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Organizational legacies of violence Conditions favoring insurgency onset in Colombia, 1964–1984

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Abstract

Why do insurgencies erupt in some places and not in others? This article exploits an original violent event database of 274,428 municipality-month observations in Colombia to determine the conditions favoring organized violence at the subnational level. The data cast doubt on the conventional correlates of war: poverty, rough terrain, lootable natural resources, and large, sparsely distributed populations. The evidence suggests that rebellions begin not in localities that afford sanctuaries, impoverished recruits, and abundant finances, but instead in regions providing receptacles of collective action: the organizational legacies of war. Specifically, the data indicate that regions affected by past mobilization are six times more likely to experience rebellion than those without a tradition of armed organized action. The significant correlation between prior and future mobilization is robust across different measurements of the concepts, levels of aggregations of the data, units of analysis, and specifications of the model. These include rare events and spatial lag analyses. These results highlight the need for micro conflict data, theory disentangling the causes of war onset from those of war recurrence, and a reorientation away from physical geography and back to the human and social geography that determines if rebellion is organizationally feasible. The findings suggest new avenues of research on the post-war trajectories of armed organizations, the causes of repeated war, and the micro-foundations of rebellion.

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Colonial Melancholia and Critical Nostalgia. The Visuality of Empire in Portuguese Culture

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Seminar Synopsis:

The memory euphoria of the past half-century has, if anything, raised awareness of the constructed or invented nature of national memories and their complexity. Because the articulation between the normative rules of public memory and the at times politically incorrect claim to a right to private memory is representational and discursive, cultural artefacts, such as literary texts, films, photographs, videos or monuments have seismically materialized as go-betweens in the memory wars. The memories of empire in the Portuguese cultural tissue have been over the past 40 years after independence of the former colonies contentious sites, where a certain colonial melancholia clashes with a critical nostalgia that has been growing particularly amongst a generation of artists born after decolonization. Colonial melancholia is not simply a result of recent traumatic events, but spreads over two centuries in a pathological inheritance filled with resentment, humiliation, violence, denial, myth and mystification. This melancholic vision of the past has been mediated and disseminated by several media from texts to monuments, photos and films, which have either become accomplices in this regime of power, or have sought to subvert it and have finally created spaces of ambivalence and hybridity. A notorious example of the mediation of the colonial regime was of course photography.  Visibility was pivotal to the image world of the imperial regime, that not only needed to dominate the reality portrayed in the new medium, but which also made use of it for the sake of its own assertive self-representation. The talk inquires into this regime of visibility and seeks by means of a practice of interference to unravel the colonial discourse that used the perceived essentializing of reality supported by visual ‘objectivity’ to create a structure of feeling based on melancholy and nostalgia that would become the dominant  memory of empire in Portuguese culture.  Arguably, in this practice of interference resonates a practice of cultural literacy that allows for the reinterpretation and re-contextualization not only of what the images showed, but  what they meant. Then again, it is precisely a regained cultural literacy in the reading of the visual that lies at the root of the project of critical visual nostalgia enacted by contemporary video artists in the fragmented deconstruction of the imaginary wholeness of nostalgic thinking embedded in home movies.

Encina Ground Floor Conference Room

Isabel Gil Professor of Cultural Theory Speaker Catholic University of Portugal
Seminars

Does Repression Reduce Terrorist Attacks? Evidence from Israel

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Erica Chenoweth Visiting Scholar, CISAC; Assistant Professor of Government, Wesleyan University Speaker

James D. Fearon

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-1314
0
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences
Professor of Political Science
rsd26_013_0052a.jpg PhD

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of political science. He is a Senior Fellow at FSI, affiliated with CISAC and CDDRL. His research interests include civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy and the evaluation of foreign aid projects promoting improved governance. Fearon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Some of his current research projects include work on the costs of collective and interpersonal violence, democratization and conflict in Myanmar, nuclear weapons and U.S. foreign policy, and the long-run persistence of armed conflict.

Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
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James Fearon Professor of Political Science and Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University Commentator
Seminars

Insurgency, Counterinsurgency, and Civil War: Insights from the Philippines

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Reuben W. Hills Conference Room

Joseph Felter Senior Research Scholar, CISAC; Formerly US Army Colonel and Director of the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point Speaker

James D. Fearon

CISAC
Stanford University
Encina Hall
Stanford, CA 94305-6165

(650) 725-1314
0
Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences
Professor of Political Science
rsd26_013_0052a.jpg PhD

James Fearon is the Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor of political science. He is a Senior Fellow at FSI, affiliated with CISAC and CDDRL. His research interests include civil and interstate war, ethnic conflict, the international spread of democracy and the evaluation of foreign aid projects promoting improved governance. Fearon was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2012 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2002. Some of his current research projects include work on the costs of collective and interpersonal violence, democratization and conflict in Myanmar, nuclear weapons and U.S. foreign policy, and the long-run persistence of armed conflict.

Affiliated faculty at the Center for International Security and Cooperation
Affiliated faculty at the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law
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James Fearon Theodore and Frances Geballe Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Professor of Political Science, Stanford University Commentator
Seminars

The Voice of Palestinian Civil Society: A Call for Non-Violent Resistanace

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Dear members of the Arab Studies Table, 

You are cordially invited to a private informal networking event with  world-renowned Palestinian activist, MP, and former presidential candidate and Nobel Peace Prize nominee  

 Dr. Mustafa Barghouti  

on Monday March 5, 6-7pm   

at CISAC central conference room, Encina Hall 2nd floor

followed by a speech at

Cubberley Auditorium

at 7:00pm

The event is an exclusive opportunity for the members of the Arab Studies Table to meet and network with Dr. Barghouti, who will be delivering a speech afterwards at the Cubberley Auditorium (at 7pm) on non-violent activism in Palestine. Please see attached flyer for further details. The Cubberley talk is a public event.  

We hope you can join us for the informal networking event with Dr. Barghouti on March 5 at 6pm. Coffee, refreshments, and cookies will be served!  

Please RSVP by replying to Arab Studies Table coordinator Brian Johnsrud (johnsrud@stanford.edu) with your name and affiliation. Non-Arab Studies Table guests are welcome if they are accompanied by a Table member (please send their names when you RSVP). Please RSVP by Sunday March 4.

Dr. Barghouti's bio:

Member of the Palestinian parliament; former Minister of Information under the 2007 National Unity Government; 2005 presidential candidate; General Secretary of the Palestinian National Initiative; physician; social, political, human rights and peace activist; one of the most active grassroots leadersin Palestine; campaigner for the development of Palestinian civil society and grassroots democracy; outspoken advocate of internal reform; international spokesperson for the Palestinian cause; leading figure in the non-violent, peaceful struggle against the Occupation; and organizer of international solidarity presence in the Palestine, Mustafa Barghouthi has made an extraordinary contribution to initiatives to peacefully challenge the ongoing Israeli Occupation of Palestine and bring it to end, as well as efforts to build the institutional framework of Palestinian civil society and promote the principles of internal democracy and good governance.  He writes extensively for local and international audiences on civil society and democracy issues and the political situation in Palestine, as well as on health development policy in Palestine. In 2010 Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Co-founder of the Peace People. 

In 2002, Dr. Barghouthi co-founded Al Mubadara (the Palestinian National Initiative, PNI), along with Dr. Edward Said, Dr. Haider Abdel-Shafi and Mr. Ibrahim Dakak, and currently serves as its General Secretary.  Al Mubadara is a democratic opposition movement that provides a reformist, inclusive, democratic alternative to both autocracy and corruption, and to fundamentalist groups.  It looks to achieve this by promoting an accountable and transparent democratic system in Palestine, and by strengthening contacts between Palestinians in the Territories and those in the Diaspora.  It also seeks to develop mass non-violence and international solidarity as the preferred means of ending the Israeli Occupation and achieving lasting peace, and to mobilize public opinion by making the Palestinian story visible in the international media.  

 Latest article on non-violent activism in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/22/opinion/peaceful-protest-can-free-palestine.html?ref=opinion

  Arab Studies Table at Stanford: http://www.stanford.edu/group/arabstudiestable/index.html

 



 

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Cubberley Auditorium
459 Lasuen Mall
Stanford, CA, 94305

Dr. Mustafa Barghouti Co-founder of the Palestinian National Initiative and the Union of Palestinian Medical Committees Speaker
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