Organization Leadership
Comparative Politics and International Relations of the Middle
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well. The five works this week look at political violence from
two different perspectives – the structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their
goals and the ideas that drive individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works
provide a variety of explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the
Middle East and North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind
radicalization in support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different
dependent variables and five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range
of explanations for aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological
challenges associated with studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success:
How the Internal Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National
Movement Effectiveness”, conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen
groups in Palestine and Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements
resulted in various campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or
fragmented movements offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results
that disputed both ideas. Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for
primacy within the movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he
evaluated. Unified groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome,
fared little better, achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements,
ones with a dominant group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability
of campaign success. Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing
amongst themselves, and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically,
negotiate effectively, or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student
within a movement did not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its
unassailable position within the movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its
way to its most effective outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the
insurgency in Algeria to illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case
study approach, he effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the
movement – to be driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his
most convincing when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it
is the distribution of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior.
If he had pulled this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by
each group during each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is
a minor detraction. Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most
successful work in the group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking
High-Risk Mobilization and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like
Krause, she is studying organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different
dependent variable, sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of
informal, existing social networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on
social networks, spearheaded by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood,
and Alec Worsnop. As with these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent
organizations rarely appear out of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of
existing social networks, enabling the members of the organization to engage in high risk
behavior as a result of the pre-existing trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her
work breaks little new ground, but she 2 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does
make two unique contributions. First, she argues that these networks are essential for insurgent
success not because they provide fighters (which they do), but rather because the pre-existing
social networks provide a logistical structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters.
As the experience of creating armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning
how to fight is relatively straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly
complex task. Parkinson shows the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing
social network upon which a support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second
contribution is that often these networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this
characteristic, Parkinson opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis
and investigation. Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence
to the current body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry.
The work is valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The
Moderating Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin
shifts the lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for
opportunistic violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians
by the Israeli Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such
as deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well. The five works this week look at political violence from
two different perspectives – the structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their
goals and the ideas that drive individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works
provide a variety of explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the
Middle East and North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind
radicalization in support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different
dependent variables and five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range
of explanations for aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological
challenges associated with studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success:
How the Internal Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National
Movement Effectiveness”, conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen
groups in Palestine and Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements
resulted in various campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or
fragmented movements offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results
that disputed both ideas. Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for
primacy within the movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he
evaluated. Unified groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome,
fared little better, achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements,
ones with a dominant group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability
of campaign success. Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing
amongst themselves, and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically,
negotiate effectively, or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student
within a movement did not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its
unassailable position within the movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its
way to its most effective outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the
insurgency in Algeria to illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case
study approach, he effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the
movement – to be driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his
most convincing when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it
is the distribution of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior.
If he had pulled this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by
each group during each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is
a minor detraction. Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most
successful work in the group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking
High-Risk Mobilization and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like
Krause, she is studying organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different
dependent variable, sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of
informal, existing social networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on
social networks, spearheaded by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood,
and Alec Worsnop. As with these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent
organizations rarely appear out of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of
existing social networks, enabling the members of the organization to engage in high risk
behavior as a result of the pre-existing trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her
work breaks little new ground, but she 2 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does
make two unique contributions. First, she argues that these networks are essential for insurgent
success not because they provide fighters (which they do), but rather because the pre-existing
social networks provide a logistical structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters.
As the experience of creating armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning
how to fight is relatively straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly
complex task. Parkinson shows the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing
social network upon which a support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second
contribution is that often these networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this
characteristic, Parkinson opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis
and investigation. Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence
to the current body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry.
The work is valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The
Moderating Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin
shifts the lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for
opportunistic violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians
by the Israeli Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such
as deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well. The five works this week look at political violence from
two different perspectives – the structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their
goals and the ideas that drive individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works
provide a variety of explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the
Middle East and North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind
radicalization in support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different
dependent variables and five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range
of explanations for aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological
challenges associated with studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success:
How the Internal Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National
Movement Effectiveness”, conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen
groups in Palestine and Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements
resulted in various campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or
fragmented movements offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results
that disputed both ideas. Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for
primacy within the movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he
evaluated. Unified groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome,
fared little better, achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements,
ones with a dominant group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability
of campaign success. Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing
amongst themselves, and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically,
negotiate effectively, or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student
within a movement did not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its
unassailable position within the movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its
way to its most effective outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the
insurgency in Algeria to illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case
study approach, he effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the
movement – to be driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his
most convincing when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it
is the distribution of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior.
If he had pulled this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by
each group during each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is
a minor detraction. Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most
successful work in the group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking
High-Risk Mobilization and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like
Krause, she is studying organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different
dependent variable, sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of
informal, existing social networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on
social networks, spearheaded by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood,
and Alec Worsnop. As with these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent
organizations rarely appear out of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of
existing social networks, enabling the members of the organization to engage in high risk
behavior as a result of the pre-existing trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her
work breaks little new ground, but she 2 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does
make two unique contributions. First, she argues that these networks are essential for insurgent
success not because they provide fighters (which they do), but rather because the pre-existing
social networks provide a logistical structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters.
As the experience of creating armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning
how to fight is relatively straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly
complex task. Parkinson shows the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing
social network upon which a support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second
contribution is that often these networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this
characteristic, Parkinson opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis
and investigation. Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence
to the current body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry.
The work is valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The
Moderating Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin
shifts the lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for
opportunistic violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians
by the Israeli Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such
as deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well. The five works this week look at political violence from
two different perspectives – the structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their
goals and the ideas that drive individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works
provide a variety of explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the
Middle East and North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind
radicalization in support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different
dependent variables and five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range
of explanations for aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological
challenges associated with studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success:
How the Internal Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National
Movement Effectiveness”, conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen
groups in Palestine and Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements
resulted in various campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or
fragmented movements offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results
that disputed both ideas. Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for
primacy within the movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he
evaluated. Unified groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome,
fared little better, achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements,
ones with a dominant group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability
of campaign success. Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing
amongst themselves, and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically,
negotiate effectively, or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student
within a movement did not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its
unassailable position within the movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its
way to its most effective outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the
insurgency in Algeria to illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case
study approach, he effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the
movement – to be driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his
most convincing when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it
is the distribution of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior.
If he had pulled this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by
each group during each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is
a minor detraction. Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most
successful work in the group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking
High-Risk Mobilization and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like
Krause, she is studying organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different
dependent variable, sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of
informal, existing social networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on
social networks, spearheaded by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood,
and Alec Worsnop. As with these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent
organizations rarely appear out of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of
existing social networks, enabling the members of the organization to engage in high risk
behavior as a result of the pre-existing trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her
work breaks little new ground, but she 2 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does
make two unique contributions. First, she argues that these networks are essential for insurgent
success not because they provide fighters (which they do), but rather because the pre-existing
social networks provide a logistical structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters.
As the experience of creating armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning
how to fight is relatively straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly
complex task. Parkinson shows the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing
social network upon which a support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second
contribution is that often these networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this
characteristic, Parkinson opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis
and investigation. Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence
to the current body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry.
The work is valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The
Moderating Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin
shifts the lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for
opportunistic violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians
by the Israeli Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such
as deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well. The five works this week look at political violence from
two different perspectives – the structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their
goals and the ideas that drive individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works
provide a variety of explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the
Middle East and North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind
radicalization in support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different
dependent variables and five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range
of explanations for aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological
challenges associated with studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success:
How the Internal Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National
Movement Effectiveness”, conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen
groups in Palestine and Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements
resulted in various campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or
fragmented movements offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results
that disputed both ideas. Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for
primacy within the movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he
evaluated. Unified groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome,
fared little better, achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements,
ones with a dominant group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability
of campaign success. Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing
amongst themselves, and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically,
negotiate effectively, or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student
within a movement did not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its
unassailable position within the movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its
way to its most effective outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the
insurgency in Algeria to illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case
study approach, he effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the
movement – to be driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his
most convincing when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it
is the distribution of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior.
If he had pulled this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by
each group during each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is
a minor detraction. Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most
successful work in the group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking
High-Risk Mobilization and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like
Krause, she is studying organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different
dependent variable, sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of
informal, existing social networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on
social networks, spearheaded by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood,
and Alec Worsnop. As with these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent
organizations rarely appear out of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of
existing social networks, enabling the members of the organization to engage in high risk
behavior as a result of the pre-existing trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her
work breaks little new ground, but she 2 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does
make two unique contributions. First, she argues that these networks are essential for insurgent
success not because they provide fighters (which they do), but rather because the pre-existing
social networks provide a logistical structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters.
As the experience of creating armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning
how to fight is relatively straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly
complex task. Parkinson shows the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing
social network upon which a support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second
contribution is that often these networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this
characteristic, Parkinson opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis
and investigation. Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence
to the current body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry.
The work is valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The
Moderating Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin
shifts the lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for
opportunistic violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians
by the Israeli Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such
as deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well. The five works this week look at political violence from
two different perspectives – the structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their
goals and the ideas that drive individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works
provide a variety of explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the
Middle East and North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind
radicalization in support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different
dependent variables and five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range
of explanations for aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological
challenges associated with studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success:
How the Internal Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National
Movement Effectiveness”, conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen
groups in Palestine and Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements
resulted in various campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or
fragmented movements offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results
that disputed both ideas. Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for
primacy within the movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he
evaluated. Unified groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome,
fared little better, achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements,
ones with a dominant group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability
of campaign success. Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing
amongst themselves, and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically,
negotiate effectively, or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student
within a movement did not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its
unassailable position within the movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its
way to its most effective outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the
insurgency in Algeria to illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case
study approach, he effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the
movement – to be driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his
most convincing when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it
is the distribution of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior.
If he had pulled this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by
each group during each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is
a minor detraction. Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most
successful work in the group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking
High-Risk Mobilization and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like
Krause, she is studying organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different
dependent variable, sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of
informal, existing social networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on
social networks, spearheaded by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood,
and Alec Worsnop. As with these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent
organizations rarely appear out of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of
existing social networks, enabling the members of the organization to engage in high risk
behavior as a result of the pre-existing trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her
work breaks little new ground, but she 2 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does
make two unique contributions. First, she argues that these networks are essential for insurgent
success not because they provide fighters (which they do), but rather because the pre-existing
social networks provide a logistical structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters.
As the experience of creating armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning
how to fight is relatively straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly
complex task. Parkinson shows the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing
social network upon which a support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second
contribution is that often these networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this
characteristic, Parkinson opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis
and investigation. Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence
to the current body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry.
The work is valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The
Moderating Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin
shifts the lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for
opportunistic violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians
by the Israeli Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such
as deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well. The five works this week look at political violence from
two different perspectives – the structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their
goals and the ideas that drive individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works
provide a variety of explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the
Middle East and North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind
radicalization in support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different
dependent variables and five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range
of explanations for aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological
challenges associated with studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success:
How the Internal Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National
Movement Effectiveness”, conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen
groups in Palestine and Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements
resulted in various campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or
fragmented movements offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results
that disputed both ideas. Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for
primacy within the movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he
evaluated. Unified groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome,
fared little better, achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements,
ones with a dominant group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability
of campaign success. Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing
amongst themselves, and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically,
negotiate effectively, or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student
within a movement did not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its
unassailable position within the movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its
way to its most effective outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the
insurgency in Algeria to illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case
study approach, he effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the
movement – to be driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his
most convincing when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it
is the distribution of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior.
If he had pulled this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by
each group during each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is
a minor detraction. Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most
successful work in the group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking
High-Risk Mobilization and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like
Krause, she is studying organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different
dependent variable, sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of
informal, existing social networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on
social networks, spearheaded by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood,
and Alec Worsnop. As with these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent
organizations rarely appear out of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of
existing social networks, enabling the members of the organization to engage in high risk
behavior as a result of the pre-existing trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her
work breaks little new ground, but she 2 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does
make two unique contributions. First, she argues that these networks are essential for insurgent
success not because they provide fighters (which they do), but rather because the pre-existing
social networks provide a logistical structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters.
As the experience of creating armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning
how to fight is relatively straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly
complex task. Parkinson shows the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing
social network upon which a support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second
contribution is that often these networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this
characteristic, Parkinson opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis
and investigation. Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence
to the current body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry.
The work is valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The
Moderating Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin
shifts the lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for
opportunistic violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians
by the Israeli Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such
as deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
The five works this week look at political violence from two different perspectives – the
structure of organizations that use violence to achieve their goals and the ideas that drive
individuals to pursue radical agendas. The organizational works provide a variety of
explanations for effectiveness in insurgent conflicts, with cases set in the Middle East and
North Africa. The individual-level works address the motivations behind radicalization in
support of Islamic terrorist organizations. By looking at two different dependent variables and
five different independent variables, these works provide a wide range of explanations for
aspects of political violence while highlighting the methodological challenges associated with
studying the topic. Peter Krause’s article, “The Structure of Success: How the Internal
Distribution of Power Drives Armed Group Behavior and National Movement Effectiveness”,
conducts a longitudinal analysis of seventeen campaigns by sixteen groups in Palestine and
Algeria, evaluating how the distribution of power within movements resulted in various
campaign outcomes. While existing theories debate whether unified or fragmented movements
offer the best results for insurgent movements Krause found results that disputed both ideas.
Fragmented movements, ones with two or more groups competing for primacy within the
movement with diverse goals, consistently failed in the campaigns he evaluated. Unified
groups, ones with internal competition but unity on their desired outcome, fared little better,
achieving only occasional (and limited) success. Hegemonic movements, ones with a dominant
group that had no rivals for control or goals, had the greatest probability of campaign success.
Fragmented and unified groups expended time and resources competing amongst themselves,
and in doing so, limited the movement’s ability to either act strategically, negotiate effectively,
or both. Hegemony 1 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student within a movement did
not guarantee the group would always act effectively, but its unassailable position within the
movement gave it the latitude to survive missteps and find its way to its most effective
outcomes. Krause effectively uses the Palestinian movement and the insurgency in Algeria to
illustrate his case. Using process tracing and a most different case study approach, he
effectively shows his independent variable – power distribution within the movement – to be
driving the dependent variable – campaign success. He was perhaps at his most convincing
when explaining his theory using an organizational approach, highlighting it is the distribution
of public, club, and private goods that drive organizations and their behavior. If he had pulled
this explanation into his cases, identifying what goods were being sought by each group during
each campaign, he would have strengthened his findings, but overall, this is a minor detraction.
Krause’s argument is well put together, strongly argued, and is the most successful work in the
group. Sarah Parkinson’s article, “Organizing Rebellion: Rethinking High-Risk Mobilization
and Social Networks in War”, nests well with Krause’s work. Like Krause, she is studying
organizational effectiveness, though through a slightly different dependent variable,
sustainment of a rebellion. Her independent variable, the strength of informal, existing social
networks, is well-situated within an existing body of literature on social networks, spearheaded
by the work of Roger Petersen, Paul Staniland, Elisabeth Wood, and Alec Worsnop. As with
these other authors, Parkinson argues that successful insurgent organizations rarely appear out
of thin air. Most often, they are constructed on the backs of existing social networks, enabling
the members of the organization to engage in high risk behavior as a result of the pre-existing
trust sewn into the social networks. On this point, her work breaks little new ground, but she 2
Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student does make two unique contributions. First, she
argues that these networks are essential for insurgent success not because they provide fighters
(which they do), but rather because the pre-existing social networks provide a logistical
structure by which resources can flow to front line fighters. As the experience of creating
armies from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan has shown, learning how to fight is relatively
straightforward, but sustaining a fighting force is an incredibly complex task. Parkinson shows
the same to be true for insurgent groups. Without an existing social network upon which a
support system can run, they struggle to succeed. The second contribution is that often these
networks are run and dominated by women. By identifying this characteristic, Parkinson
opened previously unexplored networks, such as marriage, to analysis and investigation.
Though these are useful contributions, the work seems to be adding evidence to the current
body of work rather than breaking new ground or opening new lines of inquiry. The work is
valuable nonetheless. In “Violence Against Civilians in the Second Intifada: The Moderating
Effect of Armed Group Structure and Opportunistic Violence”, Devorah Manekin shifts the
lens from the insurgent group to the counter-insurgent, investigating causes for opportunistic
violence – violence that is not planned or ordered by superiors – against civilians by the Israeli
Defense Force from 2000-2005. She investigated a variety of environmental, such as
deployment length, and organizational, unit morale, structure, and command structure,
variables, looking for an explanation for this specific type of violence. Using data collected
from a medium-n (n = 118) survey of IDF soldiers, she found that deployment length was
correlated with instances of violence, but that it was mitigated by organizational factors such
as command and control and discipline. As she states in her introduction, the studies of
opportunistic violence are limited, 3 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student primarily
due to a lack of data. Her findings, however, reinforce what are already well established and
widely accepted theories in both the organizational and leadership fields. The culture of the
organization, specifically, the standards that are set, the behavior of its leaders, the
effectiveness of its chain of command, and the previously demonstrated willingness of leaders
to hold subordinates accountable (discipline), are understood in the organizational literature as
highly effective ways to reduce monitoring costs and insure compliance, much more so than
the threat of sanctions. Similarly, there is a long literature of historiographies and memoires on
military organizations, war, and leadership that provide similar accounts of variation in
organizational performance. For centuries, military leaders and thinkers have sought to
understand why some units are faced with terrible conditions and situations and perform well,
while others, exposed to the same variables, fail, or worse, commit crimes. Repeatedly, the
findings are the same as Manekin’s – those that are better led and more disciplined perform
better, no matter how long they fight. To be clear, this does not discount her work, and she has
certainly added strength to the literature through her empirical analysis. It is, however, a stone
on an already large pile, albeit not a political science one. The individual-level studies, Richard
Nielsen’s “Deadly Clerics: Blocked Ambition and the Paths to Jihad”, and Thomas
Hegghammer’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Explaining Variation in Western Jihadists’
Choice Between Domestic and Foreign Fighting”, take a different approach to the topic of
political violence. Both works attempt to assess individual decision-making amongst jihadists,
an essential but difficult task. Individual studies are problematic, as Nielsen explains, as it is
difficult to gather reliable data on why people chose to do something. Data on internal thought
processes often relies on self-reporting, for obvious reasons. The challenge, 4 Political
Violence Response Paper MIT Student though, is that such a method relies on an individual
reporting honestly and truly knowing what influenced him or her. Often, neither one is reliable.
To address this issue, Nielsen collected data based on what clerics actually said and wrote, then
he statistically analyzed variations in their speech to identify radicalization. Additionally, he
focused on a narrow subset of individuals – clerics who entered academia only to find
themselves off their desired professional path who then became radical. Radical clerics are few
in number, and even fewer radicalize after they enter academia. Nielsen readily admits that his
theory only explains the path taken by about 30% of the radical clerics. But, based on his
narrow scope conditions and the enormous amount of text data collected, Nielsen makes a
compelling, statistically valid claim that clerics who turn to jihad are often ones who were
previously mainstream, but when they found themselves off the standard path to academic
success, took to jihad as a professional alternative. In doing so, he effectively tackles an
empirically elusive topic. Unfortunately, Hegghammer is not so successful. Though he takes
on a similarly difficult question – why do some fighters choose domestic versus foreign
fighting – his empirical evidence and explanation is weak at best. First, he attempts to count
the number of Islamist fighters in the West, a measurement that has no reliable data. Though
he makes a laudable attempt, he readily admits he bases his numbers on anecdotal data and
educated guesses. Based on this estimate, he determines that there are more three times as many
foreign fighters as domestic fighters and concludes that it is more likely for a jihadist to go to
another country to fight than to stay at home. He then offers three explanations for this trend:
it is easier to fight somewhere else, they need training, or they prefer it, i.e. they are following
norms. Once again, using anecdotal evidence and the numbers he made up, he proceeds to
reject the first 5 Political Violence Response Paper MIT Student two explanations and spends
considerable space explaining why norms matter in the decision making process. While this
may be true, by failing to adequately reject alternative explanations with more than anecdotes
and conjecture, I find it difficult to believe his explanation over any other explanation. He
attempts to answer a difficult question, but there are too many holes in his methodology for
this work to hold up to scrutiny. This week’s readings demonstrated a wide range of
explanations for political violence. All of them take on difficult topics and provide interesting
and unique perspectives on the topic. Overall, the organizational explanations were most
successful, offering coherent explanations seated in strong evidence. The readings also
highlighted the challenges of studying the individual level, providing examples of such
research done both well and less well.
