Yuri M. Zhukov

Denial and punishment in the North Caucasus Evaluating the effectiveness of coercive counter-insurgency

A growing literature on the subnational diffusion of armed conflict rests on the proposition that political violence triggers more violence, in the same locality and elsewhere. Yet state efforts to contain such uprisings remain largely unexplored, theoretically and empirically. Drawing on a mathematical model of epidemics, we formalize the logic of conflict diffusion and derive conditions under which state coercion might limit the spread of insurgent violence. Using a new dataset of insurgent and government violence in Russia’s North Caucasus from 2000 to 2008, we evaluate the relative effectiveness of four coercive strategies: (1) denial, which manipulates the costs of expanding insurgent activity to new locations, (2) punishment, which manipulates the costs of sustained fighting in contested areas, (3) denial and punishment, which does both, and (4) no action, which does neither. We find denial to be most effective at containing insurgent violence. Punishment is least effective, and even counterproductive. Not only does such a strategy fail to prevent the spillover of violence to new locations, but it may amplify the risk of continued fighting in contested areas. In the Caucasus, denial is found to be the least inflammatory counter-insurgency option for Russia. For it to succeed, Russia should physically isolate centers of insurgent activity from regions of nonviolence and avoid the temptation of punitive reprisals.

Islamists and Nationalists: Rebel Motivation and Counterinsurgency in Russia’s North Caucasus

This article offers the first disaggregated, quantitative comparison of Islamist and nationalist violence, using new data from Russias North Caucasus. We find that violence by Islamist groups is less sensitive to government coercion than violence by nationalist groups. Selective counterinsurgency tactics outperform indiscriminate force in suppressing attacks by nationalists, but not Islamists. We attribute this finding to rebels’ support structure. Because Islamist insurgents rely less on local support than nationalists, they are able to maintain operations even where it is relatively costly for the local population to support them. These findings have potentially significant implications for other contemporary conflicts in which governments face both types of challenges to their authority and existing political order.

Filtering revolution: Reporting bias in international newspaper coverage of the Libyan civil war

Reporting bias – the media’s tendency to systematically underreport or overreport certain types of events – is a persistent problem for participants and observers of armed conflict. We argue that the nature of reporting bias depends on how news organizations navigate the political context in which they are based. Where government pressure on the media is limited – in democratic regimes – the scope of reporting should reflect conventional media preferences toward novel, large-scale, dramatic developments that challenge the conventional wisdom and highlight the unsustainability of the status quo. Where political constraints on reporting are more onerous – in non-democratic regimes – the more conservative preferences of the state will drive the scope of coverage, emphasizing the legitimacy and inevitability of the prevailing order. We test these propositions using new data on protest and political violence during the 2011 Libyan uprising and daily newspaper coverage of the Arab Spring from 113 countries. We uncover evidence of a status-quo media bias in non-democratic states, and a revisionist bias in democratic states. Media coverage in non-democracies underreported protests and nonviolent collective action by regime opponents, largely ignored government atrocities, and overreported those caused by rebels. We find the opposite patterns in democratic states.

Use of force and civil–military relations in Russia: an automated content analysis

Russias intervention in the Georgian–South Ossetian conflict has highlighted the need to rigorously examine trends in the public debate over the use of force in Russia. Approaching this debate through the prism of civil–military relations, we take advantage of recent methodological advances in automated content analysis and generate a new dataset of 8000 public statements made by Russias political and military leaders during the Putin period. The data show little evidence that military elites exert a restraining influence on Russian foreign and defence policy. Although more hesitant than their political counterparts to embrace an interventionist foreign policy agenda, Russian military elites are considerably more activist in considering the use of force as an instrument of foreign policy.

Examining the Authoritarian Model of Counter-insurgency: The Soviet Campaign Against the Ukrainian Insurgent Army

In an effort to better understand the benefits and limitations of an authoritarian approach to counter-insurgency, this article examines the relationship between regime type and military effectiveness in the often neglected case of Soviet counter-insurgency operations in Western Ukraine. This study finds that the advantages authoritarian governments enjoy in designing, planning and implementing counter-insurgency campaigns – related to a lack of restraints and constraints – can all too easily become reversed through the excesses they permit.

An Epidemic Model of Violence and Public Support in Civil War

How do civilians respond to violence in civil war, and how do these responses shape combatants’ coercive strategies? Conventional wisdom expects civilian victimization to backfire, as a security-minded public “balances” against the side posing the greatest threat to its livelihood and survival. Yet combatants often expect a terrorized population to do the opposite, “bandwagoning” with those most willing and capable to inflict harm. Using an epidemic model of popular support dynamics, I explore the logic of balancing and bandwagoning in irregular civil war. I argue that when civilian strategy is clearly communicated to combatants, civilians are always better off balancing, and combatants are better off avoiding punishment. When civilian choice is not observed, the balancing equilibrium breaks down and patterns of violence depend on the local balance of power. The model’s results challenge the view that selective violence is most common in areas of incomplete control. Due to uncertainty over civilian behavior, violence in both divided and perfectly controlled areas can occur in equilibrium, inflicting great costs on civilians. I compare these predictions against the historical record of Soviet counterinsurgency in Western Ukraine, using new micro-level data from the declassified archives of the Soviet secret police.

Population Resettlement in War: Theory and Evidence from Soviet Archives

Why do combatants intentionally uproot civilians? The forcible relocation of families and communities to concentration camps, “protected villages,” and other special settlements is a regular feature of irregular war, occurring in almost a third of all counterinsurgency campaigns since 1816. Despite the historical regularity of these practices, most research has focused on individual decisions to flee, rather than the brute-force resettlement of civilians by combatants. Using a dynamic model of popular support and new micro-level data from Soviet secret police archives, I show that civilian resettlement is not simply a by-product of war but is a rational response to informational asymmetry. Combatants who cannot identify and selectively punish their opponents face incentives to control the population rather than earn its support. For strong governments with limited coercive leverage, civilian resettlement offers a way to reduce rebel activity without having to win hearts and minds.

The Political Legacy of Violence : The Long-Term Impact of Stalin's Repression in Ukraine

Political scientists have long been interested in how indiscriminate violence affects the behavior of its victims, yet most research has focused on short-term military consequences rather than long-term political effects. We argue that large-scale violence can have an intergenerational impact on political preferences. Communities more exposed to indiscriminate violence in the past will—in the future—oppose political forces they associate with the perpetrators of that violence. We document evidence for this claim with archival data on Soviet state violence in western Ukraine, where Stalin’s security services suppressed a nationalist insurgency by deporting over 250,000 people to Siberia. Using two causal identification strategies, we show that communities subjected to a greater intensity of deportation in the 1940s are now significantly less likely to vote for “pro-Russian” parties. These findings show that indiscriminate violence systematically reduces long-term political support for the perpetrator.

Stalin’s terror and the long-term political effects of mass repression:

Repression has a long-term negative effect on political participation. Using millions of arrest records from archival documents, and polling station-level election results, we examine how exposure to Stalin-era repression affects voter turnout in Putin’s Russia. To estimate the effect of repression on voting, we exploit exogenous variation in repression due to the structure of mid-century Soviet railroads, and travel distances to prison camps. We find that communities more heavily repressed under Stalin are less likely to vote today. The electoral legacy of Stalin’s terror – decades after the Soviet collapse, and across multiple election cycles (2003–12) – is systematically lower turnout. To show that our result is not unique to the Putin regime, we replicate our analysis in Ukraine (2004–14), and find similar patterns. These results highlight the negative consequences of repression for political behavior, and challenge the emerging view that exposure to violence increases political engagement. While past research has emphasized the short-term effects of repression over several months or years, we show that these effects may be durable over generations and even changes of political regime. Our findings also demonstrate that repression need not be collective or indiscriminate to have community-level effects.

External Resources and Indiscriminate Violence: Evidence from German-Occupied Belarus

Within a single conflict, the scale of government violence against civilians can vary greatly—from mass atrocities in one village to eerie restraint in the next. This article argues that the scale of anticivilian violence depends on a combatant’s relative dependence on local and external sources of support. External resources make combatants less dependent on the local population, yet create perverse incentives for how the population is to be treated. Efforts by the opposition to interdict the government’s external resources can reverse this effect, making the government more dependent on the local population. The article tests this relationship with disaggregated archival data on German-occupied Belarus during World War II. It finds that Soviet partisan attacks against German personnel provoked reprisals against civilians but that attacks against railroads had the opposite effect. Where partisans focused on disrupting German supply lines rather than killing Germans, occupying forces conducted fewer reprisals, burned fewer houses, and killed fewer people.