Insurgency/Counterinsurgency
COUNTERINSURGENT LEARNING
How do armies learn? One challenge for armies facing insurgents is how to adapt their organization, doctrine, and equipment to guerrilla war. This project explores learning by doing during counterinsurgency and has direct implications for policy decisions on the duration of combat deployments.
Principal Researcher(s): Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Chris Price, Andrew Shaver
DRONE WARFARE AND INSURGENCY OUTCOMES
This research project seeks to assess the effects of suspected drone strikes on different insurgency outcomes -- from the types of targets and weaponry militants employ to the flow of information to counterinsurgent forces.
Principal Researcher(s): Alex Bollfrass, Andrew Shaver, Austin Wright
CIVILIAN WARTIME INFORMING AND INSURGENT VIOLENCE
This project explores the relationship between wartime informing by civilians and the production of violence by insurgents, with particular focus on way in which information and communication technologies affect this relationship. The project draws on several newly released datasets on civilian informing during the recent Iraq War independently released by the U.S. and British governments.
Accepted at International Studies Quarterly.
Principal Researcher(s): Andrew Shaver
EARLY IRAQ WAR INTELLIGENCE
This project analyzes newly released “tips” e-mails received by the U.S. government from civilian informants during the first year of the Iraq invasion in 2003. The records offer a rare, unfiltered look into the shadowy world of human intelligence collection and help piece together the historical record of America’s knowledge of and response to the growing insurgency in Iraq at the time.
(Our write up in The Washington Post)
Principal Researcher(s): Andrew Shaver
CONFLICT EXPOSURE AND CIVILIAN ATTITUDES
What are the effects of conflict exposure on civilian attitudes? This project explores how the attitudes of Baghdad citizens who were exposed to intense levels of insurgent violence during the construction of the Sadr security wall differed from fellow citizens who were largely insulted from such violence.
Principal Researcher(s): Andrew Shaver
“Disorganized Political Violence: A Demonstration Case of Temperature and Insurgency” International organization 77.2 (2023): 440-474.
Political organizations using violence to pursue strategic ends must be able to control the behavior of their combatants. A combination of empirical barriers and rationalist assumptions has hindered observational research on how successfully these organizations determine the type, target, and intensity of the violence produced by their fighters. We leverage the predictable effect of ambient temperature on human aggression to demonstrate that the motivations of individual combatants robustly influence conflict intensity. During the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, temperature affected the type and intensity of insurgent attacks and the willingness of military-age men to endorse violence against international forces. The findings caution against attributing strategic motivations to observed acts of violence, especially when individual combatants have autonomy over the initiation and intensity of attacks. They also encourage future attention to the interaction of strategic- and individual-level motivations in conflict settings. This article is accompanied by the United States Department of Defense record of Iraq war insurgent attacks against international and government forces.
Principal Researcher(s): Andrew Shaver, Alex Bollfrass