I research the complex dynamics of intrastate conflict, focusing on three related lines of inquiry: 1) how international organizations work to influence non-state groups, 2) the strategic use of peace agreements in fighting civil wars and 3) everyday people’s perceptions in civil war and post-conflict peace.
My research is united by a core interest in the dynamics of power, agency, and influence within intrastate conflict. My work consistently seeks to move beyond simplistic narratives and explore the complex interplay of actors and forces that drive civil wars. This approach is grounded in a commitment to empirical rigor; my strong background in statistical methods and computational research techniques is complemented by my use of qualitative methods to identify causal mechanisms.
Please read below for information about my current projects.
Published Research
Brandt, Caroline M., and Victor Asal. "You’ve Got a Friend in Me: How International Governmental Organizations Influence Organizations’ Participation in Elections as Ethnic Parties in Eastern Europe." Democratization (2022): 1-20.
Which ethnopolitical organizations run for office? An extensive literature studies when ethnic parties emerge. We explore an understudied dimension that distinguishes various ethnopolitical organizations: the support of international governmental organizations (IGOs). IGOs can encourage ethnopolitical organizations to participate in elections by lowering an organization’s campaign costs or the price of internal restructuring. IGOs can also increase the expected benefits of running for office. Ties with an IGO communicate to voters that an organization will effectively represent the ethnic group domestically and internationally. We explore the case of Bosnia and Herzegovina, where the international community’s hand is highly visible, to illustrate the mechanisms that link IGO support and organizations’ participation in elections. We then use a large-N cross-national analysis, relying on original data of hundreds of ethnopolitical organizations from 1991–2006 throughout Eastern Europe, to assess the theory’s generalizability. We use a recursive bivariate probit model to incorporate an estimate of which organizations IGOs are most likely to support into our analysis. Our results show that IGO support strongly correlates with an ethnopolitical organization running for office. This research contributes to our understanding of how ethnopolitical organizations with differing ideologies, competitive dynamics, and international ties come to represent an ethnic minority.
Papers Under Review
Naming and Shaming Non-State Armed Groups at the United Nations Security Council (with Jenniina Kotajoki)
Conditionally accepted at IO
This article is the first to systematically examine the naming and shaming of non-state armed groups (NSAGs). While previous research has focused on naming and shaming that targets states, we leverage novel data to show that the practice extends to NSAGs, accounting for over a third of all admonishments made at the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) from 1995 to 2016. We develop and test two explanatory theories: one suggesting that strategic partnerships drive states to name and shame NSAGs, and another positing that states condemn NSAGs to signal their commitment to global norms protecting civilians from violence and supporting the multi- lateral system. We argue that the UNSC’s five permanent members (P5) and the ten elected members (E10) employ naming and shaming for different purposes. Our findings indicate that strategic partnerships between UNSC member states and governments engaged in conflicts with NSAGs influence the P5’s decisions to name and shame NSAGs. In contrast, the E10 are more likely to publicly condemn NSAGs that deliberately target civilians, suggesting that adherence to global norms better explains their behavior. However, the E10’s naming and shaming may not be aimed at enforcing compliance from NSAGs, but rather at showcasing to domestic and international audiences their own commitment to these norms. Our study marks the opening of a new research agenda on the naming and shaming of non-state armed groups.
Divide and Conquer: Exclusive Peace Agreements as a Counterinsurgency Strategy in Multiparty Civil Conflicts
Revise and Resubmit at JPR
How does war between a government and rebel group influence the incentives for a government to enter into peace negotiations with other rebel groups? When fighting a civil war involving multiple rebel groups, signing a peace agreement that excludes one or more rebel groups allows a government to redirect previously encumbered weapons and troops to more effectively wage war against the remaining rebel forces. Given this interdependence between a government’s war with one rebel group and peace process with another, I theorize that a government is more likely to sign an exclusive peace agreement with a given rebel group when other insurgent forces are extremely threatening. I present two sets of evidence to evaluate this argument. First, using a large cross-national dataset I find that the threat posed by other rebel groups, measured by both the strength and number of other active rebel groups, is positively correlated with the likelihood that a government and rebel group sign an exclusive settlement. Second, I use a case study of civil war in the Southern Philippines to identify the mechanisms behind these correlations. In line with the theory, the evidence shows that the threat posed by other rebel groups can motivate peace talks. While exclusive peace agreements are often thought of as tools of peace, I show that these agreements can be counterinsurgency strategies.
Ties that Bind: Military Power-Sharing as A Durable Form of Rebel Side-Switching in Civil War
Revise and Resubmit at CMPS
How do governments secure the loyalty of rebel groups that switch sides? I argue that military power-sharing is a key mechanism, framing it as a durable form of side-switching rather than a conflict exit. This method enhances state control and raises defection costs. I test this proposition with a Cox proportional hazard model and find that rebel groups brought into the state’s armed forces remain loyal for significantly longer than those aligned as pro-government militias (PGMs). This research reframes military power-sharing not just as an instrument of peace, but as a tool for engineering durable wartime coalitions.
Fear and Affiliation: The Impact of Boko Haram’s Pledge to the Islamic State on Civilian Perceptions in Nigeria
This study investigates the impact of Boko Haram’s public pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State (IS) on civilian perceptions within Nigeria. Previous scholarship has suggested that such affiliations enhance a terror group’s credibility and enhance its perceived threat, but the effect has not been well-defined. This research note provides systematic evidence of how everyday civilians actually perceive these groups by using Twitter posts geolocated in Nigeria to analyze shifts in the language used by civilians immediately before and after Boko Haram’s pledge to IS in March 2015. Examining this narrow window of time isolates the immediate effects of the declaration while minimizing the influence of confounding factors. The analysis reveals a coun- terintuitive finding: following the pledge, there was a significant reduction in the expression of fear among civilians. In the case of Boko Haram, aligning with a transnational terror organi- zation actually reduced the perceived threat. This research underscores the need to reconsider how global terror networks interact with local contexts. Transnational affiliation may enhance the perception of risk in some cases, but this is not a universal effect. Indeed, in some cases, such affiliation may actually produce the opposite effect.
Works in Progress
Why Gender Matters for Peacebuilding: the Gendered Perceptions of Post-Conflict Peace (with Susanna Campbell and Laura Huber)
UN peace operations no longer only aim to keep the peace. UN peace operations also work to strengthen the peacebuilding capacity of conflict-affected communities. Yet the literature on UN operations has focused on peacekeeping troops' coercive capacity. We conducted an impact evaluation of the UN's largest peacebuilding operation, the US$ 44 million that the UN Peacebuilding Fund allocated to Burundi between 2007 and 2013. We find that UN peacebuilding effects men and women differently. Women are less likely to perceive community well-being and are less likely to attribute improvements to formal institutions. These findings identify the complex gender dynamics of community-based UN peacebuilding efforts.
Who Cares? Atrocities and the Marketplace for International Social Media Attention (with Lisa Hultman)
Some violence against civilians, from mass killings to sexual violence, garner widespread international social media attention. Others do not. How do the global public’s perceptions of mass atrocities form, develop, and grow? We use over 100 million Twitter postings on violence against civilians in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Nigeria, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria to answer this question. We examine what types of language and images used by activists, NGOs, and IGOs are most likely to be widely shared and which are likely to be adopted by Western social media users. Insight into which atrocities and narratives capture international attention is crucial to understanding why great powers and IGOs execute shaming campaigns, impose sanctions, and deploy peacekeepers.
#CivilWar: Using Social Media Data to Predict Conflict Onset and Intensity (with Håvard Hegre)
Observational civil war data often fails to capture important on-the-ground variables. Examples include: the opposition’s dedication to the cause, the public’s perceptions of injustice, and levels of civilian fear. These can be important weathervanes for predicting the course of political violence but are difficult to measure using traditional methods. This paper uses social media data to capture these variables by drawing on a sample of 1% of all Twitter posts geolocated in Africa. Topic modeling and sentiment analysis allow us to produce cross-national measures of these intangible variables that account for precise physical and temporal location. By analyzing this data, we examine whether the tone or topics of social media posts can predict civil war escalation at a specific place and/or time. We evaluate the value of social-media data for this purpose by incorporating them in the ViEWS forecasting model of organized political violence and assess the extent to which they improve the model’s ability to forecast the onset, escalation, and de-escalation of violence.