Megan A Stewart

As the United States and its coalition partners work to dismantle remnants of Da’esh in Mosul, the question we all need to be asking is what comes next? What exactly do groups like Da’esh offer in place of state-supported governance, and why are some violent extremist organizations more successful at employing nonviolent means to achieve often violent ends than others? When we think about organizations like Da’esh, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban today, we tend to think mostly about bomb blasts and beheadings. For many engaged in counterterrorism policy, action shots of packs of armed men, kitted out in masks and makeshift military gear, wielding rocket launchers and AK-47s are standard fare. Historically, research on nonstate armed actors who promote extremist ideas about governance has likewise focused variously on the origin stories of groups like al-Qaeda; the rise and fall of leading organizational ideologues such as Osama bin Laden; and global, national, and local responses to the destruction they leave in their wake in parts of the world as disparate as Brussels and Bamako. But, it is safe to say that we still don’t know what we don’t know about the nonviolent tools, tactics, and tricks violent nonstate organizations employ to stoke support for their own agendas.

Why are some dictators more successful at demobilizing protest movements than others? Repression sometimes stamps out protest movements (Bahrain in 2011) but can also cause a backlash (Egypt and Tunisia in 2011), leading to regime change. This article argues that the effectiveness of repression in quelling protests varies depending upon the income sources of authoritarian regimes. Oil-rich autocracies are well equipped to contend with domestic and international criticism, and this gives them a greater capacity to quell protests through force. Because oil-poor dictators lack such ability to deal with criticism, repression is more likely to trigger a backlash of increased protests. The argument is supported by analysis of newly available data on mass protests from the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO 2.0) dataset, which covers all countries (1945–2006). This article implies that publics respond strategically to repression, and tend to demobilize when the government is capable of continually employing repression with impunity.

What is the effect of the location of rebel-held territory on civilian casualties? We argue that insurgencies with domestic territorial are strongly incentivized to cultivate mutually beneficial relations with civilians living in their territory and limit their violence against them, while insurgencies with foreign territorial control lack these behavioral constraints and may victimize civilians to gain compliance and extract resources. We test this hypothesis in two ways: a quantitative analysis of all insurgencies from 1989-2003 followed by a multi-methods case study that leverages the exogenous acquisition of foreign territory by the Kurdish Worker’s Party (PKK) after the 1991 establishment of the northern Iraq No-Fly Zone. Our results strongly support our hypothesis. These findings shed light on potential broader patterns of civilian victimization by insurgents, and the conditions under which insurgents may strive to limit civilian casualties and provide governance.

The movement of populations from the countryside to cities is one of the most im- portant transformations in modern history, with far-reaching political, economic, and social consequences. These changes represent particular challenges for regimes with a tenuous grasp on power. Urban concentration facilitates anti-regime mobilization, yet cities have typically proven inhospitable for the organization of large-scale in- surgency. We develop a theory connecting urban geography to the onset of civil war. Moving beyond existing works that connect population size, growth, or youth bulges to conflict, we hypothesize that urban concentration - how populations are distributed across cities - affects the probability of experiencing civil wars. We argue that highly concentrated states, with populations clustered in one or few cities, are more likely to experience widespread political violence than those with populations distributed among many urban centers. Cross-national regressions and a case study of the Ethiopian conflict provide support for our theory.