Alliance Formation in Civil Wars

Abstract

In the last ten years the Middle East has been at the center of national security and foreign policy discussion. Do Middle East scholars seek to convert their expertise into policy advice and do policymakers want input from Middle East scholars? PK: The Middle East is rife with political tension-internal, domestic political tension, at least partially connected to the Israeli-Arab conflict-and because scholars often get typecast, rightly or wrongly, as belonging to one camp or another in this conflict, they are often perceived as biased. As a result there has not been a very deep reliance on university academics that specialize in the Middle East. A few have actually served on the National Security Council in the past, but there have not been many. Additionally, the "think-tank culture" of Washington has subsumed some of that because people living in Washington rotate between government and these institutions to craft policy. précis: What is MIT's relationship to the policymaking community?

Fratricidal Rebels: Ideological Extremity and Warring Factionalism in Civil Wars

“…Rebels often constitute rival factions that compete with each other through balancing, 7 spoiling, 8 defecting, 9 and outbidding. 10 Given the range of options available to rebels to manage their rivalries, why do some turn to fratricide?…”

Potential uses of Numerical Simulation for the Modelling of Civil Conflict

“…The present paper builds on these previous insights by extending the approach proposed by Christia (2012) which is based on the metric of the 'relative power' between two sides. Terms for rebel recruitment of civilians and state deployment of troops are incorporated and ways in which stochastic processes can be implemented into the model are explored.…”

“…In this paper, one numerical approach is examined in particular; namely that proposed by Christia (2012), who suggests that two-sided conflict might be modelled by using the concept of the relative power that exists between the state and a rebel group. In the present paper, the relative power concept is explored and used to provide a basis for the development of a general simulation model of two-sided conflict, in which different mechanisms of conflict, such as asymmetric conflict, are modelled.…”

“…A general two-party model of conflict is developed by extending an approach proposed by [Christia, F., (2012), Alliance Formation in Civil Wars, Cambridge University Press, New York], which is based on a metric of the 'relative power' that exists between the state and a rebel group. Various definitions of relative power are considered and one of these is chosen to illustrate different types of two-sided armed conflict, namely direct-fire, guerrilla and asymmetric warfare.…”

Building the Rule of War: Postconflict Institutions and the Micro-Dynamics of Conflict in Eastern DR Congo

“…Kalyvas and Balcells 2010;Kalyvas 2003Kalyvas , 2005Raeymaekers 2005;Salehyan 2009;Staniland 2012Staniland , 2014 See, e.g., Brass 1997;Hazen 2013;Mampilly 2011;Menkhaus 2007;Raeymaekers, Menkhaus, and Vlassenroot 2008. Kalyvas and Balcells 2010 1969. De Waal (2009 refers to this landscape as a "patrimonial marketplace.…”