Erik Gartzke

Russia’s cyber-enabled influence operations (CEIO) have garnered significant public, academic and policy interest. 126 million Americans were reportedly exposed to Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 US election on Facebook. Indeed, to the extent that such efforts shape political outcomes, they may prove far more consequential than other, more flamboyant forms of cyber conflict. Importantly, CEIOs highlight the human dimension of cyber conflict. Focused on ‘hacking human minds’ and affecting individuals behind keyboards, as opposed to hacking networked systems, CEIOs represent an emergent form of state cyber activity. Importantly, data for studying CEIOs are often publicly available. We employ semantic network analysis (SNA) to assess data seldom analyzed in cybersecurity research – the text of actual advertisements from a prominent CEIO. We examine the content, as well as the scope and scale of the Russian-orchestrated social media campaign. While often described as ‘disinformation,’ our analysis shows that the information utilized in the Russian CEIO was generally factually correct. Further, it appears that African Americans, not white conservatives, were the target demographic that Russia sought to influence. We conclude with speculation, based on our findings, about the likely motives for the CEIO.

Spying from space has lifted the veil over the battlefield, diffusing the fog of war and lessening the utility of aggression. No one likes to be caught in the act. Homes and businesses use CCTV cameras as a deterrent against crime and to document criminal behaviour when it occurs. Something similar can be said to […]

Growing reliance on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the effort to combat militant groups has led to considerable debate about the consequences of this new mode of warfare. While critics have focused on the impact of civilian casualties on militant recruitment and the resulting use of terrorism, evidence suggests that ‘drones’ are paradoxically more effective in limiting civilian deaths compared to other forms of military force. This article demonstrates a different causal pathway connecting militant use of force to terrorist attacks. Drone strikes encourage militants to displace operations to urban centers. Confronted with unfamiliar terrain and greater government capacity, militants emphasize terrorist attacks against civilians. The article explores these dynamics in the longest running drone campaign, in Pakistan. While civilian casualties from drone strikes have no discernible effect on terrorism, strikes that kill militants increase terrorist attacks against civilians in urban settings, while failing to reduce attacks on government targets.

Much of international behavior is linked spatially and temporally. Yet, analyses of interstate interactions generally either assume independence among units or resort to technical solutions to dependence that “throw away” relevant information. We detail a more informative and satisfying approach to modeling spatial dependence from extra-dyadic linkages in alliance ties and geographical proximity as specific pathways of conflict contagion. Beyond deterrence, the purpose of alliances is to draw other parties into dyadic contests, but most existing research on conflict onset generally only considers alliance ties within an individual dyad or external intervention in the same dispute. We develop new measures on third- and fourth-party alliance ties, demonstrating direct and indirect spatial effects of alliances on conflict onset. Similarly, ongoing contests can spread geographically, but dyads in some locations are much more at risk for conflict onset than others. We provide a new theory of geographic “inbetweenness” in conflict and show that dyads involving specific locations and ties to the ongoing conflict are much more likely to see dispute onset, even accounting for other purely dyadic factors. Beyond the intrinsic interest in the impacts of extra-dyadic position and alliances on conflict, our spatial approach can be applied more broadly to other extra-dyadic ties.

In a recent example, ^{Tomz and Weeks (2013)} demonstrate experimentally that subjects in the United States and the United Kingdom are less willing to advocate attacks against democracies than against non-democratic countries. Popular preferences might thus account for the democratic peace — the observation that democracies seldom fight each other.

New technologies such as Remotely Piloted Vehicles (RPVs) make it possible to remove human beings from direct involvement in combat. How will this evolving dynamic affect the practice and purposes of political violence? Will conflict become ‘costless’ in human terms as machines replace people on the front lines or will the logic of war continue to call for human sacrifice? While considerable attention has been devoted to the role of technology in transforming warfare, little is known about how new modes of combat will affect established motives for using force. I explore these political dimensions of new modes of conflict, drawing three basic conclusions. First, to the degree that substituting machines for humans lowers the costs for fighting, conflict will become more frequent, but less definitive. Second, in a reversal of previous trends, battlefield automation promises disproportionately to revitalise ground elements of military organisations. Finally, regrettably, new technologies should weaken inhibitions against targeting civilians.

Should the U.S. respond with military means to a limited Russian incursion in the Baltics? This paper explores Western attitudes towards such a hypothetical grey zone crisis. Using survey experiments and crisis simulations we find considerable reluctance to use military tools in order to support a Baltic ally, and surprisingly little variation across the audiences. The underlying reluctance to get the U.S. involved in an armed conflict with Russia in the hopes that such acquiescence may help preserve global stability indicates that the conflict in Ukraine only had a fundamentally limited impact on Western strategic thought on deterring Russia.

Scholars interested in researching nuclear security are increasingly expressing the fear that the “important questions” have already been answered. At the same time, recent studies highlight the potential for major limitations on the ability to conduct casual inference on nuclear proliferation in particular, suggesting perhaps that we know much less than was previously believed. Although recognizing these challenges, this article argues that there remain ample opportunities to conduct innovative scholarship on questions of nuclear security. New nuclear challenges bring fresh opportunities for the next generation of research on topics including limited nuclear war; nuclear nonproliferation diplomacy; emerging technology, weapons proliferation and strategic stability; nuclear modernization and arms races; and many other issues. More precise theory, new data, and improved methods of inference also allow researchers to revisit and possibly resolve persistent debates. Although the problems confronting research on nuclear security are serious, they can be addressed. In sum, the questions in this field are so consequential that they deserve the best available analytical attention, even if the resulting answers are not perfect.

Studies of regime type and war show that democracies tend to win the wars they fight, but questions remain about why this is the case. A simple, if underappreciated, explanation for democratic success is that democracies fight alongside larger and more powerful coalitions. Coalition partners bring additional material capabilities and may also provide intangible benefits to the war effort, such as increased legitimacy or confidence. Democracies may also find it less costly to join coalitions, as democratic war aims may be easier to apportion among the victors without diluting the spoils. Evaluating our hypotheses in a sample of all wars (or all militarized disputes) during the period 1816–2000, we find that democracies fight alongside larger coalitions and that states fighting alongside larger coalitions are more likely to win major contests. Coalition size subsumes most (and in some specifications all) of the direct effect of regime type on victory.

Researchers have increasingly sought to identify the social repercussions of an evolving climate. Several influential studies claim that climate change is responsible for increases in conflict, while other research finds no such evidence. Relating human-caused changes in the climate to conflict poses a basic endogeneity problem, though: accepting that industrial activity is responsible for altering the climate implies that human agency is indirectly involved in the impact of the climate on conflict. Specifically, industrial activity is closely tied to climate change and to rising economic development, the latter generally being accepted as a determinant of reductions in conflict. In this letter, we discuss this endogeneity problem, outline possible shortcomings for empirical research if this problem is not addressed, and propose a research strategy that might eventually help to overcome it effectively.