Social media increasingly plays a role in conflict and contentious politics. Politicians, leaders, insurgents, and protestors all have used it as a tool for communication. At the same time, scholars ...have turned to social media as a source of new data on conflict. I provide a framework for understanding social media's influence on conflict through four interrelated points: (1) social media reduces the costs of communication, (2) it increases the speed and dissemination of information, (3) scholars should focus on the strategic interaction and competitive adaption of actors in response to communication technology changes, and (4) the new data that social media provides are not only an important resource, but also fundamentally change the information available to conflict actors, thereby shaping the conflict itself. In sum, social media's influence on conflict defies simplistic explanations that argue that it privileges incumbents or challengers.
How does the threat of becoming a victim of terrorism affect voting behavior? Localities in southern Israel have been exposed to rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip since 2001. Relying on variation ...across time and space in the range of rockets, we identify the effect of this threat on voting in Israeli elections. We first show that the evolution of the rockets’ range leads to exogenous variation in the threat of terrorism. We then compare voting in national elections within and outside the rockets’ range. Our results suggest that the right-wing vote share is 2 to 6 percentage points higher in localities that are within the range—a substantively significant effect. Unlike previous studies that explore the role of actual exposure to terrorism on political preferences and behavior, we show that the mere threat of an attack affects voting.
We investigate the relationship between education and antisemitism using unique individual-level survey data on antisemitism from more than 100 countries. Our findings show that education is ...associated with greater favorability toward Jews, but the relationship between education and endorsement of antisemitic stereotypes and conspiracy theories varies between countries. In countries that actively supported recent statements condemning Holocaust denial and antisemitism at the United Nations—which we use as a proxy for country-level opposition to antisemitism in education and politics—greater education is associated with reduced endorsement of antisemitic stereotypes. By contrast, more educated people are more likely to endorse antisemitic stereotypes than less educated people in countries that declined to endorse those statements. These descriptive findings provide new evidence about the association between education and intolerance.
How does international public support via social media influence conflict dynamics? To answer this question, I construct a unique, extremely disaggregated data set drawn from social media sources to ...examine the behavior of Israel and Hamas during the 2012 Gaza Conflict. The data set contains conflict actions and international audience behavior at the hourly level for the full 179 hours of the conflict. Notably, I also include popular support for each side from international audiences on social media. I employ a Bayesian structural vector autoregression to measure how Israel’s and Hamas’s actions respond to shifts in international public support. The main finding is that shifts in public support reduce conflict intensity, particularly for Israel. This effect is greater than the effect of the key international actors—United States, Egypt, and United Nations. The results provide an important insight into how information technology is changing the role of international audiences in conflict.
I examine how anger stemming from violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict influences intragroup retaliation. In July 2010 I conducted a series of experiments in two cities in the Southern District ...of Israel affected to varying degrees (high and low) by rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. For each experiment, subjects were partnered anonymously with a member of their community. They were then exposed to one of two emotional manipulations: one that induced anger or one that did not. Finally, each subject was given an opportunity to keep an endowment or allocate it towards destroying a portion, or all, of their partner's income ("pay to punish") in retaliation for their partner having taken money from them previously. This decision to "pay to punish" was designed to closely mimic the costly nature of conflict. The findings suggest that anger has a conditional effect on decisions to pay to punish: in Sderot (most affected by rocket fire), anger decreases punishment, while in Ofakim (less affected), it increases punishment. Additionally, higher exposure to violence made subjects more likely to engage in negative reciprocity.
Misperceptions and conspiracy theories about foreign powers and religious and ethnic groups can inflame intergroup conflict and distort public opinion, especially in divided and contentious regions ...like the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Why do people acquire and maintain these false or unsupported beliefs? This study reports the results of a novel survey experiment examining conspiracy beliefs in the MENA region. We find that belief in conspiracy theories about the West, Jews, and Israel is widespread and strongly associated with generalized anti-Western and anti-Jewish attitudes, especially among individuals with high political knowledge. However, both experimental and observational data indicate that these beliefs do not appear to be the result of feelings of powerlessness—our findings provide little support for the hypothesis that a lack of control makes people more vulnerable to conspiracy theories.
The lack of temporal disaggregation in conflict data has so far presented a strong obstacle to analyzing the short-term dynamics of military conflict. Using a novel data set of hourly dyadic conflict ...intensity scores drawn from Twitter and other social media sources during the Gaza Conflict (2008-2009), the author attempts to fill a gap in existing studies. The author employs a vector autoregression (VAR) to measure changes in Israel's and Hamas's military response dynamics immediately following two important junctures in the conflict: the introduction of Israeli ground troops and the UN Security Council vote. The author finds that both Hamas's and Israel's response to provocations by the other side increase (both by about twofold) immediately after the ground invasion, but following the UN Security Council vote, Israel's response is cut in half, while Hamas's slightly increases. In addition, the author provides a template for researchers to harness social media to capture the micro-dynamics of conflict.
Much of the focus of cyber conflict has been on interstate conflict. This article focuses on two interrelated questions in the important but neglected area of cyber contentious politics. First, how ...does the public feel about the use of different eco tactics including cyber-based tactics carried out by activists involved in the radical environmental movement, a movement that uses protest and sabotage in service of environmental causes? Second, how do anti-technology sentiment and concerns about climate change influence support for different eco tactics? To answer these questions, we conduct a survey and survey experiment on a nationally diverse sample of Americans. We find that Americans are less supportive of certain eco tactics, particularly those that involve property destruction or physical sabotage compared to cyber-based tactics. We further show that anti-technology sentiment and perceived threat from climate change are correlated with increased support for eco direct actions. Using a survey experiment we show that cyber direct actions that result in sabotage are viewed as more acceptable than kinetic actions even though they both result in the same level of destruction. Finally, we include qualitative data from interviews with activists to better understand the strategy and role that new technology and tactics play in the broader radical environmental movement.
Extant research hypothesizes that anger over past intergroup conflict serves as a catalyst for future conflict. However, few studies have experimentally tested this hypothesis on a representative ...sample in a high-stakes, field setting. I use a behavioral economics experiment to measure how anger over past conflict influences intergroup relations. Subjects were sampled proportional to population and ethnicity in Acre, Israel, a mixed city of Jews and Palestinian Citizens of Israel that experienced ethnic riots in 2008. The experiment randomly assigned subjects to an anger treatment about the riots or a neutral condition. Subjects then allocated income between themselves and three partners: one from their ingroup, one from their outgroup, and one whose identity was unclear. I find that priming anger over the riots did not increase discrimination. Rather, it reduced altruism to all groups, and this result was strongest for "high aggression" types. Qualitative information suggests that blame for the riots falls on both ingroup and outgroup members.
If public opinion about foreign policy is such an elite-driven process, why does the public often disagree with what elites have to say? We argue here that elite cue-taking models in International ...Relations are both overly pessimistic and unnecessarily restrictive. Members of the public may lack information about the world around them, but they do not lack principles, and information need not only cascade from the top down. We present the results from five survey experiments where we show that cues from social peers are at least as strong as those from political elites. Our theory and results build on a growing number of findings that individuals are embedded in a social context that combines with their general orientations toward foreign policy in shaping responses toward the world around them. Thus, we suggest the public is perhaps better equipped for espousing judgments in foreign affairs than many of our top-down models claim.
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