On this page, you will find updated drafts of my publications and working papers, details on additional works in progress, as well as a copy of my doctoral dissertation.
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Peer-Reviewed Publications:
"Don't Bite the Hand that Feeds: Rebel Funding Sources and the Use of Terrorism," (with V. Page Fortna and Nicholas Lotito). Forthcoming, International Studies Quarterly.
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Why do some rebel groups resort to terrorism tactics, while others refrain from doing so? This paper argues that rebel organizations pay attention to the legitimacy costs associated with terrorism and that how rebel organizations finance their rebellion creates variation in their vulnerability to these legitimacy costs. Organizations that rely primarily on civilian support, and to a lesser extent on foreign support, are most constrained in their use of terrorism. Rebels who finance their fight with lootable resources such as gems or drugs are least vulnerable to legitimacy costs and so are more likely to resort to terrorism and to employ more of it. The paper develops legitimacy cost theory and tests it using new data on Terrorism in Armed Conflict from 1970 to 2007. We find robust support for the hypothesis that groups who finance their fight with natural resources are significantly more likely to employ terrorism (though not necessarily to conduct more deadly attacks) relative to those who rely on local civilian support. We find that groups with external sources of financing, such as foreign state support, may be more likely to engage in terrorism than those who rely on local civilians, but not significantly so.
Under Review:
"Rebel Territorial Control and Civilian Collective Action in Civil Wars"
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Under what conditions do rebel organizations control territory during civil war? How do civilians influence the distribution of territorial control? This article introduces a civilian agency theory, emphasizing the importance of community collective action capacity (CAC) defined by underlying social network structure, to complement existing explanations of territorial control in civil war. It argues communities with greater CAC mobilize information and resources more efficiently, increasing belligerents’ incentives to control territory. However, CAC also increases community bargaining power to demand costly investments in governance and protection, partially offsetting these expected gains. CAC increases rebel control in areas of state neglect. But, as community access to state services increases, communities leverage CAC to demand prohibitively costly rebel governance, deterring rebel control. The article tests the theory using novel village-level data from the communist insurgency in the Philippines. Annual military intelligence reports from 2011-2014 measure communist insurgent territorial control and social network analysis of a household-level census (2008-2010) measures community CAC. Multilevel logit regression results are consistent with the theory. Qualitative analysis of key-informant interviews from 75 randomly selected villages in conflict-affected Eastern Mindanao illustrates the causal mechanisms and tests against plausible alternative explanations.
Research supported by the National Science Foundation Law and Social Sciences Program (Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, (Award Number: 1535598). Support also provided by the Earth Institute's AC4 program, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and the Columbia University Political Science Department.
Research supported by the National Science Foundation Law and Social Sciences Program (Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, (Award Number: 1535598). Support also provided by the Earth Institute's AC4 program, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and the Columbia University Political Science Department.
"Regime Types and Terrorism Revisited: The Institutional Determinants of Terrorism," (with Richard K. Morgan)
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Existing research offers contradictory claims regarding whether democracy increases or decreases states’ exposure to terrorism. Empirical evidence suggests that, relative to consolidated democracies and closed autocracies, “hybrid” regimes are more vulnerable to terrorism. Using common datasets of regime types (e.g., Polity IV), researchers have found convincing evidence in support of this “inverted-U” relationship. While insightful, research relying on aggregate measures of regime type cannot assess which institutional features drive this curvilinear relationship. We address this shortcoming by advancing an alternative explanation for the observed non-monotonic relationship between regime type and terrorism: particular component political institutions may have countervailing effects. We argue that civil liberties protections which we disaggregate further into political civil rights, private civil liberties, and protections against state repression—have distinct effects on a country’s vulnerability to terrorism. We isolate the effects of specific institutional features by leveraging the deconstructable nature of the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data and measure a state’s exposure to terrorism using the Global Terrorism Database. Our sample covers 176 states from 1970-2016. After replicating the inverted-U finding using V-Dem’s Liberal Democracy Index, we find evidence suggesting that political civil liberties increase the risk of terrorism while institutional features that protect citizens from state repression decrease this risk, and elections contribute little to a country’s risk of terrorism.
Working Papers:
"Terrorism in Armed Conflict (TAC): Introducing a New Data Set on Terrorism in Civil Conflicts, 1970-2012," (with V. Page Fortna and Nicholas Lotito).
The Terrorism in Armed Conflict (TAC) data collection project, developed with Page Fortna (Columbia University) and Nicholas Lotito (Yale University), links violent incidents in the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) to civil war combatants included in the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) datasets, filling a crucial gap in existing empirical studies addressing the causes and consequences of terrorism. Existing research has relied upon data that includes only groups that have committed acts of terrorism without including similar groups that may use terrorism but do not. This limits the set of testable research questions and confidence in inferences regarding the strategic use of terrorism. We consider civil war belligerents a useful sample of potential users of terrorism and investigate research questions related to strategies of conflict and the use of terrorism in civil wars. Upcoming papers using TAC data contribute to the literature on the causes and consequences of Terrorism in civil wars, rebel group lethality and conflict intensity, and strategic choice between guerrilla and civilian targeting tactics.
Works in Progress:
"International Rivalry and the Market for Sponsorship in Civil Wars"
Under what conditions do states support rebel groups in a rival’s territory? As conventional interstate war has become less common, states have increasingly adopted alternative strategies short of war (“gray zone” conflict) to prosecute their disputes with rivals. One such strategy is to sponsor non-state political opposition organizations in an adversary’s territory in order to impose costs without risking the state’s own personnel and resources. But sponsorship may backfire when adversaries discount the state’s credibility to withdraw support as part of a peace agreement or when rebels pursue their own interests at the expense of the sponsor’s interests (agency slack). This article develops and tests a theory to explain why states choose sponsorship over other gray zone strategies or war escalation. It argues that the structure of overlapping interstate conflicts influences states’ willingness to accept the risks of backfire associated with sponsorship: when multiple state challengers seek concessions from the same adversary, there exists greater competition in the market for sponsorship—the demand for services provided by rebel groups in the common adversary’s territory—which increases the incentives to forge a sponsorship relationship in order to maintain the strength of one’s bargaining position with the adversary relative to other challengers. The theory is tested using UCDP Armed Conflict data, San-Akca's (2016) Dangerous Dyads data on external support, and Goertz, et al. (2016) peace and conflict data to measure rivalry and alignment among states.
"Concede with Caution: How Concessions Affect Political Opposition Movement Fragmentation," (with Nora Keller).
Under what conditions can negotiation foster peace? How does bargaining in intrastate conflict impact the organizational structure of political opposition movements? This article advances a theory to explain political movement fragmentation during self-determination conflicts. We argue that political concessions to heterogeneous self-determination movements may have the unintended consequence of prolonging armed conflict by increasing the risk of organizational fracture. Politically marginalized factions within the movement are more likely to spoil the peace through (renewed) violence in order to avoid entrenching their subordinate political status in the post-conflict order. We test the theory using data on concessions to 146 self-determination movements in 77 countries from 1960-2005 (Cunningham 2014, Cunningham, Dahl and Fruge 2017). Ethnic Power Relations data identifying language and religious cleavages (Bormann, Cederman and Vogt 2017) and Minorities at Risk data enumerating politically and socially relevant ethnic groups measure the within-movement cleavage structure along which fragmentation may occur.
Dissertation:
Rebel Territorial Control, Governance, and Political Accountability in Civil War: Evidence from the Communist Insurgency in the Philippines
- Permanent URL
- Research supported by the National Science Foundation Law and Social Sciences Program (Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant, (Award Number: 1535598). Support also provided by the Earth Institute's AC4 program, the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and the Columbia University Political Science Department.
| rubin_michael_dissertation_manuscript.pdf |
Under what conditions do rebel organizations successfully control territory, and under what conditions do they provide governance, during civil war? Under what conditions do non-combatants influence the spread and conduct of insurgency? The accountability theory of rebel conduct introduces a new unifying framework for understanding rebel groups’ territorial control, governance, and strategic use of violence during civil war. Though existing literature has explored in depth the consequences of local-level variation in territorial control for civil war violence and outcomes, little is known about the origins of territorial control despite obvious relevance to the escalation and perpetuation of intrastate conflict. Crucially, the process by which insurgency expands or contracts represents the crucial first stage that determines the context in which belligerents make subsequent decisions in the conduct of war. Failure to consider the determinants of rebel territorial control, then, presents clear inferential challenges for existing theories of insurgent and counterinsurgent behavior. By emphasizing rebel accountability to civilians, the project contributes to the existing literature by emphasizing the role of non-combatants to explain the origins of rebel territorial control.
The accountability theory argues that community collective action capacity, the ability to mobilize collective action to pursue common interests, influences rebel territorial control and conduct during intrastate conflict. Collective action capacity represents a mobilization technology: communities efficiently form political committees, gather resources and supplies, and monitor individuals’ collaboration with insurgents and/or counterinsurgents. Because of these concomitant advantages,
belligerents have incentives to control territory in which communities enjoy high collective action capacity. However, collective action capacity empowers communities to leverage belligerents’ dependence on their collaboration to demand higher standards of governance and protection from violence. Because governance is costly, collective action capacity may cut against belligerents’ benefits to territorial control. Whether collective action capacity encourages or deters rebel territorial control depends on the community’s alternatives to rebel control; outside options, including alignment with the state or mobilization of autonomy/self-protection strategies, determine community bargaining power to demand rebel investment in governance. Collective action capacity increases rebel control where the state or local power brokers cannot provide basic services and security from civil war violence. The community accepts rebel control at low levels of governance, so rebels’ surplus benefits associated with local collaboration outweigh the expected governance costs. Communities with more effective state or local governance enjoy greater bargaining power to demand rebel governance that may become prohibitively expensive; collective action capacity deters rebel territorial control.
The empirical strategy draws upon complementary quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the extent to which the theoretical predictions are consistent with evidence from the Philippines. First, I present and econometric analysis on nation-wide, village-level data from the communist insurgency in the Philippines. Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) military intelligence assessments from 2011- 2014 categorize villages based on the sophistication of organized networks of support for the communist insurgency, and on the New People’s Army (NPA) capabilities to attack military and police units with precision. The reports are designed for internal use, but were generously supplied by the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process for research purposes. To measure village collective action capacity, I construct family networks from a government census conducted during 2008-2010, using household head family names. In the Philippines, kinship represents the primary currency of social capital, providing the foundation for the clientelist networks that distribute economic resources and drive political competition. In 1849, the Spanish colonial Governor, facing difficulty tracking household tax contributions, directed local officials to assign unique surnames to each family in their municipality using a list of approved family names. This peculiar history of name reassignment along with strict naming conventions suggests households sharing a surname within the same municipality can be confidently identified as members of the same family line, which allows identification of kinship networks. In the Philippines, collective action capacity increases the level of NPA control in villages with a history of state neglect, while the effect declines as the quality of local governance increases, consistent with the theory. I investigate potential threats to the inferences associated with endogeneity bias and test the theory’s mechanisms by investigating the relationship between collective action capacity and rebel governance in qualitative data collected in a Key-Informant survey of local leaders in 75 randomly selected villages within 3 conflict-affected provinces (Agusan del Sur, Davao Oriental, and Compostela Valley) on the island of Mindanao. I present plausible alternative theories, consistent with the econometric results, and draw competing hypotheses regarding variation in rebel governance. I use the interview data in process-tracing and case comparison methods to adjudicate between the accountability theory and these alternatives.
The accountability theory argues that community collective action capacity, the ability to mobilize collective action to pursue common interests, influences rebel territorial control and conduct during intrastate conflict. Collective action capacity represents a mobilization technology: communities efficiently form political committees, gather resources and supplies, and monitor individuals’ collaboration with insurgents and/or counterinsurgents. Because of these concomitant advantages,
belligerents have incentives to control territory in which communities enjoy high collective action capacity. However, collective action capacity empowers communities to leverage belligerents’ dependence on their collaboration to demand higher standards of governance and protection from violence. Because governance is costly, collective action capacity may cut against belligerents’ benefits to territorial control. Whether collective action capacity encourages or deters rebel territorial control depends on the community’s alternatives to rebel control; outside options, including alignment with the state or mobilization of autonomy/self-protection strategies, determine community bargaining power to demand rebel investment in governance. Collective action capacity increases rebel control where the state or local power brokers cannot provide basic services and security from civil war violence. The community accepts rebel control at low levels of governance, so rebels’ surplus benefits associated with local collaboration outweigh the expected governance costs. Communities with more effective state or local governance enjoy greater bargaining power to demand rebel governance that may become prohibitively expensive; collective action capacity deters rebel territorial control.
The empirical strategy draws upon complementary quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the extent to which the theoretical predictions are consistent with evidence from the Philippines. First, I present and econometric analysis on nation-wide, village-level data from the communist insurgency in the Philippines. Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) military intelligence assessments from 2011- 2014 categorize villages based on the sophistication of organized networks of support for the communist insurgency, and on the New People’s Army (NPA) capabilities to attack military and police units with precision. The reports are designed for internal use, but were generously supplied by the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process for research purposes. To measure village collective action capacity, I construct family networks from a government census conducted during 2008-2010, using household head family names. In the Philippines, kinship represents the primary currency of social capital, providing the foundation for the clientelist networks that distribute economic resources and drive political competition. In 1849, the Spanish colonial Governor, facing difficulty tracking household tax contributions, directed local officials to assign unique surnames to each family in their municipality using a list of approved family names. This peculiar history of name reassignment along with strict naming conventions suggests households sharing a surname within the same municipality can be confidently identified as members of the same family line, which allows identification of kinship networks. In the Philippines, collective action capacity increases the level of NPA control in villages with a history of state neglect, while the effect declines as the quality of local governance increases, consistent with the theory. I investigate potential threats to the inferences associated with endogeneity bias and test the theory’s mechanisms by investigating the relationship between collective action capacity and rebel governance in qualitative data collected in a Key-Informant survey of local leaders in 75 randomly selected villages within 3 conflict-affected provinces (Agusan del Sur, Davao Oriental, and Compostela Valley) on the island of Mindanao. I present plausible alternative theories, consistent with the econometric results, and draw competing hypotheses regarding variation in rebel governance. I use the interview data in process-tracing and case comparison methods to adjudicate between the accountability theory and these alternatives.
