Terminology
The use of disruptive techniques to make a political point, or to change government policy.
What is a contention?
Which lens: Weak states don't have enough resources to stop insurgencies or prevent civil war outbreak.
What is structuralist lens?
A qualitative method that traces changes over time in one case.
What is within-case comparison?
The term to describe the quality that a given theory, hypothesis, or finding has of being applicable to a wide number of cases.
What is generalizability?
States that cannot control territory, eliminate internal rivals, deliver public goods, and manage the economy will not be able to prevent revolutions.
What is state capacity model?
The use of violence by nonstate actors against non-military targets for the purpose of reducing civilian support for one or another official policy or to bring about some major political change.
What is terrorism?
Which lens: Contact between different cultural groups leads to conflict.
What is culturalist lens?
Two or more countries are very similar but they have different outcomes on the dependent variable.
What is Most Similar Systems design?
Type of critique: Terrorism needs a stronger conceptual definition. If we don't know what it is, then we won't be able to properly study it.
What is theoretical critique?
Economic development, industrialization, education, and urbanization can increases between group inequality, which increases the risk of ethnic conflict.
What is modernization theory?
A belief that all institutions and values are essentially meaningless and that the only redeeming value is violence
What is nihilism?
Which lens: Ideas like dualism and millenarianism can make contention more likely.
What is culturalist lens?
A research design in which we compare cases that differ with respect to multiple factors but in which the outcome is the same.
What is Most Different Systems?
Type of critique that says a research design uses invalid operationalizations to measure the variables.
What is a methodological critique?
Leaders choose to activate salience of the ethnic division, which constructs an ethnic conflict.
What is Political / Elites / Constructivism / Top-down (Rationalist) model?
Military techniques designed to produce ongoing stalemate, usually employed in situations of asymmetric military capability.
What are guerrilla tactics?
Which lens: Economic modernization causes uneven development, which leads to ethnic conflict.
What is structuralist lens?
A statistical analysis examines survey data drawn from interviews with 1,200 people who had participated in the Tahrir Square demonstrations.
What is large-n quantitative design?
Type of critique: The strategic model makes too many inaccurate predictions. Terror group behavior does not match the predictions of this model.
What is empirical critique?
Rational organizations use violence strategically to achieve goals. Groups will try to peacefully pursue political goals and will only resort to violence if they are blocked.
What is strategic model?
The state of having or feeling that one has less than members of one's reference group (including one's own group over time).
Which lens: Leaders frame a conflict as a cosmic war when they want to lock in the conflict and prevent it from ever being resolved.
What is rationalist lens?
A measure of the degree of ethnic diversity in a country which represents the probability that two randomly selected individuals belong to different ethnic groups.
What is Ethnolinguistic Fractionalization (ELF)?
The term to describe the conditions or range of cases for which an argument works
What are scope conditions?
Terrorists are rationally seeking social connection.
What is the social connection / natural systems model (Abrahms 2008)?
The engagement of individuals and groups in sustained contention.
What is mobilization?
When Posner uses "size of the group relative to its arena" to explain varying levels of ethnic competition, which theoretical lens is he using?
Structuralist because he is basing his model on the demographic structure of each country.
When Juergensmeyer compares terrorist groups from six different world religions that all use the same rhetoric to justify their violence, which research design is he using?
Most different systems because they are all from different religious backgrounds, but the outcome (terrorist violence justified using dualism) is the same.
Term to describe the testability of a model or hypothesis. A good hypothesis could be logically demonstrated to be false by evidence.
What is falsifiability?
Honor/shame ideals may increase the likelihood of terrorist violence
What is cultural values model?
According to some scholars, a type of nationalism that closely resembles civic nationalism, in that membership is fundamentally determined by where one is born or where one resides rather than one's ancestry.
What is territorial nationalism?
Which lens: Information from social media shaped how citizens made individual decisions about participating in Arab Spring protests.
What is rationalist lens?
a method of comparing alternative models by finding a question for which they give different answers.
What are critical experiments?
Type of critique: This study chooses cases with a focus on effects rather than causes, which can lead to inaccurate conclusions about correlation or causation.
What is methodological critique?
Cultural differences are fixed. Contact between different groups leads to ethnic conflict.
What is Societal / Perennialism/ Primordialism / Bottom-up / contact theory?