“Dynamic Deterrence in Civil War: Evidence from (Simulated) Airstrikes in Afghanistan”

Thursday, February 24, 2011
12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
IR/PS Dean’s Conference Room

Register at: http://iicas.ucsd.edu/speaker-series/registration.html

Can insurgents be deterred during civil war or, alternatively, are they essentially undeterrable, having already decided ex ante to pay the costs of taking up arms? Despite a voluminous literature on interstate deterrence, there has been surprisingly few studies of whether the lessons of deterrence translate to the civil war battlefield. Lyall draws on a new dataset of nearly 8000 airstrikes and shows of force---where bombing runs are simulated but no weapons are released---in Afghanistan (2006-09) to examine how insurgents respond to (threatened) coercion. Matching via a relational database is used to pair bombed and threatened villages with similar locations to isolate the causal effects of both coercion and threats on the location and timing of insurgent attacks. He also examines whether the effects of airstrikes are conditional on the nature of civilian casualties they inflict and underlying population characteristics such as ethnicity or prior exposure to violence.

Jason Lyall is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs at Yale University. He is also affiliated with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) and the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies. He is currently working on three projects: the sources of military effectiveness in conventional wars since 1800; how state violence affects public attitudes and insurgent violence in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Russia’s Northern Caucasus; and how identity influences information dynamics in civil wars.

His work has been published in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and World Politics. He has received the 2009 Kellogg-Notre Dame Award; the 2007 APSA Helen Dwight Reid Prize for Best Dissertation in International Relations, Law, and Politics; and the 2007 Stanley Kelley Jr. Prize for Teaching Excellence in Princeton University’s Politics Department. His research has been funded by the United States Institute for Peace and the Macarthur Foundation, among others. He has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale and at Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, as well as a Visiting Scholar at the European University at St. Petersburg, Russia. Lyall previously taught at Princeton University, and received his PhD from Cornell University.

The IICAS PIA and IR/PS laboratory on International Law and Regulation (ILAR) 2010-2011 Joint Speaker Series at UC San Diego is sponsored by the Project on International Affairs (PIA) at the Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies (IICAS), and the International Law and Regulation Laboratory (ILAR) at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS).