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AbstractDoes improved communication provided by modern cellphone technology affect the rise or fall of violence during insurgencies? A priori predictions are ambiguous; introducing cellphones can enhance insurgent communications but can also make it easier for the population to share information with counterinsurgents and creates opportunities for signals intelligence collection. We provide the first systematic micro-level test of the effect of cellphone communication on conflict using data on Iraq's cellphone network (2004–2009) and event data on violence. We show that increased mobile communications reduced insurgent violence in Iraq, both at the district level and for specific local coverage areas. The results provide support for models of insurgency that focus on noncombatants providing information as the key constraint on violent groups and highlight the fact that small changes in the transaction costs of cooperating with the government can have large macro effects on conflict.

Can civilians caught in civil wars reward and punish armed actors for their behavior? If so, do armed actors reap strategic benefits from treating civilians well and pay for treating them poorly? Using precise geo-coded data on violence in Iraq from 2004 through 2009, we show that both sides are punished for the collateral damage they inflict. Coalition killings of civilians predict higher levels of insurgent violence and insurgent killings predict less violence in subsequent periods. This symmetric reaction is tempered by preexisting political preferences; the anti-insurgent reaction is not present in Sunni areas, where the insurgency was most popular, and the anti-Coalition reaction is not present in mixed areas. Our findings have strong policy implications, provide support for the argument that information civilians share with government forces and their allies is a key constraint on insurgent violence, and suggest theories of intrastate violence must account for civilian agency. Adapted from the source document.

Political scientists have long been interested in citizens' support level for such actors as ethnic minorities, militant groups, and authoritarian regimes. Attempts to use direct questioning in surveys, however, have largely yielded unreliable measures of these attitudes as they are contaminated by social desirability bias and high nonresponse rates. In this paper, we develop a statistical methodology to analyze endorsement experiments, which recently have been proposed as a possible solution to this measurement problem. The commonly used statistical methods are problematic because they cannot properly combine responses across multiple policy questions, the design feature of a typical endorsement experiment. We overcome this limitation by using item response theory to estimate support levels on the same scale as the ideal points of respondents. We also show how to extend our model to incorporate a hierarchical structure of data in order to uncover spatial variation of support while recouping the loss of statistical efficiency due to indirect questioning. We illustrate the proposed methodology by applying it to measure political support for Islamist militant groups in Pakistan. Simulation studies suggest that the proposed Bayesian model yields estimates with reasonable levels of bias and statistical power. Finally, we offer several practical suggestions for improving the design and analysis of endorsement experiments.

Islamist militancy in Pakistan has long stood atop the international security agenda, yet there is almost no systematic evidence about why individual Pakistanis support Islamist militant organizations. An analysis of data from a nationally representative survey of urban Pakistanis refutes four influential conventional wisdoms about why Pakistanis support Islamic militancy. First, there is no clear relationship between poverty and support for militancy. If anything, support for militant organizations is increasing in terms of both subjective economic well-being and community economic performance. Second, personal religiosity and support for sharia law are poor predictors of support for Islamist militant organizations. Third, support for political goals espoused by legal Islamist parties is a weak indicator of support for militant organizations. Fourth, those who support core democratic principles or have faith in Pakistan's democratic process are not less supportive of militancy. Taken together, these results suggest that commonly prescribed solutions to Islamist militancy—economic development, democratization, and the like—may be irrelevant at best and might even be counterproductive.

An effective terrorism alert system in a federal government has one central task: to motivate actors to take costly protective measures. The United States' color-coded Homeland Security Advisory System (HSAS) failed in this mission. In federal systems, national leaders cannot compel protective actions by setting an alert level; they must convince constituent governments and private parties that the desired actions are worth the costs. Such beliefs can be generated either by sharing the information behind an alert or by developing enough confidence in the alert system that the government's word alone suffices. The HSAS did neither, largely because it was not designed to generate confidence. Rather, the system's creators assumed that the public would trust the national leadership and believe in the utility of the system's information. Over time, as the HSAS became increasingly perceived as politically manipulated, there was no built-in mechanism to recover confidence in the system. An alternative, trust-based terrorist alert system could solve this problem. Building on the notion of "procedural fairness" from the psychological and legal traditions, this system would retain the political advantages of the HSAS, facilitate greater compliance among the requisite actors, and ameliorate many of the strategic problems inherent in terror alert systems.

We investigate the long-term relationship between conflict-related migration and individual socioeconomic inequality. Looking at the post-conflict environment of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), a former Yugoslav state most heavily impacted by the conflicts of the early 1990s, the paper focuses on differences in educational performance and income between four groups: migrants, internally displaced persons, former external migrants, and those who did not move. The analysis leverages a municipality-representative survey (n≈6,000) that captured self-reported education and income outcomes as well as migration histories. We find that individuals with greater exposure to conflict had systematically worse educational performance and lower earnings two decades after the war. Former external migrants now living in BiH have better educational and economic outcomes than those who did not migrate, but these advantages are smaller for individuals who were forced to move. We recommend that policies intended to address migration-related discrepancies should be targeted on the basis of individual and family experiences caused by conflict.