Program on Security Institutions and Violent Instability (Military)
Michaela Mattes, Professor
Political Science
Closed. This professor is continuing with Fall 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Spring 2025.
Overview: (This is one of three pieces of a collaborative project between Professors Arriola, Matanock, and Mattes.) Countries around the world are increasingly confronting violent irregular threats such as insurgencies and terrorism. Yet, many countries have proven unable to effectively deploy their security institutions (including regular militaries, paramilitaries, and police) when responding to such threats even if they have sufficient resources at their disposal. For example, while resource-poor Ethiopia has managed to mobilize its forces to successfully prevent most attacks within its borders by Al-Shabaab, the Somali jihadist terrorist group affiliated with Al-Qaeda, oil-rich Nigeria has repeatedly failed to coordinate its forces in preventing further attacks from a comparable threat, Boko Haram, the Islamist group linked to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). Our project, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Defense, is designed to explain why some states’ security institutions are more effective than others. To shed light on this question we will collect a dataset on the design of domestic security institutions across 102 developing countries and conduct detailed comparative case studies on six paired countries: Colombia and Mexico; Ethiopia and Nigeria; and Myanmar and the Philippines.
This part of the project will focus on refining our comprehensive data collection of
regular military forces (such as army, navy, and air force) and irregular security organizations (including paramilitaries and militias such as Republican Guards) in existence in developing countries between 1980-2017. We will also address substantive questions about the security forces and mandates in our case study countries, especially the Philippines, Myanmar, and Colombia.
Role: Using secondary materials, online sources, encyclopedias, and other reference material, undergraduate research apprentices will investigate questions such as when particular security forces came into existence and ceased to exist, the size of these forces, which ministries commanded the forces, why a government decided to change its domestic security institutions. Research apprentices will write brief summaries of their insights that will form the backbone of our data coding and case studies. This work will build on research conducted by our team during previous semesters and will help to significantly improve the quality of our data for our own purposes and for the larger scholarly community.
The apprenticeship is designed to expose undergraduate researchers to how rigorous social science research is done. Undergraduate research assistants will learn about how to collect and process data that can then be used for statistical analysis. Substantively, undergraduate research assistants will learn more about the variation that exists in countries’ domestic security institutions and how this might explain why some countries are better at fighting violent threats than others.
Qualifications: Research apprentices should be familiar with how to use library and electronic resources, and possess tenacity in tracking down specific information about particular cases. Strong writing skills are desirable as well. Foreign language skills are a plus, since some information might be most easily available on foreign country websites.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Allison Grossman, Graduate Student
Hours: 6-8 hrs
Social Sciences