Michael C. Burch

Why do some states repatriate children of Islamic State (IS) foreign fighters while others ignore their human rights? The collapse of IS left thousands of children of foreign fighters stateless, trying to be repatriated to the home country of their foreign parents. While some states welcomed children back, others were quite hesitant. I argue that two mechanisms influence a state’s willingness to repatriate: the level of that state’s direct military involvement in the international coalition that fought IS and its regime type. The higher a state’s degree of commitment of troops, arms, or finances to the international coalition against IS, the less likely that state is to welcome home children of IS members. Additionally, I argue that lower levels of electoral competition within the state insulates leaders from any domestic audience costs associated with bringing IS-affiliated children to their country. These states will thus repatriate earlier than states with open elections. I explore the importance of these two mechanisms with a mixed-methods research design. Together, the mixed method approach helps illuminate the variation in children’s human rights in the post-IS conflict landscape.

How does the international community decide to frame grievous human rights abuses during wartime? Using the Islamic State’s campaign of human rights abuses against the minority Yazidi population over the past decade, we consider modern media portrayals of mass atrocities and the use of the term genocide. We argue that Western news will initially have few articles defining these atrocities as genocide, but with the passage of time, they will be more widely recognized as a mass atrocity. That is because, initially, only human rights groups will employ the term to draw attention to the abuses, but as the United States becomes more involved militarily in the region, more actors and policymakers will use the term to provide a moral justification for intervention. We test this theory through the analysis of multiple Western media sources from the start of the ISIS campaign in 2014 until 2020. Tracing the evolution of language used to describe the violence against the Yazidis, specifically focusing on the term “genocide,” we find support for our claims. These findings will provide important insight into the politics and challenges of classifying acts of mass atrocities in the 21st century.

Why and when do violent Islamist groups join the transnational franchises run by al-Qaeda (AQ) or Islamic State (IS)? Existing literature on the phenomenon of violent franchise networks stress the relative costs and benefits of franchising to the core organization. In this paper, we explore the question from the other side, namely, that of the franchisees. In contrast to explanations that stress the importance of capacity building or ideological alignment, we propose that franchising is driven by the dynamics of an intra-group conflict that encourages outbidding and/or splintering: established leaders join AQ or IS to forestall challengers and prevent internal schisms, while rising challengers join AQ or IS to set up their own insurgent splinter faction. We employ a mixed-methods approach that combines a statistical analysis of all violent Islamist groups in Africa in the post-2001 period with qualitative case studies of Islamist organizations that became franchisees for AQ and IS. Using data from ACLED, we estimate the effects of splinter risk on the likelihood of a group franchising. We then trace the proposed causal process through a case study of Islamist groups splintering and franchising in the western Sahel. Our results are consistent with the argument that franchising is used by insurgent leaders and commanders as a means of restraining or creating splinter factions.

What explains the specific location of Islamic State attacks in Syria and Iraq? We consider how both ethnic and economic factors shape the group's decision-making about where to attack. We explore these competing motivations using spatial analysis of the Islamic State's individual acts of violence from 2013-2017. We find that both areas with ethnic heterogeneity and valuable economic rents are associated with more individual Islamic State violent events. By examing the micro-foundations of the Islamic State's conflict decisions, we provide further nuance to understanding the strategic logic of rebel groups during wartime.

Why do some rebel groups fractionalize during intrastate conflict? The focus of this article is on understanding a particular phenomenon within fragmentation during civil war: the emergence of viable splinter factions. Splinter factions are when a new rebel group emerges from an ongoing violent challenge against the state and concurrently launches their own violent campaign rather than continue to pool resources to mount a more effective fight. In this article, we outline how the organizational characteristics of the original rebel movement can create several conditions in which splinter factions will emerge. Organizational decisions regarding, mobilization, central command, and territorial control creates opportunities for aggrieved members within the coalition to strike out on their own. Support for the theory is found through statistical tests on the internal characteristics of rebel groups demonstrating the importance of rebel group structure in understanding contemporary conflict processes.

How may the legitimacy of rebel groups shape the decisions of third-party states to support insurgencies militarily? In aiming to better understand how the (group-level) attributes of insurgencies motivate interventions on their behalf, we argue that the size of rebel forces serves as a proxy for a revolution's perceived legitimacy within the international community. Specifically, we maintain that the larger the insurgency, the greater the insurgency's perceived legitimacy and, thus, the more likely intervention on its behalf becomes. This analysis challenges previous studies that have confined the causal salience of faction size to relative capabilities or strength, and it also underscores the controversial policy implications of this finding.

How do rebel groups determine their targets during intrastate conflict? We build upon two competing theories in conflict studies that emphasize either the social or economic determinants of violence during war and use geographic information systems (GIS) analysis to explore these competing theories. To do this, we utilize a subnational analysis of the most likely case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to understand whether ethnicity or natural resources motivates the location of conflict events. Accounting for geography, we find that economic endowments in the form of natural resources are highly related with the number of violent attacks, while the presence of competing ethnic groups does not offer much help in understanding the location of conflict events.