Ches Thurber | Northern Illinois University (original) (raw)
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Papers by Ches Thurber
International Studies Quarterly, 2019
This article examines the impact of social ties on a challenger’s ability to initiate a civil res... more This article examines the impact of social ties on a challenger’s ability to initiate a civil resistance campaign. Recent waves of nonviolent uprisings, from the color revolutions of Eastern Europe to the Arab Spring, have sparked renewed scholarly interest in civil resistance as a strategy in conflict. However, most research has focused on the effectiveness and outcomes of civil resistance, with less attention paid to when, why, and how challengers to regime power come to embrace a strategy of nonviolent action in the first place. Drawing upon a longitudinal analysis of challenger organizations and coalitions in Nepal, this article illustrates how social ties inform challengers’ assessments of the viability of civil resistance and consequently shape their strategic behavior. The findings complicate state-centric approaches to contentious politics by showing how different actors within the same state face different sets of political opportunities and constraints. They also highlight the indeterminate effects of ideology, as differences in challengers’ social ties drive Gandhians to take up arms and Maoists to lay them down.
Journal of Global Security Studies, 2018
While ethnic cleavages have featured prominently in our understanding of civil wars, attention to... more While ethnic cleavages have featured prominently in our understanding of civil wars, attention to ethnic and social structures has been surprisingly absent from the recent wave of research on civil resistance. Yet these structures likely have an important impact on when and where we see nonviolent campaigns occur. This article argues that the strategic logic of civil resistance presents high barriers to entry for politically excluded ethnic minorities. Constraints on these groups’ ability to activate mechanisms central to an exclusively nonviolent strategy either prevent them from getting a civil resistance campaign off the ground or deter them from ever attempting to do so. Using original data on the ethnic composition of nonviolent and violent campaigns, I show that nonviolent campaigns are less likely than violent ones to include participants from politically disadvantaged ethnic groups and also less likely to feature ethnic political claims. Furthermore, I find that political exclusion and small group size reduce the likelihood that members of an ethnic group will initiate a campaign of civil resistance.
The ethnic composition of state security forces is believed to have important effects on the dyna... more The ethnic composition of state security forces is believed to have important effects on the dynamics of conflict processes, but data limitations have impeded our ability to test such hypotheses cross-nationally until now. To address this problem, the Security Force Ethnicity (SFE) dataset provides time-series, group-level measures of the ethnic composition of military forces in the Middle East between 1946 and 2013. We draw on an extensive review of case studies and histories to produce unique ordinal codings for participation rates in the officer corps and in the rank and file. We demonstrate the utility of the data through empirical applications examining the relationship between military ethnic composition and the incidence of coups and repression. Our findings illustrate the theoretical and empirical importance of disaggregating ethnic representation in the military from inclusion in other institutions of the state.
Himalaya the Journal of the Association For Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 2014
Small Wars & Insurgencies, 2014
International Studies Quarterly, 2019
This article examines the impact of social ties on a challenger’s ability to initiate a civil res... more This article examines the impact of social ties on a challenger’s ability to initiate a civil resistance campaign. Recent waves of nonviolent uprisings, from the color revolutions of Eastern Europe to the Arab Spring, have sparked renewed scholarly interest in civil resistance as a strategy in conflict. However, most research has focused on the effectiveness and outcomes of civil resistance, with less attention paid to when, why, and how challengers to regime power come to embrace a strategy of nonviolent action in the first place. Drawing upon a longitudinal analysis of challenger organizations and coalitions in Nepal, this article illustrates how social ties inform challengers’ assessments of the viability of civil resistance and consequently shape their strategic behavior. The findings complicate state-centric approaches to contentious politics by showing how different actors within the same state face different sets of political opportunities and constraints. They also highlight the indeterminate effects of ideology, as differences in challengers’ social ties drive Gandhians to take up arms and Maoists to lay them down.
Journal of Global Security Studies, 2018
While ethnic cleavages have featured prominently in our understanding of civil wars, attention to... more While ethnic cleavages have featured prominently in our understanding of civil wars, attention to ethnic and social structures has been surprisingly absent from the recent wave of research on civil resistance. Yet these structures likely have an important impact on when and where we see nonviolent campaigns occur. This article argues that the strategic logic of civil resistance presents high barriers to entry for politically excluded ethnic minorities. Constraints on these groups’ ability to activate mechanisms central to an exclusively nonviolent strategy either prevent them from getting a civil resistance campaign off the ground or deter them from ever attempting to do so. Using original data on the ethnic composition of nonviolent and violent campaigns, I show that nonviolent campaigns are less likely than violent ones to include participants from politically disadvantaged ethnic groups and also less likely to feature ethnic political claims. Furthermore, I find that political exclusion and small group size reduce the likelihood that members of an ethnic group will initiate a campaign of civil resistance.
The ethnic composition of state security forces is believed to have important effects on the dyna... more The ethnic composition of state security forces is believed to have important effects on the dynamics of conflict processes, but data limitations have impeded our ability to test such hypotheses cross-nationally until now. To address this problem, the Security Force Ethnicity (SFE) dataset provides time-series, group-level measures of the ethnic composition of military forces in the Middle East between 1946 and 2013. We draw on an extensive review of case studies and histories to produce unique ordinal codings for participation rates in the officer corps and in the rank and file. We demonstrate the utility of the data through empirical applications examining the relationship between military ethnic composition and the incidence of coups and repression. Our findings illustrate the theoretical and empirical importance of disaggregating ethnic representation in the military from inclusion in other institutions of the state.
Himalaya the Journal of the Association For Nepal and Himalayan Studies, 2014
Small Wars & Insurgencies, 2014