Violence against civilians is often treated as a single category, but civilians differ in ways that shape why they are targeted. This paper focuses on violence against local leaders — a widespread yet understudied form of wartime victimization — and argues that local leaders are preemptively targeted because of their potential to mobilize support.
Where formal state authority is limited, local leaders often drive political mobilization — but why are some leaders more effective than others? This study introduces the concept of encompassing authority: how widely individuals perceive a leader as influencing multiple domains of their lives. Using original survey data from Zambia’s 2021 elections, the authors compare religious leaders, chiefs, and local councillors and test whether encompassing authority predicts mobilization beyond leader traits and voter characteristics.
This article asks how the social backgrounds of participants in 2019 Fridays for Future (FFF) protests across European cities related to who joined the protests and to protesters' strategic beliefs about how to address climate challenges. Using unique protest survey data collected at FFF events, the authors examine variation in participants' socioeconomic profiles and whether those backgrounds shaped preferences for institutions and approaches to climate and environmental action. The contribution is a nuanced account that rejects single-story portrayals of protesters as uniformly privileged or uniformly poor and highlights links between social composition and movement strategic orientations.
How do protests shape incumbent support in lower-income democracies? An unexpected anti-government demonstration in Ghana that intersected a planned field survey provides a natural experiment to answer this question.
Surrender is explained as a contagious collective-action problem: victory in battle depends on soldiers choosing to fight together rather than flee, but each soldier’s willingness to fight hinges on expectations about whether comrades will do the same. Soldiers look to what others did in comparable situations, so mass surrender in one engagement raises the probability of surrender in later battles. When no recent precedent exists, widespread capitulation is unlikely.
What leads some communities to be displaced before violence reaches them? This study probes whether social cohesion—by enabling collective action—raises the likelihood that whole communities undertake “preemptive evacuation” ahead of belligerent operations. Using detailed archival Village Files to build a village-level dataset about Arab Palestinian communities during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, the authors assess variation in social cohesion alongside other social, political, and economic village characteristics to evaluate links between cohesion, migration, and casualties.
This article asks how unrest spreads by testing a framework that separates (1) the networks that carry information, (2) whether news of repression changes participation, and (3) the role of organizers. The authors apply this framework to the English Swing riots of 1830–31 and use spatiotemporal variation specific to that historical episode to identify patterns of diffusion. Their contribution is an empirically grounded account of which kinds of ties mattered for riot diffusion and the role of local organizers in that process.
A new 'variance-in-time' method uses Google Trends (GT) to detect and forecast events by collecting multiple, overlapping GT samples over time. The algorithm leverages variation in both the mean and the variance of a search term to accommodate idiosyncrasies in the GT platform.
Developing states that lack a monopoly on the use of force are often judged as failing the Weberian sovereign ideal. This study argues that such weakness need not imply anarchy: devolving important state functions to subnational actors can be a rational and effective strategy for providing public goods.
How does group deliberation affect political engagement?️ This question has long puzzled scholars and policymakers alike.️ The article examines this by analyzing data from multiple rounds of public deliberations in the United States, focusing on participants' shifts toward activism after discussion sessions.️ Using logistic regression models to track changes over time, it finds that while deliberation does increase awareness, its impact on actual participation is less direct and pronounced than previously thought※ Challenging assumptions about political mobilization through collective dialogue, the findings suggest a more complex relationship between discussion spaces and citizen action.
This study investigates how autocracies manage collective action through representation, using data from Imperial Russia.
New research reveals that election violence boosts incumbent victory odds, yet creates heightened risks after elections. This nuanced effect reflects shifting political dynamics throughout the electoral cycle.