How do the psychological characteristics of world leaders affect civil wars? Multiple studies have investigated how the personalities and beliefs of world leaders affect foreign policy preferences and outcomes. However, this research has yet to be applied to the intrastate context, which is problematic, given the growing importance of civil wars in the conflict-studies literature. This dissertation project utilizes at-a-distance profiling methods to investigate how leaders and their psychological characteristics can affect the likelihood, severity, and duration of civil conflicts. The findings of this research provide further support for the general hypothesis that leaders can, and often do, matter when trying to explain policy outcomes. More importantly, the findings demonstrate that leaders can influence the likelihood of civil war onset, the severity of civil wars, and their duration. Additionally, this project investigates the effect that civil war severity has on the psychological characteristics of leaders. Contrary to some previous research, however, the findings here indicate that leaders' psychology may not be sensitive to civil conflict severity.

In the past decade, cyber operations have been increasingly utilized to further policy goals of state-sponsored actors to shift the balance of politics and power on a global scale. One of the ways this has been evidenced is through the exploitation of electric grids via cyber means. A remote tripping command injection attack is one of the types of attacks that could have devastating effects on the North American power grid. To better understand these attacks and create detection axioms to both quickly identify and mitigate the effects of a remote tripping command injection attack, a dataset comprised of 128 variables (primarily synchrophasor measurements) was analyzed via statistical methods and machine learning algorithms in RStudio and WEKA software respectively. While statistical methods were not successful due to the non-linearity and complexity of the dataset, machine learning algorithms surpassed accuracy metrics established in previous research given a simplified dataset of the specified attack and normal operational data. This research allows future cybersecurity researchers to better understand remote tripping command injection attacks in comparison to normal operational conditions. Further, an incorporation of the analysis has the potential to increase detection and thus mitigate risk to the North American power grid in future work.

This dissertation explores how traits of a mass casualty event and community institutionalization affect how a community demonstrates solidarity after a mass casualty event. A systematic examination of mass casualty events along these lines has not been conducted before. Theoretically, individual helping behaviors like altruism help explain individual involvement in demonstrations of solidarity while solidarity and resilience help in explaining group behaviors. A typology is proposed that breaks up mass casualty events into four different types: terrorism, criminal, weather and accidents. These types of events make up the majority of non-war mass casualty events. Experimentally a sample of students is used to assess how individuals are likely to respond to mass casualty events by gauging how they would respond using five different types of demonstrations of solidarity. Findings suggest that victim type positively influences demonstrations of solidarity while casualty number and event type are only selectively influential. Two cases (Orlando, FL 2016 and San Bernardino, CA 2015) are used to test three hypotheses that are related to how a community demonstrates solidarity after a mass casualty event. Results indicate that victim type positively influences demonstrations of solidarity, particularly through the specific institutions within vulnerable communities that increased access to demonstrations. Additionally, increased institutionalization within the victim community also positively influences demonstrations of solidarity. Furthermore, results suggest that event specific traits do influence demonstrations of solidarity under certain circumstances. However, more empirical research is needed to examine how individuals respond and the exact processes available to communities that would aid in their recovery from such an event.

What is the impact of military institutional tendencies and habits on U.S. Army senior officer forecasting accuracy and how does this forecasting ability shape success in battle? Military leaders plan operations based on the forecasted strengths and vulnerabilities of their adversary. Negative habits, such as limited option development, confirmation bias, doctrinal overreliance, and over-consideration of sunk costs, inhibit effective forecasting. The tempo of the modern battlefield, hierarchical culture, and institutional tendencies of the US Army may promote and reinforce these habits. I surveyed Colonels in US Army War College programs to measure their individual tendencies, levels of education, and accuracy in forecasting events during a three to twelve-month future. Quantitative analysis of the resulting data shows that these habits are present and negatively affect forecasting ability; additionally, higher levels of education positively affect forecast accuracy, possibly counteracting the effects of negative institutional tendencies and habits. Extending the research using historical and contemporary case studies of senior US Army Generals, including interviews of General David Petraeus and other high-ranking officials, I find that rejection of these institutional habits and tendencies enabled superior forecasting, leading to battlefield success. I conclude by examining how educational levels of commanding generals in the Iraq War affected military success. Exploratory quantitative analysis of data collected from the US Army historical archives shows that higher levels of education positively affected significant activities within the general's assigned areas.

Child soldiers continue to be regular participants in modern conflicts in many different parts of the world. This dissertation addresses several interrelated questions about child soldiering employing large-N statistical analyses, process-tracing, and in-depth interviews. First, it asks how foreign state support and the characteristics of these donors influence rebels' recruitment of child soldiers. An important finding is that rebels supported by democratic states are less likely to employ child soldiers. It then investigates the factors and conditions that lead some groups to diversify their demographics in the types of recruits and others to not. Specifically, it considers why a rebel group would recruit children, but refrain from recruiting women. It examines theoretical arguments that contend group ideology, desires for patriarchal preservation, societal gender inequalities, and the location/type of rebellion (rural vs. urban) can each significantly contribute to groups' recruitment behavior. Third, it considers a question that speaks directly to the first two questions. What factors lead to the initial recruitment of children and how conflict conditions may impact the dynamics of rebel recruitment over time? An in-depth analysis of the Kurdistan Worker's Party (PKK) and the employment of a unique dataset on deceased Kurdish militants allows for an exploration of the temporal variation in the group's recruitment patterns over four decades. It illustrates that inter-rebel rivalries, conflict intensity, and the evolution of human rights norms shape rebels' recruitment behavior. The final section reorients the focus of the dissertation from rebel child soldiering to government child soldiering. It surveys the conditions under which the United States holds foreign governments accountable for their child soldiering practices through the restriction of certain forms of security assistance. In depth analyses of four norm-violating states and interviews with policy experts show that the strategic importance of a state and the systemic nature of child recruitment are strong predictors of when security assistance waivers will be granted. Together, this dissertation advances scholarly understanding of the causes, dynamics, and implications of child soldiering.

This dissertation explores the role of altruistic punishment, the act of punishing outsiders perceived to harm members of one's group at a personal cost, in explaining individual motivations to participate in inter-group violence. It first develops a social theory of this type punishment. This theory argues that an egalitarian social logic may be key to understanding motivations of parochial altruism, and that one's social environment may influence thresholds of anger needed to induce punishment behavior. Empirically, it conducts two survey-experimental studies. The first experiment utilizes subject partisan identity in the context of American politics and hypothetical acts of violence to study altruistic punishment behaviors among two different populations in the US. The second experiment utilizes a comparative sample of American, German, and Kurdish participants to assess whether priming for anger tied to acts of political violence by outsiders against their respective in-group increases support for a hypothetical in-group "punisher" of these outsiders. The results of these studies offer two key findings: (1) anger induced costly punishment of outgroup perpetrators may be conditional on egalitarian attitudes; (2) this relationship is contextual and varies across population. The findings cautiously suggest two conclusions. First, there may be evolutionary and neurological mechanisms that promote participation in inter-group conflict and that superficial characteristics such as ethnicity, religion, and ideology may work in tandem with biological factors. Second, it suggests that social and political environments may be useful for modulating, or exacerbating, the role of anger in the decision to participate in inter-group conflict activities.

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Under what conditions do women become more resilient and empowered in post conflict settings? Utilizing data from multi site fieldwork in northern Iraq, Germany, and the U.S. involving over 160 in depth interviews, this dissertation addresses this question by studying the experiences of Yezidi women who were subject to genocidal violence by the Islamic State in Iraq in 2014. By adopting an intersectional approach, it contributes to feminist research on post conflict dynamics and suggests that how women cope with trauma and achieve positive changes in their lives depends on a variety of factors. Age, history of sexual violence and displacement and immigration experiences of Yezidi female survivors as well as the intersection of these factors, emerge as main determinants of their post genocide resilience and empowerment. Older women and widowed women, especially when they have no educational or work background, show less resilience and are not likely to experience empowerment post conflict. While survivors of sexual violence and abduction undergo high levels of traumatic stress, they can also show the highest levels of post traumatic growth when they are supported by their families and communities. Moreover, since they have greater access to sources compared t o the rest of the community, they are also more likely to experience empowerment. Displacement is mostly a disempowering experience for survivors. In contrast, immigration may bring positive changes, depending on the conditions of immigration, host country politics, community support in settled places and individual background. In conclusion, the dissertation questions generalized assumptions about women's post conflict experiences as well as the established categories of victimhood and calls for a more effective and inclusive policymaking for women in post atrocity settings.

Which strategies contribute towards a belligerent's ability to shift territorial control in its favor more quickly than others? This dissertation advances a theory of territorial control dynamics in conventional civil war that places the civilian population at the center of the analysis. Existing scholarship explaining territorial control in conventional civil war has emphasized the role of relative military capabilities, direct military confrontations aimed at territorial conquest, and the existence of established zones of control, with civilians generally residing in areas clearly dominated by one party or another, not in contested areas. As such, theory holds that this makes the civilian population 'less consequential'. I argue that as a strategy in conventional civil war aimed at increasing territorial control, displacement serves a direct and indirect purpose suited towards these ends. Beyond using strategic displacement as a means of clearing out civilians to facilitate territorial conquest and consolidating territorial control, belligerents can strategically displace civilians into enemy-held territory as a way of geographically concentrating the civilian population. This can serve to undermine the enemy's capacity to govern. Beyond the frontlines, strategic displacement is employed in part as a strategy of exhaustion. Using indirect violence to promote the repeated civilian displacement within the enemy's rearguard serves as indirect mechanism by which to exhaust the enemy by eroding the enemy's ability to maintain territorial control, both in the short and long term. As opposition groups are faced with the meeting the demands of the local civilian population in an increasingly concentrated geographical expanse, and the more civilians are randomly displaced within enemy-held territory, the more pressure the opposition group has placed on its governance capacity and the more exhausted the enemy becomes. This in turn weakens the ability of the enemy to maintain territorial control. However, I argue that these effects vary across armed groups, dependent upon each group's respective governance capacity. This effect is also amplified when the enemy does not represent a unitary movement.