No abstract

This article examines the impact of military unit composition on desertion in civil wars. I argue that military units face an increased risk of desertion if they cannot develop norms of cooperation. This is a challenging task in the context of divided and ambiguous individual loyalties found in civil wars. Norms of cooperation emerge, above all, from soldiers sending each other costly signals of their commitment. Social and factional ties also shape these norms, albeit in a more limited fashion. Hence, unit composition can serve as an intervening variable explaining how collective aims can sometimes induce individual soldiers to keep fighting. Analyzing original data from the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), I demonstrate that three characteristics of a military unit's composition—the presence of conscripts rather than volunteers, social heterogeneity (whose effect is found to be limited to volunteer units), and polarization among factions—increase the individual soldier's propensity to desert. Unit composition proves at least as important as individual characteristics when explaining desertion. This analysis indicates the usefulness of moving beyond commonly used atomistic understandings of combatant behavior. Instead, it suggests the importance of theoretical microfoundations that emphasize norms of cooperation among groups of combatants.

Instability and conflict within African countries are on the rise. What are the best means for third parties to promote short-term crisis management and long-term conflict resolution in these situations? Often, these two tasks are at odds with one another, and certain approaches to intervention may be more or less effective. This study grapples with these issues by focusing on one particularly difficult set of cases—violent crises that are rooted in ethnic divisions and are part of protracted conflicts in Africa during the post-Cold War era—and one approach to intervention—mediation. We also view mediation as a multidimensional strategic process, and we test a series of hypotheses linking specific mediation styles to various crisis outcomes. The data and analyses reported in this study grew out of a new project named Mediating Intrastate Crises that is focused on uncovering the dynamics of successful mediation efforts during crisis situations at the intrastate level, which are important but understudied phenomena. Our findings indicate that mediators are highly effective at managing crises in the short term, particularly when they adopt a more intrusive approach. However, they have insignificant effects on long-term conflict resolution, showing little ability to stem the tide of recurrent violence.

This article examines desertion in civil wars, focusing on the role of combatants’ hometowns in facilitating desertion. Analyzing data from the Spanish Civil War, the article demonstrates that combatants who come from hill country are considerably more likely to desert than combatants whose hometowns are on flat ground. This is because evasion is easier in rough terrain. The finding implies that the cohesion of armed groups depends on control, not just positive incentives, and that control of territory in civil wars goes beyond rebel–government contestation, and consists also of control behind the lines. The article bridges micro and macro approaches to civil wars by indicating the multiple uses to which individuals can put structural conditions like rough terrain. This helps to clarify the macro-level link between rough terrain and civil war. It also shows that micro-level research can profitably examine structural variables alongside individual characteristics and endogenous conflict dynamics.

Does repression increase or decrease unity within ethnic or nationalist movements? Conventional wisdom lends itself to two contradictory predictions. On one hand, it is said that conflict with an out-group is the surest path to unity in an in-group. On the other hand, repression exaggerates the gap between radicals and moderates in a movement. Challenging both views, this article argues that repression amplifies trends in cooperation or conflict existent in a movement before the onset of repression. All movements have some institutional arrangement, meaning a set of procedures and relationships that structure decision making and behavior. These “rules of the game” distribute power within the movement, and thus favor some actors over others. Repression disrupts the equilibrium of these institutions, after which the members might engage in either more cooperation or more conflict, depending on the level of satisfaction with preexisting institutional arrangements. The authors illustrate these propositions through comparative analysis of four repression shocks from two nationalist movements: the Kurdish movement in Iraq and the Palestinian national movement.