The Blessed and the Damned: Peacemakers, Warlords, and Post Civil War Democracy

This thesis seeks to explain how democracies emerge out of the ashes of civil wars. This paper envisions transitions to democracy after a civil war largely as a function of the peace process. Democracy is thought of as a medium through which solutions to the problems and issues over which the civil war was fought can be solved without violence. Transitions to democracy are more likely if there is a large bargaining space and the problems of credible commitments to democratization can be solved. Democratization is more likely if four conditions exist in a state after the civil war: a negotiated settlement, credible commitments via international enforcement, demobilization, and a cooperative international environment. The hypotheses derived are tested through an event history analysis for two different standards of democracy. The results suggest that factors indicative of all four theoretical concepts contribute to the likelihood of democratization after a civil war

Disease and Dissent: Epidemics as a Catalyst for Social Unrest

We identify a set of potential theoretical mechanisms that link the outbreak and spread of communicable diseases to temporal and spatial patterns of social unrest. Despite the proliferation of research since 2020 analyzing the social impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, we examine the broader relationship between less severe epidemic outbreaks and their social consequences. Epidemics, as well as the policies that governments implement to tackle them, often generate acute grievances among the public and create new opportunities for collective dissent, the combination of which promotes unrest. Nonetheless, perceived opportunities for unrest are influenced by the scale and scope of the disease outbreak, and particularly lethal disease outbreaks may therefore offset the incentives for collective mobilization. We examine these relationships using sub-national data on communicable disease outbreaks and geo-located social unrest events data in 60 African and Latin American countries from 1990 to 2017 and find support for our argument. However, we observe a curvilinear relationships between the severity of the epidemic and the incidence of unrest

The internal politics of external threat

This project focuses on domestic political pressures in response to different kinds of international threat. In explaining the domestic politics of external threat, I seek to answer why states choose escalate conflicts over some issues and not others, against rivals at certain times and not others, and choose to abuse human rights during some conflicts, but not others. I focus specifically on the interaction between the external threats of territorial competition and interstate rivalry with domestic political institutions to predict outcomes in interstate conflict such as escalation to war and rival conflict severity, as well as the propensity to repress human rights. I argue that democratic states, which are driven by popular support, are more likely to engage in conflict and repression when public goods issues such as symbolic territory (e.g. Jerusalem, Kashmir) are contested. In contrast autocratic states, which are dependent on elite support, are more likely threats salient when they threaten private good distribution, or when land such as resource rich territory, is on the line. In three empirical chapters, I explore the domestic politics of threat in three arenas. First, I examine how domestic considerations affect when and over what kinds of territory that state go to war; examining militarized territorial conflicts and territorial claims from 1816-2001. The second empirical chapter explores how domestic political concerns affect the escalation of conflict between international rivals from 1816-2001. Finally, the last empirical chapter explores how territorial conflict, rival conflict, and domestic politics intersect to alter states tendencies to abuse human rights from 1977-2001

Replication data and Online Appendix for: "Territorial Revision and State Repression" Journal of Peace Research. 51 (3).

Web appendix and replication script and data files for "Territorial Revision and State Repression" by Thorin M. Wright, Journal of Peace Research, 2014, 51(3)

Replication data for: Replication Files and Online Appendix for "Disputed Territory, Defensive Alliances, and Conflict Initiation" Conflict Management and Peace Science

Replication Files and Online Appendix for Wright & Rider, 2014, Conflict Management and Peace Science, 31(2): 119-144. Replication data and do-files for tables in online appendix available by request

Replication Data for: Responding to Catastrophe: Repression Dynamics Following Rapid-onset Natural Disasters

Replication files and online appendix

Replication Data for: Unpacking Territorial Disputes: Domestic Political Influences and War

Replication data (Stata 13 version), do-files, and online appendix included in the zip file

Refugees, Economic Capacity, and Host State Repression

Does hosting refugees affect state repression? While there have been numerous studies that examine the link between refugees and the spread of civil and international conflict, an examination of the systematic links between refugees and repression is lacking. We contend that researchers are missing a crucial link, as the dissent-repression nexus is crucial to understanding the development of armed conflict. Drawing upon logics of the relationship between refugees and the spread of conflict as well as economic capacity, we argue that increased numbers of refugees lead to increased repression. We contend that willingness to increase repression when hosting refugees is in part conditional on a host state’s economic capacity. We argue that, on the whole, the greater the population of refugees in a host state, repression becomes more likely. That said, we argue that increased economic capacity will moderate this relationship. We find empirical support for both predictions

A Conditional Defense of the Dyadic Approach

We contend that the dyadic approach should be employed as a theoretically informed choice. All choices of units in modeling are simplifying. Current criticisms do not render dyadic approaches useless forms of simplification. Indeed, depending on the question and theory, dyadic approaches may be the most appropriate simplification of reality for scholars of international studies. The basic structure of the dyad, a two actor interaction, remains a useful simplification for multiple key questions in conflict research. As such, we offer a conditional defense of the dyadic approach in light of three elements: (i) the choice of level of analysis, (ii) the assumption of independence of cases, and (iii) the benefits accrued by past dyadic research

Disaggregating Repression: Identifying Physical Integrity Rights Allegations in Human Rights Reports

Most cross-national human rights datasets rely on human coding to produce yearly, country-level indicators of state human rights practices. Hand-coding the documents that contain the information on which these scores are based is tedious and time consuming but has been viewed as necessary given the complexity and detail of the information contained in the text. However, advances in automated text analysis have the potential to streamline this process without sacrificing accuracy. In this research note, we take the first step in creating this streamlined process by employing a supervised machine learning automated coding method that extracts specific allegations of physical integrity rights violations from the original text of country reports of human rights. This method produces a dataset including 163,512 unique abuse allegations in 196 countries between 1999 and 2016. This dataset and method will assist researchers of physical integrity rights abuse because it will allow them to produce allegation-level human rights measures that have previously not existed, and provide a jumping-off point for future projects aimed at using supervised machine learning to create global human rights metrics