Event data
In this set of projects, I leverage geospatial event data to explore the microlevel dynamics of political violence. What role can violence at the local level serve in advancing broader political ends? What explains patterns of action and reaction between actors engaged in different types of political violence? How do the differing roles the UN peacekeepers play affect the likelihood that rebel fighters will target them?
Article
Christian Oswald, Melanie Sauter, Sigrid Weber, and Rob Williams. “Under the Roof of Rebels: Civilian Targeting After Territorial Takeover in Sierra Leone.” International Studies Quarterly.
Do rebels target civilians as part of the process of establishing control in their territories? This research note shows that transition periods after rebels gain territorial control are remarkably violent for civilians. Speaking to the civilian victimization and rebel governance literature, we investigate the immediate time period after rebels successfully capture and hold territory. We argue that rebels use violence to gain compliance in newly captured territories until they are able to build up local capacities and institutions for peaceful governance. To test this argument, we draw on methodological advances in integrating event data and combine multiple datasets to study patterns of violence perpetrated by the Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone from 1997-2001. The findings of our spatiotemporal analysis show that civilian targeting increases in the period after rebels capture territory from the government compared to areas without territorial takeover, suggesting that life under the roof of rebels is initially more dangerous for civilians.
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Working paper
Patrick Hunnicut, William G. Nomikos, and Rob Williams. “Non-Combatants or Counter-Insurgents? The Strategic Logic of Violence against UN Peacekeeping.” To be presented at the Annual Conference of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, CA, Sepember, 2020.
As UN multidimensional peacekeeping operations have proliferated over the past two decades, violence against peacekeepers has increased as well. Yet there exists substantial sub-national geographic variation in patterns of violence. What explains this variation? We contend that much of the violence against peacekeepers stems from strategic motivations. Peacekeepers in multidimensional PKOs serve as substitute providers of governance and security, working to bolster perceived state capacity and legitimacy in areas where the government cannot send its own forces. Insurgents target peacekeepers in expectation of a PKO unit’s capacity to win over the support of local civilians. We argue that insurgents rely on three primary heuristics to predict the downstream efficacy of peacekeeping forces: personnel composition, peacekeeper gender, and peacekeeper nationality. We test our theory using an original dataset of geocoded United Nations multidimensional peacekeeping deployments peacekeeping deployments. Using primary documents sourced directly from the UN covering 10 multidimensional peacekeeping operations from 1999-2018, we present comprehensive time-series data on UN peacekeeper deployment location by type, gender, and nationality. We find that insurgents overwhelmingly target peacekeepers in areas with a large number of three types of forces: police, non-Western, and female peacekeepers.
Navin Bapat, Daniel Gustafson, and Rob Williams. “Terrorism, Stealth Aggression, and Political Opportunism.” Presented at the Annual Meeting of the Peace Science Society (International), South Bend, IN, November, 2016.
Why do governments respond to terrorist attacks with repression, given that terrorism typically produces insignificant damage, and repression often increases popular support for terrorists? This study argues that governments use repression in response to terrorist attacks for both strategic and opportunistic reasons. Strategically, attacks may signal that terrorists are destabilizing the government’s control of its territory. Since state power is endogenous to the territory it controls, these losses may precipitously weaken the government and make it vulnerable to internal and external challengers. Governments therefore turn to violence in an effort to maintain territories that are critical to maintaining power. On the other hand, the specter of destabilization allows opportunistic leaders in quasi-democratic regimes to repress political adversaries and retain office indefinitely in the name of fighting terrorism. We find support for these hypotheses using data on African, Asian, and Middle Eastern states from 1992-2010.