The principal investigators (PIs) use an innovative theoretical and empirical study of guerrilla insurgencies from 1980-2007. The theoretical models draw upon both bargaining theories of war developed by international relations scholars as well as collective action theories of resource mobilization utilized by comparative politics scholars. The PIs use the models to analyze how domestic and international forces influence guerrilla insurgencies across three sequential stages. In the first stage, the central question is whether a low-level guerrilla armed conflicts escalate to large-scale civil war. In the second stage, the analysis focuses on understanding patterns of coercive bargaining between guerrillas and regimes in which combatants choose different strategies of armed attacks and negotiations. In this stage the central outcomes of interest include the duration of the war, the severity and targets of violence, and the frequency and timing of talks. In the third stage the PIs analyze the dynamics of how civil wars come to an end via negotiated agreements, military victories, or de-escalation without any settlements.
At each of these three stages, the PIs utilize their theoretical framework that draws upon IR bargaining theory and collective action theory to explain varying patterns of behavior. The PIs expect bargaining theory to be especially important to understanding outcomes resulting from strategic interaction and joint responses, while collective action theory will be most helpful in modeling how the actions and choices of individual combatants contribute to the joint outcomes. They expect international factors to be particularly significant to the initiation and termination of guerrilla insurgencies, while domestic factors will be more important to the dynamics of insurgency.
To test the hypotheses derived from their theory of wartime bargaining and collective action, the PIs construct an original data set on a random sample of guerrilla insurgencies drawn from the population of 173 such insurgencies from 1980-2007. The hypotheses are tested through a series of statistical analyses of new fine-grained datasets and the results of the project will make important contributions to basic research on the dynamics of guerrilla insurgencies, scholarly literatures on bargaining models of conflict and collective action theory, and develop new datasets that should be of widespread interest to other researchers.
In addition to contributions to basic research, the findings from this project should be of relevance to policymakers in the US and abroad who seek timely interventions to manage and control internal armed conflicts in other states. For example, the findings should help policymakers to anticipate: (1) when low-level internal conflicts will escalate to civil wars, (2) when civil wars will lead to humanitarian crises and large-scale violence against civilian populations, and (3) whether combatants are likely to be coerced by outside threats and sanctions.
