How does the political environment that a group operates affect whether they engage in terrorism? My research is concerned with how political opportunities, which I conceptualize in terms of political decentralization, affect how groups engage with the state, and whether they will engage in terrorism. Previous research has indicated that decentralization can reduce violence but can pose stability problems in other countries. I hypothesize that states with higher levels of decentralization will have lower levels of violence. I believe this works by allowing minority groups more access to power. Because they have access to political power, there is less incentive to use violence to achieve their political goals. This project is tested with a large-N study of democratic countries. I also engaged in two case studies focused on Northern Ireland and Spain, looking at the IRA and ETA, respectively. These two case studies trace the effect of changing levels of centralization on the behavior of minority groups. This study finds that political opportunities often lead to less violence in the long-term. Decentralization is one way of achieving this. However, sometimes decentralization may not work because it could take away rights from minorities; while in other cases, even after decentralization begins to take place, it can take a while for changes to take hold. Both the Northern Ireland and Spanish cases show that it is not always so simple as just saying decentralization will take place, or that it has begun.

Since the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), US administrations have criticized their European allies for not meeting security burden-sharing goals. This study aims to gain insight into what factors motivate alliance members to contribute to the burden-sharing objectives they have agreed to achieve. From a US perspective, the need for its European allies to reach these goals will allow the United States to shift resources to more pressing strategic challenges like the rise of China. Informed by Mancur Olson's theory of collective action and Glenn Snyder's concept of the security dilemma in alliances, this project tests the hypothesis that the more a NATO ally's foreign policy interests align with those of the United States, the less that ally will spend on defense as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). This study uses a mixed-methods approach. The primary metric measuring an ally's contribution is the percentage of its GDP spent on defense. Furthermore, this study breaks NATO's history into three geopolitical periods: the Cold War (1950 to 1990), the Post-Cold War (1991 to 2006), and the Resurgent period (2007 to 2019). The analysis yields robust support for the theory in periods lacking a major threat (i.e., the Post-Cold War). That means the more aligned an ally's foreign policy preferences are with the United States, the less that ally spends on defense as a percentage of its GDP in such periods. The implications of these findings suggest that with the intensified threat of Russia made apparent with its attack on Ukraine in 2022, burden sharing in the NATO alliance will be less of a problem for the US in the immediate future. However, when this threat recedes, the burden-sharing issue will return, and the United States will have to send credible signals (like withdrawing troops from Europe) to its allies to cause them to question US protection and increase defense spending.

Military coups are the most consequential breakdown of civil-military relations. This dissertation contributes to the explanation and prediction of coups through three independent quantitative analyses. First, I argue that food insecurity is an important determinant of coups. The presence of hunger can generate discontent in society and subsequently alter coup plotter opportunities. Furthermore, I show that the presence of chronic hunger can condition the effect of increasing development. While increasing levels of development have been shown to limit coup proclivity, a state experiencing chronic hunger will recognize the fundamental failure of basic needs provision. As development increases, the presence of chronic hunger in a state will therefore increase the likelihood of a coup when compared to its absence. Findings indicate that food insecurity, and specifically the conditioning influence of chronic hunger, are important explanatory predictors of coups. In the second analysis, I argue that existing tests of the Coup-Contagion hypothesis have not been sensitive to the specific pathways through which coups may diffuse. After a robust analysis of spatial autocorrelation, I derive a novel feature of contagion that is sensitive to both shocks and historical legacy of neighborhood coups. Regression models including coup contagion as a predictor, provide substantive support for my hypotheses. In the final assessment, I synthesize explanatory models and provide a machine learning framework to forecast coups. This framework builds on a growing effort in social science to predict episodes of political instability. I leverage a rolling origin technique for cross-validation, sequential feature selection, and an ensemble voting classifier to provide forecasts for coups at the yearly level. I find that predictive sensitivity to coups is increasing over time using these methods and can result in practical forecasts for policy makers.

The project studies enlistment into Pro-Government Militia groups (or PGMs) in the context of modern armed conflicts. While PGMs as armed groups are getting an increased attention, very little insight has been generated regarding the circumstances under which pro-government combatants choose to join PGMs over the army. I develop survey tools, a survey experiments and a series of semi-structured interviews to study individual-level factors affecting recruitment dynamics in Ukraine, the country that successfully employed PGMs to defend itself against Russian hybrid aggression. The inquiry tests for the role of such factors as trust in the army, emotions, and subjective individual reasons (existential desires), and is aimed at helping policy makers and military analysts better understand combatants' motivation to join the fight and the potential of grassroots mobilization in the context of well-developed Western societies. The results offer several insights. The interview analysis reveals that the ex-combatants situate their choice within a dichotomy of "fight" vs. "serve". These self-identified fighters are driven to PGMs by their existential need for excitement, meaning or the need to "reinvent" themselves. Other most-cited reasons include the lack of trust in the army and informal communitarian obligations before the nation as opposed to the state. On the national level, results of an emotion-based survey experiment suggest that the respondents who experience pride as a result of recent conflict developments are more likely to support potential conflict participation of their friends and family. In contrast, self-efficacious, highly motivated individuals, are interested in joining PGMs as a way to fight for their home while not being constrained by army bureaucracy.

Intrusions are the intentional unauthorized violation of a state's sovereign territory or claimed space (e.g., air defense identification zone, exclusive economic zone) by assets controlled by another state. Intrusions are one of the most common military interactions between major powers. Yet, intrusions are poorly understood by security studies scholars. To the extent that they are addressed in the literature, they are usually understood through the lens of coercive signaling. However, most intrusions lack the requisite components for this coercive signaling such as competing political objectives, associated demands, and the necessary risk to demonstrate resolve. As a result, most intrusions are left unexplained by the literature. This dissertation argues that states use intrusions and responses to intrusions to assert their relative status in bilateral relationships. Leaders that are dissatisfied with their state's status in relation to another country are more likely to exhibit a pattern of escalated intrusions or responses to intrusions as a means of reframing the status relationship. The study tests these hypotheses using case studies centered on Chinese and Russian leaders vis-a-vis the United States. The cases were constructed using interviews with current and former senior officials as well as archival resources (some recently declassified). These findings are important. They provide insight on how states communicate and compete for status as well as the role of intimidation and deference in interstate relationships. The findings also help clarify how and why leaders today are using intrusions such as Xi Jinping in the South and East China Seas and Vladimir Putin's resumption of long-range bomber patrols against the United States and other NATO countries.

China has two contrasting images in the West: a cute panda and an evil dragon. In recent years, a near-consensus seems to be forming among policy makers in Washington that the People's Republic of China (PRC) is more of an evil dragon than a cute panda, using "sharp power" to threaten U.S. interests and world peace. The PRC is regarded by the current U.S. administration as a "strategic competitor," and a new Cold War seems to be looming between the world's two largest economies. Is the rise of China destined to cause conflicts or even war? After analyzing the conflict behavior of the PRC documented in the Correlates of War project's Militarized Interstate Dispute dataset (v4.3), this research shows that China's rise does not seem to make conflict more likely. Instead, with the growth of its power, Beijing has become increasingly reluctant to use force against other states. Drawing on the economic norms theory, the author argues that the development of the capitalist-market economy since late 1970s has fundamentally changed China's economic conditions, social norms and political culture. This transformation has helped the PRC form increasing interests in maintaining a robust global marketplace and a peaceful world order, thus making war or serious conflicts with other nations almost unimaginable. Currently, China is more a panda rather than a dragon. However, the West needs to remember that though vegetarian and non-predatory, pandas are bears with sharp teeth and nails. When pressured and cornered, they can be dangerous. The misunderstanding and fear of China, rather than the rise of China itself, is the real cause of the recent rise of US-China frictions.

Great powers have often sought to achieve their strategic goals through the allocation of military aid. The United States is no exception, as it has frequently used military aid to influence the policies and military capacity of its allies and partners. However, our understanding of the effects of US military aid on the conflict behavior of recipient states - and especially the mechanisms underlying these effects - remains poorly understood. The results of previous studies of U.S. military aid are often contradictory, and are mostly based on over-aggregated, country-level data. In this dissertation, I argue that examining the individual-level effects will give us a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying country-level associations between US military aid and recipient behavior. I examine three research questions related to the manner in which military aid influences conflict in recipient countries. First, I explore the individual effects of U.S. IMET using semi-structures in-depth interviews and an original survey of Hungarian military officers and non-commissioned officers. This paper investigates the transmission of professional values and "democratic" norms to individual participants through the U.S. IMET programs. Second, I investigate the effects of U.S. IMET participation on civil conflict duration. I argue that government forces with more robust U.S. IMET participation will accumulate more and better military human capital, which incentivize rebels to hide and minimize their operations leading to a prolonged civil conflict. Finally, while exploring recipient states international conflict behavior I theorize that American educated and trained foreign military personnel return home with a better understanding about the role of the military as an instrument of national power, civil-military relations, the value of cooperation and the cost of war. I argue that these military personnel advise their political masters against the use of military force during international disputes leading to a decreased probability of MID initiation. I find support for each of the main arguments presented in the dissertation. Overall, this dissertation represents one of the first attempts to move beyond country-level data and explore the micro-foundations of US military assistance.

To what extent do elite and social group cues affect the public's willingness to embrace their leader's actions during domestic and international security crises? Studies traditionally have focused on top-down elite cue-driven models to study how the public's attitudes are influenced during international and domestic security crises, largely disregarding the bottom-up effects social peer groups can have on individuals' attitudes. This is problematic as the public is regularly exposed to cue messages from elites and social peer groups, both of which are expected to help determine how successful leaders will be in mobilizing public support on a tactical level. To address this dissertation, conducted three studies drawing on prospect theory and audience costs evaluating to what extend elite and social group cues are able to moderate the American and Indian public's willingness to support or oppose the use of force in the context of humanitarian interventions, trade disputes, international and domestic security crises. Relying on ten survey experiments, the results from the three studies present robust evidence that the tactical use of elite and social group cues is not particularly effective as these information signals are unable to consistently induce preference shifts among the public during domestic and international security crises.

West Africa's dominant sources of security threats have shifted in the past 20 years from large-scale civil wars to low-intensity conflicts previously unaccentuated. This dissertation takes on three of these new security threats; a) crop farmer (farmer) and animal herder (herder) tensions, b) small arms proliferation, and c) corruption and security. The clashes between farmers and herders have assumed significant security dimensions in the past decade, yet, we have a limited understanding of the conflict processes. I examined farmer-herder contestations in chapter two from climate-change conflict nexus and common-pool resource (CPR) governance perspectives. First, I argue that the recent farmer-herder skirmishes are evidence of climate volatility, positing that extreme climatic factors have contributed to these clashes' frequency and severity. Second, I assess how local CPR regimes in the conflict hotspots exacerbate the tension by considering these resources' social embeddedness and the implications of different user stratifications. The analysis draws on detailed interview data gathered in the conflict hotspots in the Kwahu enclave in the Eastern Region of Ghana in 2020 to explain the mechanisms. The climate-conflict literature has developed an affinity for large-N approaches, with few studies emphasizing qualitative methods. Qualitative approaches can emphasize location-specific conditions of the conflict dynamics to illustrate variations at the micro-level. For which no quantitative data exist, for instance, power relations between groups or CPR design principles to cope with the exigencies of climate extremes and intergroup tensions, fieldworks or interview approaches can provide better contextualization. They can pinpoint the broader causal dynamics critical for understanding climate–conflict links but are easily ignored by methods focusing on the narrow relationships between mainly two variables. The study reveals that a) seasonal variability affects farmer-herder conflicts, with the intensity (frequency and fatality) peaking during the heart of the drought period and b) ambiguous CPR governance regimes and weak land rights also feature prominently as the conflict driver. The third chapter investigates how state legitimacy influences the demand for small arms and light weapons (SALW) and how this, in effect, provokes conflicts in the West African subregion. Specifically, I evaluate the Economic Community of West African States' (ECOWAS) nonproliferation regime on small arms. I argue that the state's legitimacy is the mechanism that determines if it will import arms outside the legal routes and if conflict will follow. The analysis uses qualitative evidence of SALW proliferation data with a state legitimacy index to explain the tendency to comply with the collective security agreement. The second part uses case studies about Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire (CD1), and Nigeria to draw further inferences on how state legitimacy crises induce small arms demands and undermine compliance with the nonproliferation agreement. The findings reveal that state legitimacy bodes well for not acquiring arms outside the legal channels. The evidence also suggests that state capacity, an essential mechanism in treaty compliance, has little impact on states' ability to implement the regime. State capacity plays a marginal role because countries with domestic legitimacy problems acquired arms with little adherence to the security regime because of 'insecurity and the constant need to be on high alert. This makes state capacity a secondary factor as countries decide not to enforce the regime rules because of domestic legitimacy problems. In Ghana, state legitimacy pointed in the direction of compliance, while in CDI and Nigeria, diminished state legitimacy led to conflict, reducing the ability to implement the regime. Chapter four explores links between political corruption, and national security, using Boko Haram in Nigeria as a case study. I argue that corruption is a security problem because it diverts resources away from national security issues, predisposes resource distribution to patronage networks that co-opt state institutions, and distorts counterinsurgency success. The empirical analysis, drawn from micro-qualitative evidence from financial statements, military records, and terrorism data, finds that corruption enervated military capacity while strengthening insurgency effectiveness. This study makes links between corruption and insurgency in a novel way and expands our grasp of what makes counterinsurgency successful. Chapter five summarizes the general findings and reveals how the project contributes to our understanding of security dynamics in the West African subregion. Overall, the evidence illustrates that it is difficult to provide security without some fundamental government legitimacy, governance effectiveness, and more importantly, without considering how ecological scarcity, which has become more pronounced recently, threatens security nationally and at the micro-levels.

Recent tensions in US civil-military relations point to a potential sea-change in the way US military officers interact with the public political space. This study considers that relationship with three linked papers. It considers the partisanship of officers, using a novel survey of 471 US Army officers and cadets to determine the political inclinations and activity of that group as well as to assess the willingness of officers to use force internationally. It uses a separate, nationally representative, survey experiment to weigh the influence of military conditions on public opinion regarding the use of force in international crises. The study finds that officers are, in fact, highly influential in US politics, but remain unlikely to use that influence. It finds that officers remain true to their professional ethics both externally by refraining from political action and internally by developing politically moderate views. It also finds that service as an officer has a moderating effect on an individual's willingness to use force, so that initial selection effects which make the officer population initially more hawkish are moderated over time. It finally reinforces the potential political impact of officers by showing that the conditions they establish internationally have a significant impact on the way the public views the use of force during international crises. Through these three findings, this work makes a contribution to the civil-military relations sub-field, specifically that work considering the civil-military relations gap and provides confidence in the military institution.