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This article provides a critical examination of the current theoretical debate concerning the effects of indiscriminate violence. It argues that indiscriminate violence has been treated as an essentially random counterinsurgency tactic, but that the important distinction between its random and retributive variations has been overlooked, along with critical issues of timing and location, which has made it difficult to evaluate its efficacy in quelling rebel violence. Prior research has shown that both random and retributive violence reduced insurgent activity in the targeted locations and in the short term, but it does not necessarily follow that indiscriminate violence is effective. This article uses microlevel ethnographic evidence from Chechen villages during the period from 2001 to 2005 to show that indiscriminate violence deployed retributively against village communities generated insurgent activity in other areas because local avengers and rebels from the targeted populations sought to avoid further retributive violence against their village communities. Moreover, the insurgent activity occurred at least nine months after the initial act of retributive violence. Indiscriminate violence deployed randomly against village communities generated insurgent activity within the same targeted area, since the insurgents did not fear retributive violence in retaliation, and occurred with a delay of at least six months. As a result, the rebel reaction to indiscriminate violence is not observed immediately or, in the case of retributive violence, in the same location. This finding has crucial implications for evaluating the efficacy of indiscriminate violence in counterinsurgency operations, and underscores the importance of understanding how the social and political context can shape the way populations react to different forms of violence.

Although many countries have ethnic kin on the \"wrong side\" of their borders, few seek to annex foreign territories on the basis of ethnicity. This article examines why some states pursue irredentism, whereas others exhibit restraint. It focuses on the triadic structure of the kin group in the irredentist state, its coethnic enclave, and the host state, and provides new data on all actual and potential irredentist cases from 1946 to 2014. The results indicate that irredentism is more likely when the kin group is near economic parity with other groups in its own state, which results in status inconsistency and engenders grievances. It is also more likely in more ethnically homogeneous countries with winner-take-all majoritarian systems where the kin group does not need to moderate its policy to win elections by attracting other groups. These conditions generate both the grievance and opportunity for kin groups to pursue irredentism.

Recognition of aspiring states from established countries is central to becoming a member state of the international system. Previous research suggests that great power recognition decisions regarding aspiring states rapidly converge toward either recognition or non-recognition, yet great power convergence has still not occurred in the case of Kosovo after more than ten years. Unilateral secessions typically remain wholly unrecognized, since they violate the norm of home state consent, yet Kosovo has now been recognized by more than 100 countries. Why do some countries extend recognition to unilateral secessions, and do so early, whereas others delay recognition or withhold it altogether? In the case of Kosovo, great power influence and contestation, rather than convergence, have played a key role in shaping recognition decisions. We argue that countries in the US sphere of influence, with strong economic and military ties, are more likely to recognize Kosovo and to do so relatively fast, whereas countries influenced by Russia are less likely to recognize Kosovo at all, or to do so only after an extended delay. However, great powers are not equal in influencing other states to adopt their preferred position, since the USA is more powerful than Russia and can benefit from working alongside allies within the Western-oriented world order. We estimate a non-proportional Cox model with new time-varying data on Kosovo recognition and provide evidence that US military ties influenced other countries in extending recognition to unilateral secession.

Most studies of technocratic populism have focused on democracies under stress (e.g., Italy, Czech Republic). This article builds on and extends these studies by analyzing a hybrid regime—post-Soviet Georgia—and argues that technocratic populism in this context is utilized as a façade to cover authoritarian and oligarchic tendencies, while suspending (or reversing) democratization efforts. The state apparatus is weaponized against current and potential political opponents. Ideology is irrelevant, loyalty is key, and passivity is encouraged. The government aims to chip away at institutional checks and balances, and to demobilize the public by undermining confidence in the country’s representative institutions while increasing dependence on experienced personalities, the ‘can do experts.’ The result is most often a stable partial-reform equilibrium. We illustrate this argument with evidence from Georgia, where Bidzina Ivanishvili, the richest man in the country, came to power in 2012 and, despite not holding any official position in the government since 2013, has run the state as a firm.

How do countries decide whether or not to recognize an aspiring state? We examine such decisions in the context of contested recognition, which we define as a claim to statehood that is recognized by a large number of countries, but remains unrecognized by many others. We suggest that religion—both at the domestic level via religious regulation and discrimination against minority religions and at the international level via transnational religious ties—shapes recognition decisions. In cases where the two parties to a recognition dispute share the same dominant religious tradition (as in Western Sahara), transnational religious ties are expected to lead to external support for the side that emphasizes its religious identity and that has access to more resources. Moreover, we show that countries with higher levels of religious regulation are less likely to extend recognition. We assess these two conjectures for why some countries—but not others—have recognized the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic as an independent state using data on the recognition decisions of all 192 United Nations member states.

This article provides a critical examination of the current theoretical debate concerning the effects of indiscriminate violence. It argues that indiscriminate violence has been treated as an essentially random counterinsurgency tactic, but that the important distinction between its random and retributive variations has been overlooked, along with critical issues of timing and location, which has made it difficult to evaluate its efficacy in quelling rebel violence. Prior research has shown that both random and retributive violence reduced insurgent activity in the targeted locations and in the short term, but it does not necessarily follow that indiscriminate violence is effective. This article uses microlevel ethnographic evidence from Chechen villages during the period from 2001 to 2005 to show that indiscriminate violence deployed retributively against village communities generated insurgent activity in other areas because local avengers and rebels from the targeted populations sought to avoid further retributive violence against their village communities. Moreover, the insurgent activity occurred at least nine months after the initial act of retributive violence. Indiscriminate violence deployed randomly against village communities generated insurgent activity within the same targeted area, since the insurgents did not fear retributive violence in retaliation, and occurred with a delay of at least six months. As a result, the rebel reaction to indiscriminate violence is not observed immediately or, in the case of retributive violence, in the same location. This finding has crucial implications for evaluating the efficacy of indiscriminate violence in counterinsurgency operations, and underscores the importance of understanding how the social and political context can shape the way populations react to different forms of violence.

When do parties respond to their political rivals and when do they ignore them? This article presents a new computational framework to detect, analyze and predict partisan responsiveness by showing when parties on opposite poles of the political spectrum react to each other’s agendas and thereby contribute to polarization. Once spikes in responsiveness are detected and categorized using latent Dirichlet allocation, we utilize the terms that comprise the topics, together with a gradient descent solver, to assess the classifier’s predictive accuracy. Using 10,597 documents from the official websites of radical right and ethnic political parties in Slovakia (2004–2014), the analysis predicts which political issues will elicit partisan reactions, and which will be ignored, with an accuracy of 83% (F-measure) and outperforms both Random Forest and Naive Bayes classifiers. Subject matter experts validate the approach and interpret the results.

Islamic law denotes as haram any forbidden behavior, object, beverage, or food. Despite subscribing to a similar Salafi ideology, very few jihadi groups use violence against haram targets (e.g., brothels, casinos, statues, liquor stores, mixed sex schools, and gay clubs). This study argues that haram-centered violence unites ethnically-mixed jihadi groups by fostering a superordinate Islamic identity that enables them to overcome their collective action problems. As a result, ethnically-mixed Salafi jihadi groups deploy haram targeting much more than homogenous ones. Using new disaggregated group-level data, our analyses demonstrate that the ethnic structure of Salafi jihadi groups shapes haram targeting, both in Dagestan and on a global scale. The article discusses these findings and directions for future research on religious violence.

The study of secession generally stresses the causal influence of cultural identities, political preferences, or ecological factors. Whereas these different views are often considered to be mutually exclusive, this paper proposes a two-stage model in which they are complementary. We posit that cultural identities matter for explaining secessionism, but not because of primordial attachments. Rather, religious and linguistic groups matter because their members are imbued with cultural legacies that lead to distinct political preferences – in this case preferences over welfare statism. Further, ecological constraints such as geography and topography affect social interaction with like-minded individuals. On the basis of both these political preferences and ecological constraints, individuals then make rational choices about the desirability of secession. Instrumental considerations are therefore crucial in explaining the decision to secede, but not in a conventional pocketbook manner. To examine this theory, we analyze the 2013 referendum on the secession of the Jura Bernois region from the Canton of Berne in Switzerland, using municipal level census and referendum data. The results lend support to the theory and suggest one way in which the politics of identity, based on factors like language and religion, can be fused with the politics of interest (preferences for more or less state intervention into the polity and economy) to better understand group behavior.

Why do states engage in irredentism? Expanding on previous scholarship, this article advances a new theory with rationalist microfoundations that accounts for the incentives of both elites and citizens to support irredentism in democracies and dictatorships. Our model suggests irredentism is more likely when it enables political elites to provide a specific mix of private goods, public goods, and welfare transfers to citizens who desire them at the lowest tax rate. This leads to the prediction that irredentism is most likely in majoritarian democratic electoral systems and military dictatorships, and least likely in proportional electoral systems and single-party dictatorships. We test and find supportive evidence for these expectations using a comprehensive dataset covering all observed and potential irredentist cases from 1946 to 2014.