James Lyall
Biographic Data
| ID | 964088 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James Lyall |
| GIVEN NAMES | James |
| FAMILY NAME | Lyall |
| SIGNATURE | LYALL J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Yale University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9117-7503 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1129 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Fratricidal Coercion in Modern War
Armies sometimes use fratricidal coercion—violence and intimidation against their own troops—to force reluctant soldiers to fight. How this practice affects battlefield performance remains an open question. We study fratricidal coercion using a mixed-methods strategy, drawing on (1) monthly panel data on Soviet Rifle Divisions in World War II, built from millions of declassified personnel files; (2) paired comparisons of Rifle Divisions at the Ba…
Prolonged contact does not reshape locals' attitudes toward migrants in wartime settings
Despite record numbers of internally displaced persons (IDPs) globally, we know little about the causal effects of intergroup contact between migrants and locals in active conflict settings. We conduct a randomized controlled trial of a vocational skills‐training program implemented by Mercy Corps that enrolled 2597 locals and migrants in near equal numbers in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where IDPs face daily prejudice and discrimination. Courses last…
Mad CoW: A Reply to Gibler and Miller
In Divided Armies, I argue that inequality within armies (“military inequality”) has shaped their battlefield performance in conventional wars since 1800. Gibler and Miller (2022) are unpersuaded. They raise a flurry of concerns about the cross-national evidence and one statistical analysis in the book’s Chapter 4. In particular, they maintain that Project Mars, the book’s dataset, offers nothing new compared to the Correlates of War (CoW). I fin…
Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War
How do armies fight and what makes them victorious on the modern battlefield? This book challenges long-standing answers to this classic question by linking the fate of armies to their levels of inequality. Introducing the concept of military inequality, the book demonstrates how a state's prewar choices about the citizenship status of ethnic groups within its population determine subsequent battlefield performance. Treating certain ethnic groups…
Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War
Can Economic Assistance Shape Combatant Support in Wartime? Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan
Governments, militaries, and aid organizations all rely on economic interventions to shape civilian attitudes toward combatants during wartime. We have, however, little individual-level evidence that these "hearts and minds" programs actually influence combatant support. We address this problem by conducting a factorial randomized control trial of two common interventions-vocational training and cash transfers-on combatant support among 2,597 at-…
Civilian Casualties, Humanitarian Aid, and Insurgent Violence in Civil Wars
Indiscriminate violence against civilians has long been viewed as a catalyst for new rounds of violence in civil wars. Can humanitarian assistance reduce violence after civilians have been harmed? Crossnational studies are pessimistic, drawing a connection between humanitarian aid and increased civil war violence, lethality, and duration. To date, however, we have few subnational studies of wartime aid and subsequent violence. To examine this rel…
Arras 200: Revisiting Britain's most famous Iron Age cemetery
Can civilian attitudes predict insurgent violence? Ideology and insurgent tactical choice in civil war
Are civilian attitudes a useful predictor of patterns of violence in civil wars? A prominent debate has emerged among scholars and practitioners about the importance of winning civilian 'hearts and minds' for influencing their wartime behavior. We argue that such efforts may have a dark side: insurgents can use pro-counterinsurgent attitudes as cues to select their targets and tactics. We conduct an original survey experiment in 204 Afghan villag…
Coethnic Bias and Wartime Informing
Information about insurgent groups is a central resource in civil wars: counterinsurgents seek it, insurgents safeguard it, and civilians often trade it. Yet despite its essential role in civil war dynamics, the act of informing is still poorly understood, due mostly to the classified nature of informant "tips." As an alternative research strategy, we use an original 2,700 respondent survey experiment in 100 villages to examine attitudes toward t…
From cell phones to conflict? Reflections on the emerging ICT-political conflict research agenda
From mobilizing masses to monitoring rebels, information and communication technologies (ICT) are transforming political conflict. We reflect on the contributions made by the articles of this special issue to the emerging ICT-political conflict research agenda, highlighting strengths of these articles, and offering suggestions for moving forward. Elaborate theory is crucial: it informs our standards of evidence, our choice of statistical models, …
Comparing and Combining List and Endorsement Experiments: Evidence from Afghanistan
List and endorsement experiments are becoming increasingly popular among social scientists as indirect survey techniques for sensitive questions. When studying issues such as racial prejudice and support for militant groups, these survey methodologies may improve the validity of measurements by reducing nonresponse and social desirability biases. We develop a statistical test and multivariate regression models for comparing and combining the resu…
Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan
How are civilian attitudes toward combatants affected by wartime victimization? Are these effects conditional on which combatant inflicted the harm? We investigate the determinants of wartime civilian attitudes towards combatants using a survey experiment across 204 villages in five Pashtun-dominated provinces of Afghanistan-the heart of the Taliban insurgency. We use endorsement experiments to indirectly elicit truthful answers to sensitive ques…
Do Democracies Make Inferior Counterinsurgents? Reassessing Democracy's Impact on War Outcomes and Duration
A core proposition from decades of research on internal wars asserts that democracies, with their casualty-averse publics, accountable leaders, and free media, are uniquely prone to losing counterinsurgency (COIN) wars. Yet one should question this finding, for two reasons. First, existing studies overwhelmingly adopt no-variance research designs that only examine democracies, leaving them unable to assess their performance relative to autocracie…
Are Coethnics More Effective Counterinsurgents? Evidence from the Second Chechen War
Does ethnicity matter for explaining violence during civil wars? I exploit variation in the identity of soldiers who conducted so-called "sweep" operations (zachistki) in Chechnya (2000-5) as an empirical strategy for testing the link between ethnicity and violence. Evidence suggests that the intensity and timing of insurgent attacks are conditional on who "swept" a particular village. For example, attacks decreased by about 40% after pro-Russian…
Does Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks: Evidence from Chechnya
Does a state's use of indiscriminate violence incite insurgent attacks? To date, most existing theories and empirical studies have concluded that such violence is highly counterproductive because it creates new grievances while forcing victims to seek security, if not safety, in rebel arms. This proposition is tested using Russian artillery fire in Chechnya (2000 to 2005) to estimate indiscriminate violence's effect on subsequent patterns of insu…
Rage Against the Machines: Explaining Outcomes in Counterinsurgency Wars
During the nineteenth century, states routinely defeated insurgent foes. Over the twentieth century, however, this pattern reversed itself, with states increasingly less likely to defeat insurgents or avoid meeting at least some of their demands. What accounts for this pattern of outcomes in counterinsurgency (COIN) wars? We argue that increasing mechanization within state militaries after World War I is primarily responsible for this shift. Unli…
Beneath the sand—remote sensing, archaeology, aggregates and sustainability: A case study from Heslerton, the Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire, UK
The Vale of Pickering, in Yorkshire has been the setting for one of the largest archaeological research projects in Europe for more than 30 years. The accrued data includes over 1000 ha of fluxgate gradiometer measurements that can be interpreted with reference to 200 ha of subsurface mapping, 25 years of aerial photographic survey, two large-area multispectral and vertical photographic surveys, a Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) surve…
Pocket Protests: Rhetorical Coercion and the Micropolitics of Collective Action in Semiauthoritarian Regimes
This article examines how repression in semiauthoritarian regimes affects collective action by comparing antiwar protesting during Russia's first (1994–96) and second (1999–) Chechen wars. Vladimir Putin's creeping authoritarianism acts as a "natural experiment" where we can study collective action before, during, and after the introduction of restrictive measures. Two key findings emerge. First, despite the Kremlin's increasingly heavy hand, ant…
Enhancing the record through remote sensing: The application and integration of multi-sensor, non-invasive remote sensing techniques for the enhancement of the Sites and Monuments Record. Heslerton Pa…
The archaeological landscape is a fragile, disappearing and frequently little understood resource; conventional methods of field research tend to be both time-consuming and labour-intensive and produce a patchy and inconsistent record which reflects varying site visibility rather than poor research. If we are to preserve, or at least mitigate against damage to, this resource successfully, or even to undertake realistic assessment of landscapes as…
The application of high resolution fluxgate gradiometery as an aid to excavation planning and strategy formulation
The excavation of the Late Roman and Anglian settlement at West Heslerton, North Yorkshire, has been one of the largest excavations undertaken in England in the last twenty years. It has been the setting for a number of developments and experiments in the application of 'the new technology' to field archaeology. Parts of the site, which extended over c.20 Ha., proved to have high magnetic susceptibility and were ideally suited for magnetic prospe…
Does Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks: Evidence from Chechnya
Does a state's use of indiscriminate violence incite insurgent attacks? To date, most existing theories and empirical studies have concluded that such violence is highly counterproductive because it creates new grievances while forcing victims to seek security, if not safety, in rebel arms. This proposition is tested using Russian artillery fire in Chechnya (2000 to 2005) to estimate indiscriminate violence's effect on subsequent patterns of insu…
Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan
How are civilian attitudes toward combatants affected by wartime victimization? Are these effects conditional on which combatant inflicted the harm? We investigate the determinants of wartime civilian attitudes towards combatants using a survey experiment across 204 villages in five Pashtun-dominated provinces of Afghanistan-the heart of the Taliban insurgency. We use endorsement experiments to indirectly elicit truthful answers to sensitive ques…
Rage Against the Machines: Explaining Outcomes in Counterinsurgency Wars
During the nineteenth century, states routinely defeated insurgent foes. Over the twentieth century, however, this pattern reversed itself, with states increasingly less likely to defeat insurgents or avoid meeting at least some of their demands. What accounts for this pattern of outcomes in counterinsurgency (COIN) wars? We argue that increasing mechanization within state militaries after World War I is primarily responsible for this shift. Unli…
Are Coethnics More Effective Counterinsurgents? Evidence from the Second Chechen War
Does ethnicity matter for explaining violence during civil wars? I exploit variation in the identity of soldiers who conducted so-called "sweep" operations (zachistki) in Chechnya (2000-5) as an empirical strategy for testing the link between ethnicity and violence. Evidence suggests that the intensity and timing of insurgent attacks are conditional on who "swept" a particular village. For example, attacks decreased by about 40% after pro-Russian…
Comparing and Combining List and Endorsement Experiments: Evidence from Afghanistan
List and endorsement experiments are becoming increasingly popular among social scientists as indirect survey techniques for sensitive questions. When studying issues such as racial prejudice and support for militant groups, these survey methodologies may improve the validity of measurements by reducing nonresponse and social desirability biases. We develop a statistical test and multivariate regression models for comparing and combining the resu…
Do Democracies Make Inferior Counterinsurgents? Reassessing Democracy's Impact on War Outcomes and Duration
A core proposition from decades of research on internal wars asserts that democracies, with their casualty-averse publics, accountable leaders, and free media, are uniquely prone to losing counterinsurgency (COIN) wars. Yet one should question this finding, for two reasons. First, existing studies overwhelmingly adopt no-variance research designs that only examine democracies, leaving them unable to assess their performance relative to autocracie…
Coethnic Bias and Wartime Informing
Information about insurgent groups is a central resource in civil wars: counterinsurgents seek it, insurgents safeguard it, and civilians often trade it. Yet despite its essential role in civil war dynamics, the act of informing is still poorly understood, due mostly to the classified nature of informant "tips." As an alternative research strategy, we use an original 2,700 respondent survey experiment in 100 villages to examine attitudes toward t…
Can Economic Assistance Shape Combatant Support in Wartime? Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan
Governments, militaries, and aid organizations all rely on economic interventions to shape civilian attitudes toward combatants during wartime. We have, however, little individual-level evidence that these "hearts and minds" programs actually influence combatant support. We address this problem by conducting a factorial randomized control trial of two common interventions-vocational training and cash transfers-on combatant support among 2,597 at-…
Civilian Casualties, Humanitarian Aid, and Insurgent Violence in Civil Wars
Indiscriminate violence against civilians has long been viewed as a catalyst for new rounds of violence in civil wars. Can humanitarian assistance reduce violence after civilians have been harmed? Crossnational studies are pessimistic, drawing a connection between humanitarian aid and increased civil war violence, lethality, and duration. To date, however, we have few subnational studies of wartime aid and subsequent violence. To examine this rel…
Pocket Protests: Rhetorical Coercion and the Micropolitics of Collective Action in Semiauthoritarian Regimes
This article examines how repression in semiauthoritarian regimes affects collective action by comparing antiwar protesting during Russia's first (1994–96) and second (1999–) Chechen wars. Vladimir Putin's creeping authoritarianism acts as a "natural experiment" where we can study collective action before, during, and after the introduction of restrictive measures. Two key findings emerge. First, despite the Kremlin's increasingly heavy hand, ant…
Can civilian attitudes predict insurgent violence? Ideology and insurgent tactical choice in civil war
Are civilian attitudes a useful predictor of patterns of violence in civil wars? A prominent debate has emerged among scholars and practitioners about the importance of winning civilian 'hearts and minds' for influencing their wartime behavior. We argue that such efforts may have a dark side: insurgents can use pro-counterinsurgent attitudes as cues to select their targets and tactics. We conduct an original survey experiment in 204 Afghan villag…
From cell phones to conflict? Reflections on the emerging ICT-political conflict research agenda
From mobilizing masses to monitoring rebels, information and communication technologies (ICT) are transforming political conflict. We reflect on the contributions made by the articles of this special issue to the emerging ICT-political conflict research agenda, highlighting strengths of these articles, and offering suggestions for moving forward. Elaborate theory is crucial: it informs our standards of evidence, our choice of statistical models, …
Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War
Beneath the sand—remote sensing, archaeology, aggregates and sustainability: A case study from Heslerton, the Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire, UK
The Vale of Pickering, in Yorkshire has been the setting for one of the largest archaeological research projects in Europe for more than 30 years. The accrued data includes over 1000 ha of fluxgate gradiometer measurements that can be interpreted with reference to 200 ha of subsurface mapping, 25 years of aerial photographic survey, two large-area multispectral and vertical photographic surveys, a Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) surve…
Prolonged contact does not reshape locals' attitudes toward migrants in wartime settings
Despite record numbers of internally displaced persons (IDPs) globally, we know little about the causal effects of intergroup contact between migrants and locals in active conflict settings. We conduct a randomized controlled trial of a vocational skills‐training program implemented by Mercy Corps that enrolled 2597 locals and migrants in near equal numbers in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where IDPs face daily prejudice and discrimination. Courses last…
The application of high resolution fluxgate gradiometery as an aid to excavation planning and strategy formulation
The excavation of the Late Roman and Anglian settlement at West Heslerton, North Yorkshire, has been one of the largest excavations undertaken in England in the last twenty years. It has been the setting for a number of developments and experiments in the application of 'the new technology' to field archaeology. Parts of the site, which extended over c.20 Ha., proved to have high magnetic susceptibility and were ideally suited for magnetic prospe…
Enhancing the record through remote sensing: The application and integration of multi-sensor, non-invasive remote sensing techniques for the enhancement of the Sites and Monuments Record. Heslerton Pa…
The archaeological landscape is a fragile, disappearing and frequently little understood resource; conventional methods of field research tend to be both time-consuming and labour-intensive and produce a patchy and inconsistent record which reflects varying site visibility rather than poor research. If we are to preserve, or at least mitigate against damage to, this resource successfully, or even to undertake realistic assessment of landscapes as…
Beneath the sand—remote sensing, archaeology, aggregates and sustainability: A case study from Heslerton, the Vale of Pickering, North Yorkshire, UK
The Vale of Pickering, in Yorkshire has been the setting for one of the largest archaeological research projects in Europe for more than 30 years. The accrued data includes over 1000 ha of fluxgate gradiometer measurements that can be interpreted with reference to 200 ha of subsurface mapping, 25 years of aerial photographic survey, two large-area multispectral and vertical photographic surveys, a Laser Imaging Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) surve…
Pocket Protests: Rhetorical Coercion and the Micropolitics of Collective Action in Semiauthoritarian Regimes
This article examines how repression in semiauthoritarian regimes affects collective action by comparing antiwar protesting during Russia's first (1994–96) and second (1999–) Chechen wars. Vladimir Putin's creeping authoritarianism acts as a "natural experiment" where we can study collective action before, during, and after the introduction of restrictive measures. Two key findings emerge. First, despite the Kremlin's increasingly heavy hand, ant…
Does Indiscriminate Violence Incite Insurgent Attacks: Evidence from Chechnya
Does a state's use of indiscriminate violence incite insurgent attacks? To date, most existing theories and empirical studies have concluded that such violence is highly counterproductive because it creates new grievances while forcing victims to seek security, if not safety, in rebel arms. This proposition is tested using Russian artillery fire in Chechnya (2000 to 2005) to estimate indiscriminate violence's effect on subsequent patterns of insu…
Rage Against the Machines: Explaining Outcomes in Counterinsurgency Wars
During the nineteenth century, states routinely defeated insurgent foes. Over the twentieth century, however, this pattern reversed itself, with states increasingly less likely to defeat insurgents or avoid meeting at least some of their demands. What accounts for this pattern of outcomes in counterinsurgency (COIN) wars? We argue that increasing mechanization within state militaries after World War I is primarily responsible for this shift. Unli…
Do Democracies Make Inferior Counterinsurgents? Reassessing Democracy's Impact on War Outcomes and Duration
A core proposition from decades of research on internal wars asserts that democracies, with their casualty-averse publics, accountable leaders, and free media, are uniquely prone to losing counterinsurgency (COIN) wars. Yet one should question this finding, for two reasons. First, existing studies overwhelmingly adopt no-variance research designs that only examine democracies, leaving them unable to assess their performance relative to autocracie…
Are Coethnics More Effective Counterinsurgents? Evidence from the Second Chechen War
Does ethnicity matter for explaining violence during civil wars? I exploit variation in the identity of soldiers who conducted so-called "sweep" operations (zachistki) in Chechnya (2000-5) as an empirical strategy for testing the link between ethnicity and violence. Evidence suggests that the intensity and timing of insurgent attacks are conditional on who "swept" a particular village. For example, attacks decreased by about 40% after pro-Russian…
Explaining Support for Combatants during Wartime: A Survey Experiment in Afghanistan
How are civilian attitudes toward combatants affected by wartime victimization? Are these effects conditional on which combatant inflicted the harm? We investigate the determinants of wartime civilian attitudes towards combatants using a survey experiment across 204 villages in five Pashtun-dominated provinces of Afghanistan-the heart of the Taliban insurgency. We use endorsement experiments to indirectly elicit truthful answers to sensitive ques…
Comparing and Combining List and Endorsement Experiments: Evidence from Afghanistan
List and endorsement experiments are becoming increasingly popular among social scientists as indirect survey techniques for sensitive questions. When studying issues such as racial prejudice and support for militant groups, these survey methodologies may improve the validity of measurements by reducing nonresponse and social desirability biases. We develop a statistical test and multivariate regression models for comparing and combining the resu…
Coethnic Bias and Wartime Informing
Information about insurgent groups is a central resource in civil wars: counterinsurgents seek it, insurgents safeguard it, and civilians often trade it. Yet despite its essential role in civil war dynamics, the act of informing is still poorly understood, due mostly to the classified nature of informant "tips." As an alternative research strategy, we use an original 2,700 respondent survey experiment in 100 villages to examine attitudes toward t…
From cell phones to conflict? Reflections on the emerging ICT-political conflict research agenda
From mobilizing masses to monitoring rebels, information and communication technologies (ICT) are transforming political conflict. We reflect on the contributions made by the articles of this special issue to the emerging ICT-political conflict research agenda, highlighting strengths of these articles, and offering suggestions for moving forward. Elaborate theory is crucial: it informs our standards of evidence, our choice of statistical models, …
Can civilian attitudes predict insurgent violence? Ideology and insurgent tactical choice in civil war
Are civilian attitudes a useful predictor of patterns of violence in civil wars? A prominent debate has emerged among scholars and practitioners about the importance of winning civilian 'hearts and minds' for influencing their wartime behavior. We argue that such efforts may have a dark side: insurgents can use pro-counterinsurgent attitudes as cues to select their targets and tactics. We conduct an original survey experiment in 204 Afghan villag…
Civilian Casualties, Humanitarian Aid, and Insurgent Violence in Civil Wars
Indiscriminate violence against civilians has long been viewed as a catalyst for new rounds of violence in civil wars. Can humanitarian assistance reduce violence after civilians have been harmed? Crossnational studies are pessimistic, drawing a connection between humanitarian aid and increased civil war violence, lethality, and duration. To date, however, we have few subnational studies of wartime aid and subsequent violence. To examine this rel…
Arras 200: Revisiting Britain's most famous Iron Age cemetery
Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War
How do armies fight and what makes them victorious on the modern battlefield? This book challenges long-standing answers to this classic question by linking the fate of armies to their levels of inequality. Introducing the concept of military inequality, the book demonstrates how a state's prewar choices about the citizenship status of ethnic groups within its population determine subsequent battlefield performance. Treating certain ethnic groups…
Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War
Can Economic Assistance Shape Combatant Support in Wartime? Experimental Evidence from Afghanistan
Governments, militaries, and aid organizations all rely on economic interventions to shape civilian attitudes toward combatants during wartime. We have, however, little individual-level evidence that these "hearts and minds" programs actually influence combatant support. We address this problem by conducting a factorial randomized control trial of two common interventions-vocational training and cash transfers-on combatant support among 2,597 at-…
Mad CoW: A Reply to Gibler and Miller
In Divided Armies, I argue that inequality within armies (“military inequality”) has shaped their battlefield performance in conventional wars since 1800. Gibler and Miller (2022) are unpersuaded. They raise a flurry of concerns about the cross-national evidence and one statistical analysis in the book’s Chapter 4. In particular, they maintain that Project Mars, the book’s dataset, offers nothing new compared to the Correlates of War (CoW). I fin…
Fratricidal Coercion in Modern War
Armies sometimes use fratricidal coercion—violence and intimidation against their own troops—to force reluctant soldiers to fight. How this practice affects battlefield performance remains an open question. We study fratricidal coercion using a mixed-methods strategy, drawing on (1) monthly panel data on Soviet Rifle Divisions in World War II, built from millions of declassified personnel files; (2) paired comparisons of Rifle Divisions at the Ba…
Prolonged contact does not reshape locals' attitudes toward migrants in wartime settings
Despite record numbers of internally displaced persons (IDPs) globally, we know little about the causal effects of intergroup contact between migrants and locals in active conflict settings. We conduct a randomized controlled trial of a vocational skills‐training program implemented by Mercy Corps that enrolled 2597 locals and migrants in near equal numbers in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where IDPs face daily prejudice and discrimination. Courses last…
Political science (15 works) · Law (11 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Sociology (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence (7 works)