Parochial altruism – individual sacrifice to benefit the in-group and harm an out-group – undermines inter-group cooperation and is implicated in a plethora of politically-significant behaviors. We report experimental evidence about the impact of variation in individuals’ distance to in-group members and to out-group members on parochial altruism in a setting in which inter-group conflict is made possible. We find that distance has systematic effects on individual choice. Parochial altruism is stimulated particularly when individuals’ distance to both their in and out-group is high. Our results suggest that high distance may create a pathway to group-based individual action. Existing research focuses on the interaction between close-knit in-groups and proximate, threatening out-groups as the typical setting in which parochial altruism occurs. Our study indicates the need for future research to investigate how parochial altruism can occur across a wider range of in-group and out-group configurations.

On-side fighting – outright violence between armed groups aligned on the same side of a civil war’s master cleavage – represents a devastating breakdown in cooperation. Its humanitarian consequences are also grave. But it has been under-recognized empirically and therefore under-theorized by scholars to date. This article remedies the omission. Existing research can be extrapolated to produce candidate explanations, but these overlook spatial and temporal variation in on-side fighting within a war. I provide a theory that accounts for this ebb and flow. On-side fighting hinges on belligerents’ trade-offs between short-term survival and long-term political objectives. Enemy threats to survival underpin on-side cooperation; in their absence, belligerents can pursue political gains against on-side competitors. I evaluate this threat-absence theory using evidence from the ongoing Syrian Civil War’s first years. Fine-grained fatalities data capture fluctuating enemy threats to on-side groups’ survival and situate on-side fighting and its absence. Findings support threat-absence theory and contribute to research on warfighting and political competition in civil wars and to the study of coalition dynamics in other settings, including elections and legislatures.

From 2011 to 2016, the Obama administration’s Syria policy appeared to be in constant flux. Prominent accounts portray this as the result of foreign policy making in an arena with no good options, or the use of programs as smokescreens to conceal underlying goals. Both portrayals fit the foreign policy making literature, which views policy as crafted by a president who acts either as guardian of the national interest or as a consummate politician. But the record on Syria does not square with these accounts. The Obama administration neither tried to find solutions to the strategic problems that Syria posed in and of itself, in order to advance the national interest, nor exploited Syria as a political opportunity, to enhance domestic political power. I show, instead, that the trajectory of U.S. Syria policy was consistent with efforts to minimize the risk that the crisis posed to President Obama’s central foreign policy objectives and his domestic political capital and legacy. The Obama administration’s Syria policy resulted from a distinct logic of political risk management.

What determined how governments in the Middle East and North Africa reacted to the global COVID-19 pandemic? We develop a theoretical argument based on the political costs of different policy options and assess its empirical relevance. Distinguishing between the immediate costs associated with decisive action and the potential costs of uncontrolled spread that are likely to accrue over the long term, we argue that leaders who have fewer incentives to provide public goods to stay in power will lock down later than their more constrained counterparts. We find empirical support for this argument in statistical analyses covering the 1 January – 30 November 2020 period using the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) and our own original data on the timing of mosque closures and strict lockdowns across the region. We also illustrate our argument with a description of the response to the pandemic in Egypt.

The increasing sectarianization of the international relations of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is a defining feature of the region’s contemporary politics. Iran has sought to increase its influence among Shi‘i populations of foreign countries, while Saudi Arabia and other Sunni regimes have moved to curtail it. In heterogeneous and polarized MENA societies, like Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq, where the Shi‘a constitute a sizable proportion of the population and compete for political power, it is natural to presume that sectarianization likely increases tension and prejudice against the Shi'a. Yet, little is known about homogenous MENA societies, where the Shi‘a exist as an infinitesimal, uninfluential minority that does not seek political power. This topic is examined using an original, nationally-representative survey of 2,000 respondents in Morocco. We find that about 59 per cent of individuals express interpersonal prejudice against Moroccan Shi‘a, expressing discomfort at the prospect of having a Shi‘i neighbour. Such prejudice is counter-intuitive, given that Moroccan Shi‘a constitute a miniscule minority – less than .1 per cent of the population. We investigate three hypotheses concerning the sources of anti- Shi‘i prejudice, which locate them in social marginalization, religious beliefs and practices, and views about regional politics. The first two hypotheses are drawn from the existing literature, whereas the third is our unique theoretical contribution. Our results, which find support for the connection between individuals’ views about regional politics and anti-Shi‘i prejudice, advance scholarly understanding of religious diversity in the MENA, showing how international developments can trickle down into interpersonal relations to hinder the acceptance and tolerance of sectarian minorities.

Empirical studies of the causes or consequences of civil war often use measures that do not correspond to theory and results are sensitive to small changes in the coding of civil wars. Civil war is an instance of “sovereignty rupture” and is inherently a polity-level phenomenon, but that understanding of civil war is not reflected in data in which civil war is coded as a dyadic conflict—the state fighting a domestic challenger. We demonstrate the consequences of conceptual ambiguity about which conflicts to code as civil war and when to code the start and end of a civil war. Using a new data set of civil wars from 1945 to 2016 that is consistent with the concept of sovereignty rupture, we replicate several studies and find that their results are often overturned or weakened when we use our data. We advocate for greater deliberateness in data selection in civil war studies, focusing on the fit between the question of interest and the concept of civil war that is underlying a given data set.

Review essay on Civil War in Syria: Mobilization and Competing Social Orders, by Adam Baczko, Gilles Dorronsoro, and Arthur Quesnay.

Read more about Civil War in Syria at Cambridge University Press .

America's power preponderance since the end of the Cold War has not translated into an ability to win quickly and decisively against insurgency. The U.S. military, designed to fight Soviet tanks on European battlefields, for the past decade has fought insurgents wearing flip-flops and using improvised explosives in Iraq and Afghanistan. Clear victories in counterinsurgency are rare, and these wars are costly and long-lasting. Peace after civil wars, of which insurgencies are a subtype, is tenuous. Is self-sustaining peace an elusive goal for U.S. intervention? How can the conduct of counterinsurgency (COIN) be better designed to shift violent, fragmented societies to a peaceful equilibrium? We describe how scientific knowledge on the determinants and characteristics of human parochialism—the tendency to cooperate with and favor members of one's group—should change the way we approach these questions.

Does territorial partition of countries in civil wars help to end these wars, reducing the risk of recurrence? Researchers have proposed territorial partition with or without formal recognition of sovereignty as a solution to civil wars and a way to create self-enforcing peace. Quantitative studies of the effect of partition on the risk of renewed civil war, however, suffer several main shortcomings, including conflicting results in the extant literature that result mainly from data coding differences, selective use of case histories, and methodological problems. A new data set and a benchmark empirical analysis find that, on average, partition is unlikely to reduce the risk of a return to civil war and, in some cases, may increase that risk.