Peer-Reviewed Articles
Abstract:
Why do groups adopt terrorism? Major theories of terrorist radicalization assume it to be a rational process whereby groups select terrorism as the policy most likely to advance their goals. Not all terrorism is rational, however, and these theories cannot explain cases when groups pursue terrorism despite it being self-defeating. We distinguish between rational and irrational terrorism, and explain the latter using social psychology's groupthink mechanism. Although terrorists are widely assumed to be vulnerable to groupthink, empirical work on the phenomenon has focused overwhelmingly on decision-making by national executives. We firmly establish the link between groupthink and terrorist radicalization by tracing groupthink's operation through the development of the Weather Underground, an American terrorist group that emerged in the late 1960s and conducted six years of bombings against the U.S. government. All of the antecedent conditions, symptoms, and decision-making defects predicted by groupthink are evident in the Weather Underground, providing valuable evidence of the dangers of irrational radicalization and offering lessons for its prevention.
Working Papers
“Post-War Egalitarianism: How Ex-Combatant Women Become a Politically Active Force for Change” (with Jillienne Haglund)
“Democratic Institutions and Women’s Rights”
“Why Week States Balance: National Mobilization and Georgia’s Post-Cold War Security Strategy”
“From War to Peace: When Interstate War Forestalls Intrastate War”
Research Description
My dissertation, Why Weak States Balance: National Mobilization and the Security Strategies of Newly Independent States, aims to explain variations among newly independent states’ security strategies towards their former ruler. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the 14 weaker post-Soviet states adopted dramatically differing security strategies towards Russia. Conventional theories that see the distribution of power or economic and institutional interdependence as the central determinants of states’ foreign policy choices cannot explain why some post-Soviet states prioritized cooperation with Russia while others sought to balance against it. I propose that a state’s national mobilization and domestic ideological environment profoundly affect its security strategy. The central argument of this study is that particular historical developments prime national mobilization, leading nations to see themselves as unique socio-political units worthy of independence and driving their leaders to interpret their former ruler as a primary security threat they must balance against. I test my theory in two ways: a broad correlational analysis between the proposed causal factors and the fourteen weaker post-Soviet states’ foreign policy choices as well as two chapters containing in-depth case studies of Georgia and Kazakhstan utilizing process tracing methods to test the specific causal mechanisms at play. My field and archival research for this study has been funded by the University of Kentucky’s Coleman Political Science Award as well as the Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I recently became a regional research/faculty associate. For the coming years my central research goals are to turn my dissertation into a book, to produce articles building on my case study chapters on Georgia and Kazakhstan, and to continue producing articles in the second stream of my research concerning women in conflict and women’s political empowerment.