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Messing with the enemy : surviving in a social media world of hackers, terrorists, Russians, and fake news
\"Clint Watts electrified the nation when he testified in front of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election. In Messing with the Enemy, the counterterrorism, cybersecurity, and homeland security expert introduces us to a frightening world in which terrorists and cyber criminals don't hack your computer, they hack your mind. Watts reveals how these malefactors use your social media information and that of your family, friends and colleagues to map your social networks, identify your vulnerabilities, master your fears and harness your preferences. Thanks to the schemes engineered by social media manipulators using you and your information, business executives have coughed up millions in fraudulent wire transfers, seemingly good kids have joined the Islamic State, and staunch anti-communist Reagan Republicans have cheered the Russian government's hacking of a Democratic presidential candidate's e-mails. Watts knows how they do it because he's mirrored their methods to understand their intentions, combat their actions, and co-opt their efforts. Watts examines a range of social media platforms--from the first Internet forums to the current titans of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn--and bad actors--from al-Qaeda to the Islamic State to the Russian social media troll farm--to illuminate exactly how our enemies use Western social media for their nefarious purposes. He explains how he's learned, through his successes and his failures, to engage with hackers, terrorists, and even the Russians--and how these interactions have generated methods for fighting back against those who seek to harm people on the Internet. He concludes with a snapshot of how advances in artificial intelligence will make future influence even more effective and dangerous to social media users and democratic governments worldwide. Shocking, funny, and eye-opening, Messing with the Enemy is a deeply urgent guide for living safe and smart in a super-connected world.\"--Jacket.
Book
The Global Right Wing and the Clash of World Politics
This book is an eye-opening account of transnational advocacy, not by environmental and rights groups, but by conservative activists. Mobilizing around diverse issues, these networks challenge progressive foes across borders and within institutions. In these globalized battles, opponents struggle as much to advance their own causes as to destroy their rivals. Deploying exclusionary strategies, negative tactics and dissuasive ideas, they aim both to make and unmake policy. In this work, Clifford Bob chronicles combat over homosexuality and gun control in the UN, the Americas, Europe and elsewhere. He investigates the 'Baptist-burqa' network of conservative believers attacking gay rights, and the global gun coalition blasting efforts to control firearms. Bob draws critical conclusions about norms, activists and institutions, and his broad findings extend beyond the culture wars. They will change how campaigners fight, scholars study policy wars, and all of us think about global politics.
eBook
Democratic counterinsurgents : how democracies can prevail in irregular warfare
\"This book explores the ways in which democracies can win counterinsurgencies when they implement a proper strategy. At a time when the USA is retrenching from two bungled foreign wars that involved deadly insurgent uprisings, this is a particularly important argument. Succumbing to the trauma of those engagements and drawing the wrong conclusions about counterinsurgency can only lead to further defeat in the future. Rather than assuming that counterinsurgency is ineffective, it is crucial to understand that a conventional response to an insurgent challenge is likely to fail. Counterinsurgency must be applied from the beginning, and if done properly can be highly effective, even when used by democratic regimes. In fact, because such regimes are often wealthier; have more experience at institution-building and functional governance; are more pluralistic in nature and therefore enjoy higher levels of legitimacy than do autocracies, democracies may have considerable advantages in counterinsurgency warfare. Rather than give up in despair, democracies should learn to leverage these advantages and implement them against future insurgencies.\"--Back cover.
Book
Activists and Conflict Extension in American Party Politics
Party activists have played a leading role in “conflict extension”—the polarization of the parties along multiple issue dimensions—in contemporary American politics. We argue that open nomination systems and the ambitious politicians competing within those systems encourage activists with extreme views on a variety of issue dimensions to become involved in party politics, thus motivating candidates to take noncentrist positions on a range of issues. Once that happens, continuing activists with strong partisan commitments bring their views into line with the new candidate agendas, thus extending the domain of interparty conflict. Using cross-sectional and panel surveys of national convention delegates, we find clear evidence for conflict extension among party activists, evidence tentatively suggesting a leading role for activists in partisan conflict extension more generally, and strong support for our argument about change among continuing activists. Issue conversion among activists has contributed substantially to conflict extension and party commitment has played a key role in motivating that conversion.
Journal Article
Perceived Threat, Social Identification, and Psychological Well-Being: The Effects of Political Conflict Exposure
Using data drawn from the adult population in Northern Ireland (N = 1,515), this article examines the relationship between perceived intergroup threat and psychological well-being, taking into consideration the mediating role of social identification and the moderating role of political conflict exposure. Results by and large confirmed our predictions that perceived threat would be directly associated with poorer well-being but would also exert a positive indirect effect on well-being via increased social identification. However, these relationships were dependent on individuals' prior conflict exposure, such that the positive indirect relationship between perceived threat and psychological well-being emerged only for two subpopulations: individuals who had high direct and high indirect exposure to conflict, and individuals who had low direct, but high indirect conflict exposure. No indirect effects emerged for individuals with relatively lower conflict exposure. Results are discussed with regard to their implications for research on the consequences of intergroup threat in political conflict settings and beyond.
Journal Article
Place, space, and geographical exposure: Foreign subsidiary survival in conflict zones
This study focuses on the role of geography in foreign subsidiary survival in host countries afflicted by political conflict. We argue that survival is a function of exposure to conflicts, and depends on the characteristics of place (the conflict zone) and space (geographic concentration and dispersion of other home-country firms). The roles of place and space are explored using street-level analysis of geographic information systems data for 670 Japanese multinational enterprises (MNE) subsidiaries in 25 conflict-afflicted host countries over 1987—2006. Through dynamic modeling of conflict zones as stretchable and shrinkable places relative to subsidiary locations, we develop a means of characterizing a foreign subsidiary's exposure to multiple threats in its geographic domain. Our results show that greater exposure to geographically defined threats, in both a static and a dynamic sense, reduces the likelihood of MNE survival. The findings indicate, moreover, that both concentration and dispersion with other firms affect survival; however, the effects depend on where the firm is spatially located (whether the firm is in a conflict zone) and with whom (home-country peers or sister subsidiaries).
Journal Article
FORCED COEXISTENCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT: EVIDENCE FROM NATIVE AMERICAN RESERVATIONS
Studying Native American reservations, and their historical formation, I find that their forced integration of autonomous polities into a system of shared governance had large negative long-run consequences, even though the affected people were ethnically and linguistically homogenous. Reservations that combined multiple sub-tribal bands when they were formed are 30% poorer today, even when conditioning on prereservation political traditions. The results hold with tribe fixed effects, identifying only off within-tribe variation across reservations. I also provide estimates from an instrumental variable strategy based on historical mining rushes that led to exogenously more centralized reservations. Data on the timing of economic divergence and on contemporary political conflict suggest that the primary mechanism runs from persistent social divisions through the quality of local governance to the local economic environment.
Journal Article
Natural Disasters and the Risk of Violent Civil Conflict
Does the occurrence of a natural disaster such as an earthquake, volcanic eruption, tsunami, flood, hurricane, epidemic, heat wave, and/or plague increase the risk of violent civil conflict in a society? This study uses available data for 187 political units for the period 1950-2000 to systematically explore this question that has received remarkably little attention in the voluminous literature on civil war. We find that natural disasters significantly increase the risk of violent civil conflict both in the short and medium term, specifically in low- and middle-income countries that have intermediate to high levels of inequality, mixed political regimes, and sluggish economic growth. Rapid-onset disasters related to geology and climate pose the highest overall risk, but different dynamics apply to minor as compared to major conflicts. The findings are robust in terms of the use of different dependent and independent variables, and a variety of model specifications. Given the likelihood that rapid climate change will increase the incidence of some types of natural disasters, more attention should be given to mitigating the social and political risks posed by these cataclysmic events.
Journal Article
Asymmetric Autonomy and the Settlement of Ethnic Conflicts
Throughout the world many sovereign states grant one or more of their territories greater autonomy than other areas. This arrangement, known as asymmetric autonomy, has been adopted with greater regularity as a solution to ethnic strife and secessionist struggles in recent decades. As asymmetric autonomy becomes one of the most frequently used conflict resolution methods, examination of the positive and negative consequences of its implementation, as well as its efficacy, is vital.
Asymmetric Autonomy and the Settlement of Ethnic Conflictsassesses the ability of such power distribution arrangements to resolve violent struggles between central governments and separatist groups. This collection of new case studies from around the world covers a host of important developments, from recentralization in Russia, to \"one country, two systems\" in China, to constitutional innovation in Iraq. As a whole, these essays examine how well asymmetric autonomy agreements can bring protracted and bloody conflicts to an end, satisfy the demands of both sides, guarantee the physical integrity of a state, and ensure peace and stability. Contributors to this book also analyze the many problems and dilemmas that can arise when autonomous regions are formed. For example, powers may be loosely defined or unrealistically assigned to the state within a state. Redrawn boundaries can create new minorities and make other groups vulnerable to human rights violations. Given the number of limited self-determination systems in place, the essays in this volume present varied evaluations of these political structures.
Asymmetric state agreements have the potential to remedy some of humanity's most intractable disputes. InAsymmetric Autonomy and the Settlement of Ethnic Conflicts, leading political scientists and diplomatic experts shed new light on the practical consequences of these settlements and offer sophisticated frameworks for understanding this path toward lasting peace.
eBook