Projects [faculty/students]

This project consists of researching the strategic, economic, religious, and cultural factors that influence the causes, conduct, and consequences of suicide terrorism and responses to it. Suicide terrorism is rising around the world, but the most common explanations do not help us understand why. Religious fanaticism alone does not explain suicide terrorism, while existing psychological explanations have been contradicted by the wide range of socio-economic backgrounds of suicide terrorists. This project will develop and test robust models focused on understanding the causes, conduct, and consequences of suicide terrorism. The approach must be highly collaborative and multidimensional for analyzing suicide terrorism events.

Related Links:

• Prof. Pape's faculty page: http://political-science.uchicago.edu/faculty/pape.html
• Pg 13 of Chicago’s Annual Report: htt © 2005-2007 the university of chicago & argonne national laboratory p://www-news.uchicago.edu/releases/05/051220.annualreport.pdf
• Prof. Pape on NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4721056

This project seeks to leverage the area of automatic machine translation from poorly studied languages (such as many of the modern dialects of Arabic) into English. Recently, there has been an explosion of activity in computational linguistics in the area of automatic translation based on systems that learn the principles of translation of one language to another when given a sample of a document that has been translated by a bilingual human being. It is of considerable interest to government agencies that oversee international terrorism threats. Research progress can be made in understanding poorly-studied languages through automatic translation and in understanding meaning through creative approaches. A critical need exists for improved translation and understanding of Arabic languages. Language research is useful in its own right but also could feed directly into supporting text processing tools that are being developed.

Related Links:

• Prof. Goldsmith's Home Page: http://humanities.uchicago.edu/faculty/goldsmith/
• The Linguistica Project: http://linguistica.uchicago.edu/

It is somewhat predictable that an invasion and occupation that topples a government and leaves a power vacuum will result in chaos. This project explores why in some cases the result is nationalist insurgency and in others it is sectarian fragmentation and civil war. Ethnic plurality is not a sufficient explanation. In order to get at this question, this project compares Iraq and Malaya, and then constructs an agent-based model to further elaborate on the mechanisms.

The twentieth century history of Malaya offers an intriguing parallel with modern Iraq. In both cases, an outside invader – Japan in Malaya and the United States in Iraq -- inflamed sectarian tension. Despite the presence of an outside occupying power in both cases, no broad nationalist front emerged and nationalism never became important enough to drive either resistance or consolidation. Instead, the occupations caused communal tensions to morph into full-fledged sectarian war. Dan Slater mentions this puzzle in his forthcoming book on state formation:

"While Japanese conquest intensified nationalism in Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines, and Vietnam (as well as China and Korea), it inflamed communalism in Malaya..." (Slater 221)

The same phenomenon has occurred in Iraq, where the Coalition occupation transformed inter-sectarian relations from relatively benign dissatisfaction into full-fledged sectarian war. In Malaya, after years of unrest and a Communist insurgency, the violence was eventually brought to an end by a program of state-building made possible by cross-sectarian consolidation among Malaya's elites. Sectarian violence in Iraq has had a centrifugal effect on its elites, tearing them apart by sectarian affiliation, while the violence in Malaya eventually pushed elites together across sectarian lines and forced them to cooperate out of fear of losing everything to a class-based revolt from below. In Iraq, such consolidation has failed to emerge. Iraqi elites remain as divided as the rest of society. In the analysis, it quickly becomes clear that there are multiple, competing identities in both Iraqi and Malayan society. As circumstances changed, different identities became more salient than others, with dramatic results.

This project proceeds in two sections. The first section is the story of communal violence in both Iraq and Malaya, tracing their similar experiences of prewar fragmentation, occupation, and communal violence. It explores why, despite the presence of a foreign occupier, a unified nationalist movement failed to emerge in either case. It uses detailed historical comparisons to identify the critical junctures that led to communal violence, and finds generalizable features that explain their strikingly similar outcomes. The second section picks up chronologically where the first leaves off, charting how Malaya moved away from sectarian violence toward class struggle, and how the Malayan state eventually consolidated power in the hands of non-sectarian political parties. In this analysis, certain implications for Iraq's future become clear.

In the end, Malaya managed to escape a lengthy sectarian war as elites consolidated along class lines to oppose a communist revolt that threatened those in power, regardless of their ethnicity. While it is too soon to tell whether Iraq will manage to avoid an extended civil war, the analysis in the second section makes it clear that it will probably not be able to do so in the way Malaya did. Class issues are no longer as salient in the post-Soviet era, class has never been as important in Iraq as it was in Malaya, and the ongoing sectarian violence continually reinforces sectarian identity in a vicious endogenous cycle. The comparison does, however, provides important implications for how we think about Iraq's future, and demonstrates what approaches probably will not work.

This project explains the relationship between group conduct, the decision- making calculus of the group elite, and the process of mobilizing suicide bombers. By focusing on the Lebanese case, this paper will identify how the material and symbolic interests used to justify and propagate suicide bombings, affect the conduct and decision making calculus of the political groups. Evidence suggests that there is a significant group level variation in religious vs. secular affiliation that explains variation in conduct. Analyses of group discourse will be used to explain causes, conduct and consequences of suicide bombing. Statistical methods are used together with content analysis and interviews to identify the circumstances under which political groups use suicide-bombings.