Matthew Adam Kocher

How "Free" Is Free Riding in Civil Wars?: Violence, Insurgency, and the Collective Action Problem

That rebels face a collective action problem is one of the most widely shared assumptions in the literature on civil wars. The authors argue that the collective action paradigm can be both descriptively inaccurate and analytically misleading when it comes to civil wars. They question both pillars of the paradigm as applied to the study of civil wars, namely, the free-riding incentive generated by the public goods dimension of insurgency and the risks of individual participation in insurgent collective action. The authors argue, instead, that although insurgent collective action may entail the expectation of future collective benefits, public (rather than just private) costs tend to predominate in the short term. Moreover, the costs of nonparticipation and free riding may equal or even exceed those of participation. The authors support these claims by triangulating three types of evidence: historical evidence from counterinsurgency operations in several civil wars; data from the Vietnam Wars Phoenix Program; and regional evidence from the Greek Civil War. They conclude by drawing implications for the study of civil wars.

Ethnic Cleavages and Irregular War: Iraq and Vietnam

The conflict in Iraq has been portrayed as “ethnic” civil war, a radically different conflict from “ideological” wars such as Vietnam. We argue that such an assessment is misleading, as is its theoretical foundation, which we call the “ethnic war model.” Neither Iraq nor Vietnam conforms to the ethnic war models predictions. The sectarian conflict between Shia and Sunni militias is not simply the outcome of sectarian cleavages in Iraqi society, but to an important extent, a legacy of U.S. occupation. On the other hand, although Vietnam was a society riven by ethnic cleavages, the Vietnam War also fails to conform to the ethnic war model. We show that there is no necessary overlap between ethnic conflict and ethnic war. Some ethnic conflicts evolve into ethnic wars, and others develop dynamics virtually indistinguishable from those of ideological civil wars. We suggest that the states role is essential in transforming conflicts into either ethnic or irregular wars. We conclude with an analysis of the current situation and future prospects in Iraq.

Lines of Demarcation: Causation, Design-Based Inference, and Historical Research

Qualitative historical knowledge is essential for validating natural experiments. Specifically, the validity of a natural experiment depends on the historical processes of treatment assignment and administration, including broader macro-historical dynamics. But if validating a natural experiment requires trust in the ability of qualitative evidence to establish the causal processes through which the data were generated, there is no good reason for natural experiments to be considered epistemically superior to historical research. To the contrary, the epistemic status of natural experiments is on a par with that of the historical research on which their validation depends. They are two modes of social-scientific explanation, each with its own pros and cons; neither is privileged. We illustrate this argument by re-examining an important recent contribution to the literature on violent conflict: Ferwerda and Miller’s 2014 natural experiment estimating the causal effect of the German decision to devolve authority to the Vichy French government on violent resistance during World War II.

What's in a Line? Natural Experiments and the Line of Demarcation in WWII Occupied France

In “Political Devolution and Resistance to Foreign Rule,” Ferwerda and Miller (FM) use a natural experiment during WWII France to argue that devolution of authority to local elites mitigates resistance to foreign rule. We dispute FM’s claims on four levels. First, the Line of Demarcation dividing France was delineated with the goal of keeping strategic railways under direct German control, invalidating FM’s natural experiment research design. Second, the higher level of resistance they observe in directly occupied France results from the Resistance’s efforts to target these strategic railways. Third, FM’s argument is not supported by the overall pattern of resistance in metropolitan France between 1940-44. Finally, FM’s data is unsuitable for testing theories connecting the location of an attack with its perpetrators’ precise geographic origins. These problems lead us to argue for the epistemic priority of treatment-assignment causal process observations over balance checks on pretreatment covariates when validating natural experiments.