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Deterrence theory typically focuses on states’ armed forces and other tools of coercion. However, what about the resolve, resilience, and willingness of ordinary civilians who voluntarily organize and arm themselves as reservist militias to defend their homeland? Can well-armed volunteers in smaller states deter larger powers? We examine the case of the Baltic States and Russia, one of the central fault lines of global politics. Questioning the commitment of NATO to their collective security, the governments of the Baltic States have begun to actively arm, organize, recruit, and train thousands of volunteer reservists to defend their homelands from an asymmetric attack, conventional or otherwise. Based on fieldwork in the region, we find that informal volunteer forces and formal civilian militias can influence the calculus of more powerful adversaries to produce a deterrent effect.

This article explains cross-border uses of force against ethnic armed groups along Myanmar’s bloody borders with China and Thailand. I trace the history of Burma’s ethnic disputes, its state-society relations, and the “modernization” of its military doctrine to understand how its state-building enterprise can shape the use of force along a state’s frontier. I treat each of the border regions as distinct subcategories to highlight variation in the micro-dynamics as well as types and conditions under which the use of state-orchestrated violence occurs. First, I point to the role of greater state-building – extractive, coercive, etc. – and how it influences the use of force along border regions. Second, I explore the modernization of Burma’s military and evolution of its doctrine – this includes early efforts by the tatmadaw’s post-1988 shift toward a more conventional counterinsurgency strategy. An implication of my theory is that more peaceful relations between states perversely can create the conditions for more cross-border violence, as there are greater opportunities for states to either “pool” border security or outsource the use of force to proxies or paramilitary forces.

This article examines the strategic logic of siege warfare in counterinsurgencies and questions the perception that siege warfare as an effective and relatively low-cost form of counterinsurgency. Sieges do allow the besieging side to conserve its military resources, avoid direct contact with the enemy, and minimize a rapid escalation of civilian casualties. Yet, on a strategic level, siege warfare is ineffective without major outside military support or the willingness to use overwhelming force.

The concept of controlling territorial space informs Western conventions of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. The Islamic State surprised the West when it recently captured dozens of cities across Iraq and Syria. Eradicating failed states and ungoverned territories vis-à-vis more robust state-building also forms the backbone of U.S. efforts to reduce violence, provide order, and build stronger societies. I argue that clearing territory, while important, should be selectively employed. Greater stateness does not always correlate with reductions in violence, and conversely not all \"ungoverned spaces\" are terrorist safe havens. A number of these areas are natural, if non-integrated, parts of the international system. Second, I posit that state-building can have its own negative externalities, such as pushing nonstate actors across state borders and thereby externalizing internal conflicts. The policy implications of my theory are twofold: First, territory is often a poor metric to capture military progress in the fight violent nonstate actors; second, fixing failed or fragile states does not always reduce the threat of violence but often just relocates it, as nonstate actors get squeezed out of areas of increasing stateness and move toward areas of weak stateness.

Refugee camps are often treated as incubators of social unrest, violence, terrorism, and illicit trade. This provokes their overseers in the United Nations (UN) and other relief agencies to conduct frequent social engineering to enhance the camps' legibility. Hence, we see orderly, perpendicular rows, standardized units from redistricting to the allocation of diapers, and so forth-all of the follies of high modernism that James Scott predicted in Seeing Like a State, but writ small. Indeed, my qualitative research from the Za'atari refugee camp, located in Jordan along the Syrian border, indicates that refugees, especially middle-class ones like Syria's, rebel against uniformity-or what Scott describes as \"metis\"-and seek to recreate their domiciles as best they can from the meager canvas tents and campers allotted to them. Put simply, they see their surroundings more as the disorderly \"sidewalk ballet\" of Jane Jacobs' Greenwich Village than the high modernist yet sterile functionalism of Robert Moses. This holds important policy implications for the future of how we devise refugee camps, which increasingly resemble small cities; how we settle internally displaced persons (IDPs); and how we deal with the aftermath of mass population displacements. From direct cash transfers to the districting of refugees, some bureaucratic flexibility is required but so is an acknowledgement and embrace of refugees' do-it-yourself ethos that is rooted in their resistance to authority and trauma from violence. Drawing from the literature in social anthropology and political science, this article presents new evidence from Za'atari that disputes the utility of a high modernist approach to the social engineering of large displaced populations.

Among the fastest growing movements in U.S. cities are urban cyclists. Vocal in their push for greater rights and respect from drivers, pedestrians, and city officials -- as evidenced by Critical Mass rides, the rise in the number of advocacy groups, and the zero-sum discourse employed through their email missives -- their emergence as a major social force has received little scrutiny from social movement or urban policy theorists. This paper argues that cyclists are not unlike insurgent movements abroad, with diffuse social networks, a disciplined core membership, and a radical fringe that can engender a counter-movement to roll back the group's gains. The advances made by cycling advocates have been met with a mix of acceptance and opposition -- a disparate coalition of well-connected businesspeople and politicians, drivers and pedestrians -- that has coalesced to roll back cyclists' rights. Employing qualitative data that includes three months of interviews, as well as a trove of emails to New York's Department of Transportation obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, this paper takes a social movement theorist's lens to urban cyclists. The case study is a bike lane installed in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in 2010 that generated international headlines after local residents sued the city. The paper finds that the residents were motivated by NIMBY concerns but were also responding to a radical fringe of the cyclist movement, a finding consistent with how locals respond to insurgent movements abroad. Adapted from the source document.

Why do some states carry out hot pursuit, whiles others, faced with a similar opportunity and non-state threat, do not? Even as interstate conflict has largely receded and respect for sovereign borders is mostly enforced, hot pursuit – a type of transnational force that allows states to pursue violent non-state actors that flee or are based across state borders – persists and arguably has become a new norm in international politics. I theorize that hot pursuit emerges as a function of two factors: the institutionalization of a state's civil-military relations, and the broader international normative environment. That is, I argue that states with greater military control over the use of force – so-called \"praetorian\" states – should prefer to pool border security with local actors or other militaries. I call this \"permissive\" hot pursuit. By contrast, states with greater civilian control over policy should be more likely to use force unilaterally to punish other states for hosting violent non-state actors – what I call \"punitive\" hot pursuit. The causal logic is that hot pursuit should hold higher opportunity costs for praetorian states to carry out than non-praetorian states, given that it a) may expose them to greater potential domestic threats by shifting armed forces from putting down domestic threats to border security, b) risks internationalizing a local conflict by drawing in other states, and c) weakens an international norm of nonintervention, thus potentially inviting future state aggression. As such, praetorian states should prefer more cautious or defensive doctrines, either by \"pooling\" border security with local actors (militias, paramilitary forces, border brigades, etc.), or working in cooperation with foreign militaries. Punitive hot pursuit is a mechanism to enforce compliance with the norm of state responsibility Permissive hot pursuit also upholds and strengthens the norm of state responsibility, given that it still holds states accountable for hosting NSAs. But because the use of force is in effect invited, it technically does not violate or weaken the norm of nonintervention. An extension of my theory is that hot pursuit should arise as a function of greater border normalization and does not portend imminent conflict across borders. To test my theory, first, I create an original and systematic dataset of 209 hot pursuit cases (1975-2009). Second, to trace the causal logic of the mechanisms behind my theory, I explore a pair of in-depth case studies: post-1988 Burma (permissive), and the United States' 1916 \"Punitive Expedition\" into Mexico (punitive). The fieldwork for my first case study was carried out in Myanmar in fall 2015. My theory holds important implications for how policymakers and military strategists think about violent non-state actors that crisscross borders and counterterrorism operations that violate sovereignty. It also is important for how scholars conceptualize emerging legal and social norms of nonintervention, especially in a future world of states with greater technological and military means to pursue non-state actors.