"Belfer Center Newsmakers" highlights members of the Belfer Center community who have been featured recently in the news.

To what extent can international peacekeeping promote micro-foundations for positive peace after violence? Drawing on macro-level peacekeeping theory, the authors' approach uses novel experimental methods to illustrate how monitoring and enforcement by a neutral third party could conceivably enhance prosocial behavior between rival groups in a tense, postconflict peacekeeping environment.

"...[D]espite the disparities in military training before arriving in Syria, Chechens in Syria will now leave with significant experience. Right now, the Kadyrovtsy that remain in Chechnya have the upper hand because most of the main opposition has left for Syria. But that could change as the bulk of foreign fighters trickle back home."

"Although noms de guerre have been a common practice in combat for centuries, fighters in Syria and Iraq have turned them into an art, stringing together elements that identify a great deal, real and imagined, about the fighter. Unlike the short pseudonyms of other conflicts, Syrian pseudonyms are long, with elements that vary between the groups."

"...[S]o long as Iraq's central government lacks the power to enforce order on its own, the country will be prime territory for nonstate armed groups. That is troubling, since the more armed groups appear in Iraq, the harder it will be to bring the country’s competing factions to the table to reach political solutions to their problems."

"ISIS leaders have stabilized the situation in Iraq by completely removing foreign fighters from administrative and political positions and relegating these fighters to IT-related intelligence work, IED factories, and technical tasks. In some areas, foreign fighters are even housed in rural villages to keep their interactions with locals to a minimum. In response, disenfranchised foreign fighters have resorted to small acts of sabotage."

To what extent can prosocial norms (re-)emerge among rival groups following intense intergroup conflict? One school of thought posits that violence can strengthen intragroup bonding norms, entrenching parochialism and sustaining in-group biases. However, recent studies suggest that intergroup bridging norms can also improve once conflict ends. The authors' research offers insights into how prosocial bridging vs. parochial bonding norms evolve after violence.

An emerging literature points to the heterogeneous effects of violence on social norms and preferences in conflict-ridden societies. This article considers how responses to violence could be affected by in-group/out-group divisions. The research uses lab-in-the-field experiments to gauge norms for pro-social behavior in the aftermath of ethnic violence in post-war Kosovo. The study finds that one set of treatments (ethnicity) captures a negative legacy of violence on parochialism, while another (local/non-local) shows stronger evidence of pro-sociality and norm recovery.

For the past three years, I have conducted interviews and surveys of men fighting in the Syrian Civil War. My interviews were with Syrian citizens, mostly young, and all men. Some of them joined Al Nusra (Al Qaeda branch in Syria), while the majority joined one of the other 1000 rebel brigades. My goal was to determine why they decided to fight, why they joined the group they did, and why some changed groups or quit fighting completely.

"ISIS has recently suffered massive losses of territory, income, and people. ISIS has lost 25 percent of its territory since the United States began its bombing campaign. The successful Kurdish recapture of Sinjar effectively divided ISIS territory in half and severed its access to the highway that was its main supply route. Based on data we have gathered on the ground, within ISIS territory, in 2014, ISIS was receiving up to 3,000 new recruits and volunteers per day, more than it could process at its own recruiting stations. Just before the Paris bombings, that number had decreased to 50–60 per day, not enough to offset the massive casualties sustained in Sinjar and elsewhere."