Articles

Diane Moore, director of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School, traveled to Iraq where she heard from Syrian refugees frustrated that so many people know so little about them. (Kirk Carapezza/WGBH)

The fall of Aleppo is a human catastrophe. It’s also a demonstration of the perils of choosing the middle course in a military conflict. Sometimes it’s possible to talk and fight at the same time. But in Syria, the U.S. decision to pursue a dual-track, halfway approach made the mayhem worse.

Policymakers’ lack of understanding of the Islamic State has led to flawed assessments of the threat the group poses and how best to fight it. Daniel Byman reviews several recent books that offer new insights regarding the Islamic State and discusses the group’s ideology and strategy, as well as U.S. and allied counterterrorism efforts.

Blood revenge is a crucial yet understudied contributor to many insurgencies and civil wars. Interviews with participants in and witnesses to the First and Second Chechen Wars reveal how a desire to avenge dead or injured relatives drove many Chechens to join insurgent groups.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, states do not typically construct fortified boundaries in response to border disputes or to prevent terrorism. Instead, most build such boundaries for economic reasons, to keep out unwanted migrants from poorer states. Further, Muslim states are more likely to both build and be the targets of fortified boundaries.

The support of the local business community helped to make Islamists’ a powerful force in the Somali civil war. The Islamists gained business support not because of shared religious affiliation, but because they ran a more stable and less costly protection racket than did other belligerents.

Why do armed groups switch sides in civil wars? In weak states with few obstacles to switching sides, groups defect for material gain or to acquire military support in local struggles. Such shifts have implications for how long civil wars will endure, how they will end, and the prospects for state building.

Existing scholarship assumes that transnational insurgents strengthen domestic rebels. Analysis of transnational insurgents’ participation in the Chechen wars, however, reveals that foreign fighters can weaken a domestic opposition movement by introducing goals and tactics that divide the movement and alienate the local community. To avoid this outcome, domestic resistance leaders must adapt the foreigners’ ideas to the local context.