In the last decade, important members of the international aid community - including the UNDP, the World Bank, and USAID - have produced reports that encourage states to devolve administrative power. In response, the Uzbek government promoted its ongoing efforts to empower local…
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This dissertation explains why some rebel groups act in a highly coercive fashion toward local populations, only to shift to increasingly contractual behavior, and why other groups that share similar circumstances evolve in the opposite direction. Drawing upon fieldwork in Sudan…
This dissertation argues that the context in which a coercive relationship occurs has a profound impact on the process itself. Specifically, that polarity will structure a state's ability to interpret key variables necessary for success. The most relevant of these is the ability…
This dissertation examines why some governments are more vulnerable to international overthrow attempts than others. Drawing on insights from the comparative politics literature, I argue that a government's vulnerability to insurgency-, economic sanctions-, or coup-based overthr…
This thesis studies under what conditions the U.S. can coerce its allies to forgo nuclear weapons. Specifically, why did Taiwan and South Korea give up their nuclear pursuits under American duress, while Israel and Pakistan attained a nuclear capability? The existing theoretical…
In counterinsurgency wars with large-scale foreign military interventions, under what conditions do in-country allies comply with the demands of foreign intervening forces and under what conditions do allies dismiss foreign demands? By examining thousands of primary source docum…
This dissertation explains when countries with nuclear weapons ambitions comply with or defy foreign demands that they abandon their bomb aims and accept restrictions on their nuclear progress. It argues that the likelihood of compliance with nonproliferation demands depends on …
Repression, used by dictators as a tool to control the populous of a nation, is a defining feature of authoritarian regimes. Often the most concerning response, the use of coercion is centrally important to a greater understanding of how dictators maintain stability. Emerging th…
This dissertation identifies the determinants of public opinion in coercive terrorist crises and explores how the effects of coercive terrorism on public opinion incentivize the decisions of democratic leaders. Using a multi-method research design, the project includes innovativ…
The following dissertation develops a theoretical framework for guiding the strategy of democratic states in successfully countering the hostilities of nationalistic substate terrorist organizations (NSTOs), and effectively manipulating the terrorist group’s (and its supporting …
Why do coercive institutions rise and fall? While this question receives vast attention in the comparative politics literature, Americanists have been slower to take up this question. This is surprising since the United States has had some of the most coercive institutions throu…
This dissertation argues that the convergence of industrialized wage-labor, increased economic precariousness, close and partisan elections, and weak ballot laws dramatically increased the incidence of economic voter intimidation between 1873 and 1896. When this form of coercion…
Is war unavoidable? It is no mystery that the issues nations confront each other over sometimes result in violence and unnecessary human suffering, while others are resolved peacefully through diplomacy. The question as to why one and not the other has always remained at the for…