Victor Asal
Biographic Data
| ID | 193903 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Victor Asal |
| GIVEN NAMES | Victor |
| FAMILY NAME | Asal |
| SIGNATURE | ASAL V |
| AFFILIATIONS | University at Albany, State University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7614-4869 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 110 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1186 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 110 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 17 |
Lethal effects
Law and Order in Counterinsurgency
Modern-day insurgencies are adaptive, enduring, and increasingly intertwined with criminal elements, and therefore pose serious threats to regional and global security. In response, counterinsurgency strategies have become more diversified. One of the strategies that states can employ toward insurgencies is the use of domestic law enforcement, which includes operations by police and intelligence agencies. Given the predominant focus on military a…
The paradox of violent leaders and organizational structures
A Ticking Time Bomb
Do abortion restrictions augur broader crackdowns on human rights? We examine the relationship between restrictions on abortion and future Physical Integrity Rights (PIR) abuses. We argue that abortion restrictions both directly and indirectly influence PIR. Directly, abortion restrictions serve as a testing ground for repressive policies and behaviors. Indirectly, restrictions worsen inequality across segments of society and winnow support for s…
I'd Like to Speak to the Person in Charge
Why do some organizations come to represent their communities while others remain footnotes of history? While ethnopolitics exist worldwide, there is no consensus about which organizations “rise to the top” to become the standard bearers for their communities and causes. In the developing world, the answer is often presumed to be the willingness to use violence, exercising territorial control, or securing support from external actors like foreign…
The Use of Popular Songs and Cartoons in Teaching Introduction to International Relations and Comparative Politics
The use of popular culture as a teaching tool is often overlooked in teaching introductory-level political science courses. In recent years, advocacy for the inclusion of popular culture in the classroom has increased due to studies that highlight the benefits of such application in combination with other teaching methods. This paper argues that the incorporation of popular music and cartoons as a combined auxiliary teaching tool is an efficient …
Insurgent Terrorism
Why do insurgent organizations sometimes kill civilians? Some do all the time, some do so occasionally, and some seem to never do so. Why? Recent research seeks to explain civilian victimization by insurgent groups, also called terrorism, focusing on factors such as insurgent weakness or country regime type. This book presents a different explanation, building on what is referred to as insurgent embeddedness—the extent to which an insurgent group…
Tipping Points
Why do some near crises tip over into full-blown crisis and others do not? This paper considers existing scholarship and identifies four key barriers to using quantitative analysis for tipping-point analyses: strategic indeterminacy; the incentives for conflict parties to avoid inefficiencies; the paucity of cases; and the availability of quality data. Due to these challenges, many do not perform well as immediate causes for crisis escalation. We…
Why Do States Violently Repress Some Political Organizations, but Not Others? Evidence from Ethnopolitical Actors in the Middle East and North Africa
Whom do states target with violent repression? While we know that states are more likely to repress threats to their rule, precisely who is threatening enough to warrant this response is less clear. To address this question, we focus on a set of actors who often bear the brunt of state force – ethnopolitical minority organizations – and argue that certain organizational behaviors and attributes are more threatening than others and therefore are m…
Breaking taboos
Much ado has been made about the specter of unconventional weapons in the hands of militant groups. Despite the alarmism of the policy community, the pursuit of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear capabilities by non-state actors is rare. What explains why some violent non-state organizations pursue chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons while most do not? Using new data on organizational behaviors and attributes from…
You’ve got a friend in me
Which ethnopolitical organizations run for office? An extensive literature studies when ethnic parties emerge. We explore an understudied dimension that distinguishes various ethnopolitical organizations: the support of international governmental organizations (IGOs). IGOs can encourage ethnopolitical organizations to participate in elections by lowering an organization’s campaign costs or the price of internal restructuring. IGOs can also increa…
Doing Good while Killing
Many nonstate military organizations provide a wide range of social services to civilians. The apparent contradiction between their use of violence and their provision of charity has been the subject of a great deal of research in the conflict studies literature. Two of the most common sets of arguments hold that such services are either a form of bribery aimed at controlling and isolating constituents and potential recruits, or an extension of t…
Maritime Insurgency
Why do some insurgent organizations launch maritime attacks? To examine why organizations would engage in this behavior we draw on a new dataset of insurgencies to investigate the organizational characteristics associated with maritime attacks. We find that there are two types of maritime attacks by insurgencies. While both types of attacks are associated with the trappings of a state, beyond those factors, maritime revenue-raising attacks take p…
Intergroup images mediate the relationships between government abuse, sociopolitical orientations, and political action
What factors impact how people mobilize against state human rights abuses? Drawing on Image Theory, we examine how perceptions of an out-group, government abuse, and sociopolitical orientations impact political action. Using an online survey-embedded experiment with a sample of 2,932 U.S. adults, we manipulated two factors: (1) the level of government abuse and (2) the risk of punishment for taking action against the state, while also including s…
The Politics of Co-optation
Co-optation via elections in authoritarian regimes, in which leaders ward off threats to their rule by granting parties electoral access in exchange for their support, is a ubiquitous phenomenon that has received considerable attention from scholars. Two important questions that remain unanswered, however, are who exactly from among the opposition is being co-opted and why do parties accept offers of co-optation? We argue that among ethnopolitica…
Tugging on Superman’s Cape
Why do foreign militaries attack some insurgencies and not others? Although foreign involvement in civil conflicts is on the rise, many insurgencies are not targeted militarily by external powers. Current research suggests organizations that are lethal or that attack democracies should be targeted more often. We argue that organizations that have vital markers of capabilities, such as alliances with other violent non-state actors (VNSAs) and terr…
Crossing Battle Death Lines
Why do some insurgent groups escalate violence to higher-intensity insurgencies or civil war? We explore this question among 140 insurgent groups worldwide across various thresholds of armed conflict. We argue that the main drivers of escalation are insurgent networks and domestic resource mobilization. Findings show that territorial control and engagement in criminal activities to finance operations are key factors associated with insurgent-infl…
Nobody More Terrible than the Desperate
This article argues that the structural conflict conditions surrounding insurgencies produce rebel demand for external participation. Drawing on a data set of 140 militant organizations between 1998 and 2012, we find robust evidence that violence between insurgent groups is most likely to cause one or more of them to recruit externally. The effect is especially pronounced when regimes also employ punitive “stick” measures against opponents. Rathe…
Counter-Insurgency Strategies and Transnational Attacks by Rebel Groups
International attacks by rebel groups are an historically important phenomenon. Yet, few scholars have sought to understand why some rebel organizations “go abroad” and commence international attacks and some do not. We theorize that a rebel group’s decision to attack internationally is partly the result of its home-state’s counter-insurgency strategy. Home-states that employ broad-based repression discourage rebels from engaging in international…
Genocide, Politicide, and the Prospects of Democratization since 1900
Why do some autocracies democratize? A country’s violent past has received little attention. We argue that genocide and politicide undermine democratization by binding the elites’ supporters more tightly to the governing power, while cementing in-group/out-group animosities, and helping preserve the elites’ status quo position within the state. We test this argument on a new dataset of government atrocity and democratization since 1900. These nov…
Control over Bodies and Territories
Despite the popular narrative of “rape as a weapon of war,” research shows that only a minority of insurgent groups perpetrate sexual violence in armed conflict. We argue that territorial control is an overlooked factor that can increase the likelihood a group commits sexual violence for two primary reasons: (1) rebel groups seeking to establish control over territory are more likely to commit sexual violence; and (2) groups seeking to maintain t…
Does repression work
Protest and repression are reciprocally related. Governments respond with repression when faced with challenges to their rule. Dissidents choose their strategies, turning out to protest or staying home, based on the state’s behaviour. But what effect does repression have on protestors’ decisions? The existing literature is of two minds on this issue. One school of thought argues that repression suppresses protest. A second school of thought argue…
Target Them with What? Why States Choose Different Coin Strategies for Different Insurgent Organizations
Why do some governments negotiate with insurgent organizations while others use force? This study examines the factors that influence these strategic government approaches to insurgencies using an original data set of state actions toward 140 insurgent groups between 1998 and 2012. We develop a simple model to explain government policy choice and test on these original data. After accounting for ideological differences and insurgent organization …
Women Too
What explains the gender ideologies of ethnopolitical organizations? Recently, scholarship has cast attention to the determinants of violent organizations’ female recruitment patterns. Others have examined the effects of gender ideology on organizational tactics. There is a paucity of work on the determinants of gender ideologies. The article redresses this lacuna by exploring how organizational characteristics influence the gender platforms of e…
Teaching about Oppression and Rebellion
Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote that “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” Whereas the former claim of the quote is contestable and gendered, the latter part is empirically true from slavery to economic exploitation and widespread oppression that occurs to this day. Nevertheless, history shows that rarely will people take up weapons and rebel against the powerful. We have found that students often do not understand why this should be the c…
The Nature of the Beast
Why are some terrorist organizations so much more deadly then others? This article examines organizational characteristics such as ideology, size, age, state sponsorship, alliance connections, and control of territory while controlling for factors that may also influence lethality, including the political system and relative wealth of the country in which the organization is based. Using data from the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terr…
Playing Games with International Relations
After reviewing the advantages and disadvantages in using simulations to teach International Relations, this paper develops pedagogy for using simulations to teach International Relations (IR) theory. After discussing methods for integrating simulations into a class on IR theory the paper then goes on to present three simulations and the theories that they can be used to teach. The three simulations are the Classical Realism Game, Prisoner’s Dile…
Mediating International Crises
This new book shows how international crises are dangerous episodes that can be destabilizing not only to the actors directly involved but also to the entire international system. Recognizing the primacy of crises as defining moments in international relations, scholars and policy makers alike are increasingly concerned with identifying mechanisms for crisis prevention, management and resolution. Mediating International Crises is the first compre…
Mediating International Crises
This study focuses on mediation as a means for mitigating or at least minimizing the potentially turbulent and violent consequences of international crises. Two main research questions are explored: (1) Does mediation in general affect the dynamics and outcomes of crisis negotiations? and (2) Does the impact of mediation vary in accordance with mediator style? Data are drawn from the International Crisis Behavior data set and from ongoing experim…
Original Sin
This article examines the legality of homosexual acts quantitatively in a cross-national perspective with a large sample of countries from 1972 to 2002. Employing path dependence as its theoretical framework, this work explains how political, economic, and legal institutions at the domestic and international levels affect the lives of individual citizens. The rights and privileges of individuals, the findings of this study indicate, are determine…
Why Split? Organizational Splits among Ethnopolitical Organizations in the Middle East
Why do political organizations split? Drawing insight from organizational theory and social movement literature, this article explores the effect of organizational factors on group schism. Using a new data set of 112 ethnopolitical organizations in the Middle East, the article examines to what extent organizational factors such as leadership structure, organizational legality, and tactical intensity, as well as contextual variables such as state …
Winning with the Bomb
Nuclear weapons' effects on an actor's success in coercive diplomacy are in part a function of how nuclear weapons change the perceived costs of conflict. The authors argue that states can improve their allotment of a good or convince an opponent to back down and have shorter crises if their opponents have greater expected costs of crisis. Noting that nuclear weapons increase the costs of full-escalation scenarios but decrease their probability, …
Human Rights, NGO Shaming and the Exports of Abusive States
Does the attention of human rights organizations limit exports from rights-abusing states? This article examines how naming and shaming by human rights organizations (HROs) conditions the influence of human rights abuse on exports, and argues that human rights abuse alone is insufficient to damage a state’s exports. However, as attention to abuse via HRO shaming increases, abuse has an increasingly negative impact on exports. Importantly, this re…
Political Exclusion, Oil, and Ethnic Armed Conflict
Why do members of some ethnic groups rebel against the state? One approach holds that groups subject to exclusion from national politics engage in armed conflict. We theorize that the presence of resource wealth moderates the effect of political exclusion. Ethnic groups subject to exclusion whose settlement area includes oil wealth are more likely to experience the onset of armed conflict than groups experiencing exclusion alone. We depart from t…
Gender ideologies and forms of contentious mobilization in the Middle East
This article explores those factors that shape a political organization's choice of tactics in political mobilization with a particular focus on the influence of gender ideology on the choice of different type of contentious action. To understand why political organizations engaging in contentious politics choose to employ violent tactics, nonviolent tactics, or a mixture of both, current scholarship has tended to focus on factors such as relatio…
I Want You! The Determinants of Military Conscription
What explains the use of military conscription? Using a new data set of more than 100 countries over a period of 200 years, we examine the determinants of a state’s decision to implement a military draft. We argue that the decision to use conscription is largely dependent on historical factors. Specifically, we contend that former British colonies are less likely to use conscription as a means of military recruitment because of an anticonscriptio…
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 st…
Crime, Conflict, and the Legitimacy Trade-Off
Insurgent organizations have become major players in criminal enterprises around the world. However, research examining why some participate in crime while others do not remains underdeveloped. Analyzing newly collected annual data on 140 insurgent groups from 1998 to 2012, we examine the conditions driving insurgents' participation in drug crimes, extortion, smuggling, kidnapping for ransom, and robbery. We find that control of territory positiv…
Power Play
International relations scholars have long focused on power relations among nations as an explanatory factor for a wide variety of state behaviors, including alliance formation, strategic interactions, and negotiation strategies. Power transition theorists have argued that war is most likely when power is equally distributed among nations or, more precisely, when the power of the challenger approaches—or begins to exceed—that of its opponent (Org…
Structure, Empowerment and the Liberalization of Cross-National Abortion Rights
Economic, cultural, and political opportunity structures have been separately shown to facilitate and constrain abortion rights. We examine two central and related questions: First, which factors explain liberalization of different types of abortion laws? Second, which factor or set of factors is the most important in explaining abortion laws? The cross-national literature suggests a three-pronged explanation for the existence of abortion rights,…
Billiard Balls or Snowflakes? Major Power Prestige and the International Diffusion of Institutions and Practices
Do the institutions and practices of the major powers influence those of other states? Many international relations theorists have argued that these powerful states' prestige allows them to define what is normatively acceptable. This paper tests the influence of the internal characteristics of major powers on democratization, the extension of formal political equality to women, and the practice of jailing or killing the state's domestic political…
Connections Can Be Toxic
Despite plentiful scholarship relating to the prospect of terrorists utilizing chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons, little of this work is both quantitative in nature and global in scope. Leveraging open-source data, this study quantitatively explores factors influencing the terrorist organizational decision to pursue CBRN weapons. The findings suggest that organizations embedded in alliance structures and based in autho…
Crisis managers but not conflict resolvers
Instability and conflict within African countries are on the rise. What are the best means for third parties to promote short-term crisis management and long-term conflict resolution in these situations? Often, these two tasks are at odds with one another, and certain approaches to intervention may be more or less effective. This study grapples with these issues by focusing on one particularly difficult set of cases—violent crises that are rooted…
Nuclear Weapons as Shields
What security benefits do nuclear weapons provide to their possessors? After accounting for two potential selection effects, the empirical evidence from all international crises from 1945 to 2000 indicates that opponents of nuclear-weapon states demonstrate restraint in turning to violent aggression. Nuclear weapons, however, have little effect on overall crisis occurrence.The authors also explore the behavioral effects of nuclear-weapons program…
Dilettantes, Ideologues, and the Weak
Why do some terrorist organizations choose not to—or fail to—kill? Of the 395 terrorist organizations operating between 1998 and 2005 only 39% had actually killed anyone. What factors account for this outcome? This article examines a series of organizational factors, including ideology, capability, and “home-base” country context, that the literature suggests are related to the decision to “go lethal.” We then test six hypotheses using data from …
Proliferation and International Crisis Behavior
The literature on international conflict is divided on the impact of nuclear proliferation on state conflict. The optimists' argument contends that nuclear weapons raise the stakes so high that states are unlikely to go to war when nuclear weapons enter the equation. The pessimists rebut this argument, contending that new proliferators are not necessarily rational and that having nuclear weapons does not discourage war but rather makes war more d…
Kill Them All—Old and Young, Girls and Women and Little Children
What factors make it more likely that non-state organizations will target civilians as a political strategy? This study examines targeting civilians as a tactical and normative choice, and hypothesizes that the targeting of civilians (compared to the general use of violence) is a function of the ideological make-up of organizations, organization weakness and state repression. Other factors related to organizational capability will not have a diff…
Going Abroad
Existing literature on contentious political movements has generally focused on domestic political activity. Using the new Minorities at Risk Organizational Behavior–Middle East data set (MAROB-ME), which contains organization-level data for 104 ethnopolitical organizations in the Middle East and North Africa, we analyze the decision of both violent and nonviolent organizations to engage in political activity transnationally. Among the results, w…
Is It Ideology or Desperation
Why do some terrorist organizations deploy women on the front lines and in violent attacks? This study explores the social conditions, economic factors, and organizational characteristics that might explain women's participation in violent terrorist activity. With a new data set of 395 terrorist organizations, women's participation in terrorist attacks was quantified and coded. The logistic regression analysis results suggest that women's educati…
Mini-Games for Teaching Political Science Methodology
Students often find lectures on political science methodology difficult to grasp. Based on our success of simulations and games in teaching various political science theories, we created several mini-games to help students gain exposure in engaging ways with aspects of quantitative and qualitative methodology. We use techniques in which students learn through “gimmicks” (Schacht and Stewart 1990; 1992), for which they are the data points that the…
Mediating International Crises
This study focuses on mediation as a means for mitigating or at least minimizing the potentially turbulent and violent consequences of international crises. Two main research questions are explored: (1) Does mediation in general affect the dynamics and outcomes of crisis negotiations? and (2) Does the impact of mediation vary in accordance with mediator style? Data are drawn from the International Crisis Behavior data set and from ongoing experim…
Playing Games with International Relations
After reviewing the advantages and disadvantages in using simulations to teach International Relations, this paper develops pedagogy for using simulations to teach International Relations (IR) theory. After discussing methods for integrating simulations into a class on IR theory the paper then goes on to present three simulations and the theories that they can be used to teach. The three simulations are the Classical Realism Game, Prisoner’s Dile…
Nonstate Actors, Terrorism, and Weapons of Mass Destruction
While the term “weapons of mass destruction” (WMD) is a relatively new one, the effort to stop the spread of arms and weapons systems that can inflict mass harm is by no means new. Indeed, efforts to stop the production and possible use of these most fatal weapons have been successful by many accounts. From agreements following World War I to ban mustard gas to the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency to the nearly universal ac…
Holy Terror and Mass Killings? Reexamining the Motivations and Methods of Mass Casualty Terrorists
The starting point of this contribution to the Forum is the oft-cited distinction between “old terrorism” and “new terrorism” alluded to in earlier contributions. Practitioners of the old or traditional terrorism—ETA in the Basque region of Spain and the IRA in Northern Ireland are often given as examples—are involved in a localized conflict, normally with a state, over fundamental political questions. It is argued that groups such as this calibr…
Creating Simulations for Political Science Education
Simulations, particularly human-to-human interactions, offer social science students the opportunity to learn from firsthand experience, and can be an important and useful addition to an educator's teaching repertoire. However, it can be difficult for an instructor to know how to structure a simulation environment to meet specific educational goals. In this article, we suggest a pedagogical framework, focusing on the choice between educating stud…
Terrorism as Transnational Advocacy
This article attempts to shed light on the dynamics and machinations within terrorist organizations by incorporating a heretofore overlooked literature which is directly applicable, that of transnational advocacy networks (TANs). Terror networks have been described using every possible analogy, from multinational corporations to organized crime to the anthropomorphic classic “cut off the head, and the body will die.” In reality, terrorist organiz…
Power Play
International relations scholars have long focused on power relations among nations as an explanatory factor for a wide variety of state behaviors, including alliance formation, strategic interactions, and negotiation strategies. Power transition theorists have argued that war is most likely when power is equally distributed among nations or, more precisely, when the power of the challenger approaches—or begins to exceed—that of its opponent (Org…
Mediating International Crises
This new book shows how international crises are dangerous episodes that can be destabilizing not only to the actors directly involved but also to the entire international system. Recognizing the primacy of crises as defining moments in international relations, scholars and policy makers alike are increasingly concerned with identifying mechanisms for crisis prevention, management and resolution. Mediating International Crises is the first compre…
Billiard Balls or Snowflakes? Major Power Prestige and the International Diffusion of Institutions and Practices
Do the institutions and practices of the major powers influence those of other states? Many international relations theorists have argued that these powerful states' prestige allows them to define what is normatively acceptable. This paper tests the influence of the internal characteristics of major powers on democratization, the extension of formal political equality to women, and the practice of jailing or killing the state's domestic political…
Proliferation and International Crisis Behavior
The literature on international conflict is divided on the impact of nuclear proliferation on state conflict. The optimists' argument contends that nuclear weapons raise the stakes so high that states are unlikely to go to war when nuclear weapons enter the equation. The pessimists rebut this argument, contending that new proliferators are not necessarily rational and that having nuclear weapons does not discourage war but rather makes war more d…
Airing Grievances Online
This paper examines the role search engine algorithms have in ethnopolitical mobilization. Offline, the news media are vital in a minority at risk (MAR) group's message dissemination. As Tarrow (1994) Tarrow, S. 1994. Power in movements: Social movements, collective action and politics, Cambridge, , England: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar] explains, they are a valuable “external resource.” We argue search engine algorithms perform a …
Consenting to a Child's Decision to Join a Jihad
This study examines the factors that lead household members to give or refuse consent for other household members to become a militant (or mujahid). Using data derived from a detailed survey fielded among a convenience sample of 141 families of slain militants in Pakistan, this manuscript seeks to explain why some families support participation in jihad and why some families do not. Using the extant literature on recruitment, participation in vio…
Search Engines
This article investigates whether a relationship exists between the number of fatalities caused by a terrorist group and the number of websites returned via the Google search engine when a search for the group is conducted. It is hypothesized that search engines’ algorithms facilitate such an association, and search engines’ role as the Web's “gatekeeper.” Much attention has been paid to understanding the role the news media, particularly televis…
Dilettantes, Ideologues, and the Weak
Why do some terrorist organizations choose not to—or fail to—kill? Of the 395 terrorist organizations operating between 1998 and 2005 only 39% had actually killed anyone. What factors account for this outcome? This article examines a series of organizational factors, including ideology, capability, and “home-base” country context, that the literature suggests are related to the decision to “go lethal.” We then test six hypotheses using data from …
The Nature of the Beast
Why are some terrorist organizations so much more deadly then others? This article examines organizational characteristics such as ideology, size, age, state sponsorship, alliance connections, and control of territory while controlling for factors that may also influence lethality, including the political system and relative wealth of the country in which the organization is based. Using data from the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terr…
Structure, Empowerment and the Liberalization of Cross-National Abortion Rights
Economic, cultural, and political opportunity structures have been separately shown to facilitate and constrain abortion rights. We examine two central and related questions: First, which factors explain liberalization of different types of abortion laws? Second, which factor or set of factors is the most important in explaining abortion laws? The cross-national literature suggests a three-pronged explanation for the existence of abortion rights,…
Nuclear Weapons as Shields
What security benefits do nuclear weapons provide to their possessors? After accounting for two potential selection effects, the empirical evidence from all international crises from 1945 to 2000 indicates that opponents of nuclear-weapon states demonstrate restraint in turning to violent aggression. Nuclear weapons, however, have little effect on overall crisis occurrence.The authors also explore the behavioral effects of nuclear-weapons program…
Winning with the Bomb
Nuclear weapons' effects on an actor's success in coercive diplomacy are in part a function of how nuclear weapons change the perceived costs of conflict. The authors argue that states can improve their allotment of a good or convince an opponent to back down and have shorter crises if their opponents have greater expected costs of crisis. Noting that nuclear weapons increase the costs of full-escalation scenarios but decrease their probability, …
Grievance, social dominance orientation, and authoritarianism in the choice and justification of terror versus protest
The present research examines the extent to which grievance and social-personality factors including Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) influence support for and justification of both peaceful and violent forms of political action. Using an experimental design that manipulated level of grievance, we asked a sample of 2932 US adult participants to read a vignette, and then to indicate their likelihood of engag…
A Cross-National Exploration of the Conditions that Produce Interpersonal Violence
In this article we take advantage of newly available data provided by WomanStats to suggest (1) a quantifiable approach to scaling the prevalence of interpersonal violence; and (2) a model of those factors that account for different levels of interpersonal violence cross-nationally. We specifically draw from the human rights literature to determine which economic, cultural, and political factors explain different levels of interpersonal violence …
Is It Ideology or Desperation
Why do some terrorist organizations deploy women on the front lines and in violent attacks? This study explores the social conditions, economic factors, and organizational characteristics that might explain women's participation in violent terrorist activity. With a new data set of 395 terrorist organizations, women's participation in terrorist attacks was quantified and coded. The logistic regression analysis results suggest that women's educati…
A Shot Not Taken
The American military has been engaged in combat operations first conventional and then counterinsurgent for more than 8 years and the issue of political violence from a variety of different directions is an important issue to address in the college classroom. In this paper, we focus on the pedagogy of the ethics of political violence of jus in bello (the ethics of activity within war). We present an overview of three different ethical perspectiv…
Battling Abroad
Why are some terrorist organizations more likely to be targets of transnational counterterrorist operations? Previous work has identified characteristics of the environment or country involved to explain variation in targeting. We focus on characteristics of the violent organization to explain this variation. Using cross-national data on terrorist organizations and state targeting of these organizations, we identify several factors that help expl…
Connections Can Be Toxic
Despite plentiful scholarship relating to the prospect of terrorists utilizing chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) weapons, little of this work is both quantitative in nature and global in scope. Leveraging open-source data, this study quantitatively explores factors influencing the terrorist organizational decision to pursue CBRN weapons. The findings suggest that organizations embedded in alliance structures and based in autho…
Ps
In 2011, PS: Political Science and Politics published articles covering a vast range of topics. The journal's commitment to publishing articles on pedagogy and the profession, as well as exemplary topical scholarship on a spectrum of issues, call for an equally broad stable of reviewers. PS cannot publish such diverse work without the outstanding work (and openmindedness) of our peer reviewers. The peer-review process relies on the professionalis…
Political science (107 works) · Law (92 works) · Law (90 works) · Politics (77 works) · Sociology (75 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (53 works) · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence (50 works) · Political economy (46 works) · Criminology (43 works) · Psychology (42 works)