduates’ program satisfaction, (2) graduates’ wages and (3) graduates’ employment (n = 1,484 graduates). Multilevel analyses show that colleges’ ties with professional organizations positively affect graduates’ wages and employment.19 p