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.
You may also visit my Google Scholar Page.
You may also visit my Google Scholar Page.
Peer-Reviewed Publications:
Rebel Territorial Control and Civilian Collective Action in Civil Wars
Rubin, M.A. 2020. "Rebel Territorial Control and Civilian Collective Action in Civil Wars: Evidence from the Communist Insurgency in the Philippines." Journal of Conflict Resolution, 64(2-3): 459-489.
Rubin, M.A. 2020. "Rebel Territorial Control and Civilian Collective Action in Civil Wars: Evidence from the Communist Insurgency in the Philippines." Journal of Conflict Resolution, 64(2-3): 459-489.
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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 community collective action capacity (CAC) defined by underlying social network structure, to complement existing explanations of territorial control. I argue 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, partially offsetting these gains. CAC increases rebel control in areas of state neglect. But, as state service provision increases, communities leverage CAC to demand prohibitively costly rebel governance, deterring rebel control. This article tests the theory in the context of the communist insurgency in the Philippines, using military intelligence reports from 2011 to 2014 to measure village-level communist insurgent territorial control and a household-level census (2008–2010) to measure village CAC. Interviews with village elders in Eastern Mindanao illustrate causal mechanisms and explore 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.
Don't Bite the Hand that Feeds: Rebel Funding Sources and the Use of Terrorism in Civil Wars
Fortna, V.P., N.J. Lotitio, and M.A. Rubin. 2018. "Don't Bite the Hand that Feeds: Rebel Funding Sources and the Use of Terrorism in Civil Wars," International Studies Quarterly, Volume 62, Issue 4, Pages 782–794.
[Access via ISQ website]
Fortna, V.P., N.J. Lotitio, and M.A. Rubin. 2018. "Don't Bite the Hand that Feeds: Rebel Funding Sources and the Use of Terrorism in Civil Wars," International Studies Quarterly, Volume 62, Issue 4, Pages 782–794.
[Access via ISQ website]
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 and Working Papers:
Terrorism and the Varieties of Civil Liberties
Rubin, M.A. and R.K. Morgan. "Terrorism and the Varieties of Civil Liberties." Available at SSRN (April 3, 2020): http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3361330.
Status: Revise and Resubmit.
Rubin, M.A. and R.K. Morgan. "Terrorism and the Varieties of Civil Liberties." Available at SSRN (April 3, 2020): http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3361330.
Status: Revise and Resubmit.
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How do government protections of, and infringement upon, its citizens’ civil liberties influence the country’s exposure to terrorism? Existing research remains divided on whether civil liberties protections increase or decrease vulnerability to terrorism, and the conditions under which violating civil liberties mitigate or exacerbate the security threats associated with terrorism. We provide clarity on these debates by disaggregating civil liberties into component dimensions—political liberties, private liberties, and physical integrity—which we argue have distinct effects on a country’s exposure to terrorism. We argue political liberties increase terrorism while physical integrity rights decrease terrorism. These countervailing effects provide an alternative explanation for the“inverted-U”relationship between civil liberties protections and terrorism. We isolate the effects of specific political institutional features and government behaviors by leveraging the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) data. We measure a country’s exposure to terrorism using the Global Terrorism Database. Our sample covers 176 states from 1970-2016. We find evidence consistent with our hypotheses regarding the effects of the distinct component dimensions of civil liberties.
Terrorism in Armed Conflict (TAC): New Data Attributing Terrorism to Rebel Organizations
Fortna, V.P., N.J. Lotitio, and M.A. Rubin. "Terrorism in Armed Conflict (TAC): New Data Attributing Terrorism to Rebel Organizations." Working Paper.
Status: Revise and Resubmit.
Fortna, V.P., N.J. Lotitio, and M.A. Rubin. "Terrorism in Armed Conflict (TAC): New Data Attributing Terrorism to Rebel Organizations." Working Paper.
Status: Revise and Resubmit.
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. Many GTD incidents are missing, or include ambiguous, perpetrator information. Because the accuracy of perpetrator information likely varies systematically, simply dropping these incidents from analyses may bias results. TAC provides possible attribution to specific rebel groups, with coding for uncertainty. TAC enables researchers to 1) address "description bias" in media-based terrorism data, 2) model uncertainty regarding perpetrator attribution, and 3) vary the way terrorism is counted. The data coder 409 rebel organizations from 1970-2013.
The Social Determinants of Population Displacement and Community Resilience in Armed Conflict
Arnon, D.Y., R.J. McAlexander Lotitio, and M.A. Rubin. "The Social Determinants of Population Displacement and Community Resilience in Armed Conflict."
Status: Working Paper.
Arnon, D.Y., R.J. McAlexander Lotitio, and M.A. Rubin. "The Social Determinants of Population Displacement and Community Resilience in Armed Conflict."
Status: Working Paper.
Why do some communities evacuate their village during armed conflict, while others remain despite the risks? We argue that community social cohesion, by facilitating collective action in risky settings, influences community-level depopulation outcomes in two ways. First, it facilitates collective exit to escape belligerents' violent depopulation tactics. Second, among communities that remain in contested zones, cohesion enhances the prospects the community remains intact rather than violently depopulated. The argument is tested in the context of the 1948 war in Mandate Palestine (Israel’s independence/Palestinian al-Nakba). We draw upon detailed data on the proximate causes of depopulation in each Arab Palestinian village in which it occurred and new data coded from a pre-war village-level survey, conducted by the Jewish forces in early 1940s and provided to the authors by the Haganah archives, that assessed the social, political, and economic conditions of Arab communities in Palestine.
Works in Progress:
Government Repression and Rebel Groups' Use of Terrorism in Ethnic Conflict, with V.P. Fortna
Under what conditions do rebel groups use terrorism as a tactic in armed conflict? Does the government’s human rights record, including its history of civilian-targeted violence, reduce the likelihood of terrorism by eliminating violent challengers or does it increase terrorism by legitimizing it as a warranted response to government abuse? We argue that rebel groups are more likely to perpetrate acts of terrorism when their constituent population finds terrorism an appropriate tactic; when the legitimacy costs, the expected loss in legitimacy among a key audience associated with specific actions, are lower. Specifically, constituent populations are more likely to accept terrorism as legitimate when the government adversary has committed its own abuses, especially, but not exclusively, violations of physical integrity rights such as indiscriminate violence, extrajudicial killings, and other forms of civilian-targeted violence. In other words, a rebel group’s legitimacy costs for terrorism are driven, at least in part, by the perceived legitimacy of the government adversary and prior exposure to civilian-targeted violence. We test the argument empirically in the context of ethnic conflicts. The Terrorism in Armed Conflict (TAC) dataset attributes incidents of terrorism to rebel group perpetrators, using the list of rebel groups in the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP). The Ethnic One-Sided Violence Dataset records government repression of specific politically mobilized ethnic group populations, which we link to UCDP rebel groups that purport to represent those groups using the Ethnic Power Relations dataset.
Named Entities for Social Science-Political Organizations, with Rex Douglass and Thomas Scherer
A global dataset of (non-state/non-governmental) political organizations engaged in both institutionalized political activities (e.g. political parties, advocacy, and lobbying organizations) and "extra-institutional" politics (e.g. rebel groups, militias. paramilitary organizations. civil resistant groups). To explain why some organized political groups pursue their objectives through institutionalized channels (within-system) while other engage in violent or nonviolent forms of illicit competition (anti-system), scholars must compare political organizations that may adopt within- or anti-system strategies, but vary on which strategies they employ. Currently, the research programs on within- and anti-system organizations have been studied largely separately, despite the fact that anti-system groups often emerge from within-system groups (e.g. political parties turned insurgents) and vice versa (e.g. demobilized insurgents fielding political candidates in post-conflict elections). Using weak supervision machine learning techniques, we generate a sample of political organizations across these various types by extracting information from the world's largest open source repository of named entities: Wikidata. The resulting database integrates the variety of political organizations into a common dataset.
Interstate Conflict Interdependence and State Sponsorship of Rebel Groups
Under what conditions do states sponsor nonstate dissident organizations in conflict with another state? With the observed decline of interstate war, states have increasingly adopted "gray zone" strategies short of militarization to prosecute international disputes while minimizing the risk of conflict escalation. Existing research focuses on the triadic relationship involving two states and a nonstate proxy agent. This article emphasizes the international factors shaping states' willingness to accept the risks associated with sponsorship. When multiple state challengers seek competing concessions from the same adversary (conflict interdependence), each challenger is pressured into seeking to sponsor dissidents in order to maintain their bargaining position with the adversary relative to other challengers; fearing avoiding or delaying sponsorship permits other challengers to capture the limited "labor supply" of resistance. The theory is tested in a regression framework, using San-Akca's (2016) Dangerous Dyads and Berkowitz's Delegating Terror data on external support for violent groups. Introducing a new latent variable measure of interstate disputes, leveraging existing datasets on international conflict alongside global events data to identify lower-intensity disputes relevant to gray zone conflict, the article captures interstate conflict interdependence in the form of competition for target concessions.
Concede with Caution: How Government Concessions Affect Self-Determination Movement Fragmentation
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 AMAR data (Birnire, et. al. 2015) 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.
