Press Release
Cambridge, Massachusetts, April 25, 2008
The International Security Program (ISP) at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs hosted a research workshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 25, 2008. Workshop organizers Erica Chenoweth (ISP) and Adria Lawrence (ISP/Intrastate Conflict Program) brought together leading scholars to explore the conditions under which non-state actors resort to violence and the various strategies state actors use to address aggrieved populations. Workshop participants addressed issues such as why the use of violence varies among non-state actors, how the decision to use violence affects strategic outcomes of internal and international conflicts, and how states arrive at decisions to accommodate, assimilate, or ethnically cleanse minority groups. Participants received feedback on original research papers prepared in advance of the workshop. The final drafts of the papers will be compiled into an edited volume, which will be submitted for review in fall 2008.
The following is an agenda for the workshop:
8:45 Introductions and welcome
9:00 Adria Lawrence, ISP/Intrastate Conflict Program
"Driven to Arms? Escalation and the Eruption of Violence in Nationalist Conflicts"
Discussant: Kristin Bakke, ISP/Intrastate Conflict Program
9:45 Erica Chenoweth, ISP & Maria J. Stephan, International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
"Nonviolent Resistance and the Four Challenges of Asymmetric Conflict: A Framework for Analysis and Some Unresolved Questions"
Discussant: H. Zeynep Bulutgil, ISP/Intrastate Conflict Program
10:30 Break
10:45 Harris Mylonas, Yale University
"Assimilation and its Alternatives: Caveats in the Study of Nation-building Policies"
Discussant: Erica Chenoweth, ISP
11:30 Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, Iowa State University & Emily Beaulieu, University of Kentucky
"Minority Protest Strategies under Conditions of Uncertainty"
Discussant: Alexander Downes, ISP
12:15 Lunch
13:15 Alexander Downes, ISP
"Killing (Civilians) to Win? Some Preliminary Evidence on the Military Effectiveness of Civilian Victimization in War"
Discussant: Harris Mylonas, Yale University
14:00 Wendy Pearlman, ISP/Intrastate Conflict Program
"Not Why Violence but How: Towards a Process-based Understanding of Violence and Nonviolence; Insight from the Palestinian Case"
Discussant: Kathleen Gallagher Cunningham, Iowa State University
14:45 Break
15:00 H. Zeynep Bulutgil, ISP/Intrastate Conflict Program
"War, Collaboration, and Endogenous Ethnic Polarization: The Path to Ethnic Cleansing"
Discussant: Adria Lawrence, ISP/Intrastate Conflict Program
15:45 Kristin Bakke, ISP/Intrastate Conflict Program
"The Turn to Violence in Chechnya and Punjab: Separatist Struggles in Decentralized States"
Discussant: Matthew Kocher, Yale University and Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE)
16:30 Meeting Wrap-up
17:00 Workshop Adjourns
Additional Participants:
Steven E. Miller, ISP
Sean Lynn-Jones, ISP
Jonathan Caverley, ISP
Ehud Eiran, ISP
Helen Fein, ISP
Matthew Fuhrmann, ISP/Project on Managing the Atom
Susan Lynch, ISP