Project Mentor
Dr. Michael Rubin
Department: Human Rights Institute
Research Project Overview:
Human rights and armed conflict are intimately related. Armed conflict, especially episodes that devolve into full-blown civil war, produce the most egregious human rights violations; civilian-targeted violence and collective punishment, mass killing and genocide, forced displacement, violation of civil and political liberties, and denial of basic human needs such as access to water, food, and shelter. Civil war is, at its core, a competition “for control between a government and its competitors over civilians and the territory upon which they reside” (A. M. Arjona, Kasfir, and Mampilly 2015, 1). Furthermore, territorial control is central to explaining subsequent conflict processes; including intensity and duration of armed conflict, the quality and durability of peace, recruitment into armed groups, and, critically, patterns of human rights abuses such as the strategic use of civilian-targeted violence. The distribution of belligerent territorial control during armed conflict is, then, fundamental to understanding human rights in the context of civil wars. Yet, despite the vast literature examining the local dynamics of conflict and human rights, to date little attention has been paid to understanding the human rights implications of belligerent territorial control, beyond the narrow focus on civilian-targeted violence.
This research project seeks to fill this gap. It includes two stages. First, to adequately explain the role of belligerent territorial control in shaping human rights outcomes in conflict, we must first measure and understand the origins and dynamics of territorial control in armed conflict in the first place. Then, with this foundation, we can advance understanding of critical variation in human rights outcomes related to civil war and armed conflict. My book project addresses the first stage: in it I explore the origins and dynamics of territorial control in civil wars. Under what conditions do rebel organizations control territory during armed conflict? Why does rebel territory expand during certain periods of conflict and contract in others? I advance a civilian agency theory to explain variation in belligerent territorial control during civil war; emphasizing how civilians influence the expansion and contraction of insurgency, on the one hand, and the consolidation of state authority, on the other hand, during civil war.
A key aspect of this stage in the project is aimed at addressing the limitations existing measures of subnational variation in rebel territorial control, a critical component to answering the empirical questions with respect to the relationship between belligerent control and human rights conditions. It develops and executes a method to measure subnational variation in rebel territorial control within conflict zones and its changes over time in the course of conflict that is replicable, and facilitates systematic comparison, across conflicts. First, we identify indications of nonstate actors’ territorial control and governance in text (news, NGO and government reports, etc. from the conflict zone). We will then train a machine learning model on our annotated data to automate the process of identifying the indicators and locations of nonstate actors’ territorial control and governance in new (non-annotated) text sources. These models will allow us to extract data from a much larger set of texts than we could feasibly code by hand.
The second component leverages these insights from the book to explain a variety of human rights implications of territorial control in civil wars. In the project related to the summer 2023 research, I investigate the role of rebel territorial control in explaining patterns of conflict-related forced displacement. Civil wars and armed conflict produce massive forced displacement crises. Yet while in some cases most of the displaced flee across borders as refugees or asylum-seekers, in other cases a greater proportion of the displaced remain in the country of origin as internally displaced. The paper tests the argument that rebel control increases the rate of internal displacement compared to migration across borders, by generating pockets of territory within the origin state within which fleeing civilians may settle beyond to government’s reach and capacity for selective violence. test this hypothesis in a global cross-national context, in large-N analysis of civil conflicts from 1975-2011, and complement with deep investigation of the local dynamics of forced migration within the context of South Sudan. In the cross-national analysis, we measure cross-border forced displacement using the UNHCR populations of concern and Ethnicity of Refugees dataset (Ruegger and Bohnet 2018) datasets. We measure internal displacement using the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center data. We measure rebel territorial control using the Non-State Actor dataset (Cunningham, Gleditsch, and Salehyan 2013). In the analysis of the local-level dynamics within South Sudan, we use data collected in the first stage mentioned above to measure areas of rebel territorial control and their change over time, and IOM data tracking the presence and arrival of internally displaced populations at the local (payam) level between 2015-2018.
Role of a SHARE Summer Apprentice:
The research apprentice will support two key data collection pillars critical to the book project and related project exploring the relationship between belligerent territorial control and forced displacement patterns in civil wars. The first relates to the process of data collection and measurement of local-level belligerent territorial control. The research apprentice will annotate a news articles from a set of conflict cases to identify evidence of nonstate actors’ territorial control and governance activities in specific locations. Through this process, the research apprentice will grapple with the challenges associated with collection systematic data on complex social phenomena, learning strategies and best practices to relate the information we observe to the core concepts we seek to measure. This reveals the importance and the challenges of good conceptual development and definition, and how this feeds into operationalization and the development (and refining) of a measurement strategy through data collection.
Second, the research apprentice will aid in collecting primary and secondary sources to form the basis of qualitative case studies designed to explore the mechanisms proposed to explain the origins of belligerent territorial control (in the book) and its effect on human rights conditions in armed conflict. The main cases examined in these projects are civil wars in Syria, post-coup Myanmar, Somalia, and South Sudan. This activity will provide the research apprentice the opportunity to refine skills in critical reading, qualitative research methods, and to learn about conflict processes in important episodes of political violence and civil war relevant to current and future policymaking and human rights action.
Summer Schedule/Time Commitment:
While a regular schedule (for example 5-10 hours per week) is a useful baseline, the scheduling is very flexible to accommodate the student researcher’s other summer activities. There are no specific days in which the student researcher would need to work, but we would mutually choose regular meetings to examine issues and questions that come up in the data collection process.
Preferred Qualifications:
- Ability to operate a computer and search the internet.
- Ability to work independently and as part of a team.
- Excellent communication skills (written and oral) and well organized.
- Willingness to provide regular progress updates and provide constructive feedback on the research process.
- Ability to attend regular meetings over video (preferably Zoom).
- Basics of Microsoft Excel, Google’s G-Suite (Docs, Sheets).
- Experience collecting, organizing, and/or analyzing quantitative data.
- Substantive and academic interest in understanding political violence, conflict processes, or related phenomena.
- Coursework related to social science research methods
To Apply:
The application is closed.