Several speakers at this time are speaking about the future.
Several also speak about civil military relations. We also have speakers who cover regions of the world.
In particular, the conflict regions gets sufficient area.
Last week we heard about UN peacekeeping and the deployment of peacekeeping, but this is rather different.
This is a more robust approach to say and in particular looking at the Caucasus.
And it's like I said, if you see if you don't really know, first of all, if you talk to people fully, the Harvard Kennedy School now.
Since 2012, the Islamic school government is very difficult because the list of your great accolades.
But amongst them we should mention that she was originally a soldier.
So she's a soldier scholar and is now a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Minorities at Risk Advisory Board, Responsibility Task Force, Carnegie Foundation.
New York is a Fulbright scholarship in Norway, which has been the focus of our day.
And a colleague discovered this reception bridge in Bonn. So this is very much a field of design amongst all of us.
There are no books on this problem of war and religion,
but also about populations and minorities and those who are oppressed wouldn't read the full list
because it would take too long silence to say that this is connected to your most recent article,
The Denial and Punishment of the as if others will affect the success of counterinsurgency with your support,
which you will appear to have during this research.
Monica, thank you so much for coming because this is the living link between Frontex and anyway that we very much people are doing well.
Thank you and thank you for coming.
So as Rob said, this is sort of an ongoing project that I'm doing with a brilliant graduate student at Harvard, Uri Zuckoff,
and we've already published one article in JPR that sort of looks at counterinsurgency and counterinsurgency tactics by states,
in this case Moscow, the Russian government, the Ministry of Defence.
And what is the best way to sort of counterinsurgency given the tactics that they use?
So that first piece has been published. It's out in the Journal of Peace Research.
You can go ahead and read it. And in that piece, we didn't differentiate by insurgent type.
We just assumed that all the insurgents were motivated with the same sorts of ideas and ideologies.
We didn't really differentiate the target sets, what they said that they were doing this paper, we do that.
So we're looking at and we have data that's refined enough to say that was a religiously
inspired operation versus this was more of a nationalist inspired operation.
And I'll get into the data in a second. I don't think this is working, so I'll just put it in the keyboard.
So the central question to this paper is, does the motivations of insurgents matter for how an insurgency involved evolved?
They think about Syria. We have just secular actors, nationalist actors trying to defend against a corrupt state, but we also have Islamists active.
And the question is, is should we be thinking about as a Western community, as outsiders, about targeting them differently?
Mali, you had a case where you had the Tuareg national self-determination movement,
much to their chagrin, aligning themselves with Islamists and regretting it.
And so the key question is we're trying to figure out is, does it matter?
So if you're trying to counter the Mali insurgency, are there particular villages where you go in there?
There's a nationalist insurgency. Do you use different tactics?
If we're talking about force, we're actually using talking about use of force, not necessarily concessions at this point.
And in this case, it makes sense because Moscow actually doesn't give a lot of concessions.
Anybody familiar with how they engage insurgents, particularly in the caucuses,
and then do they respond differently to different kinds of counterinsurgency operations?
And Moscow did make some strategic or tactical differences, depending upon how you define that, sir, do you have particular definitions?
But Moscow does choose when it has an operation with there's a violent episode.
How to counter that? Some cases it does nothing. It lets it pass.
Other cases it goes in and it will cordon off an entire village.
And we talk about that in the first paper as denial.
So they actually set up roadblocks and they do not allow people to the best that they can do that in and out,
because the idea is you isolate the insurgents or they actually have enough intelligence and they have pretty good intelligence,
pretty good intel coming from both sides. And they go in and they pick out somebody.
So they pick out Sir Hugh and they say, you've done perpetrated this operation.
They threatened this family. In that case, they're actually punishing an individual or a set of individuals that they know is part of a cell.
And Moscow knows this, and you can actually choose which operation is going to do some cases.
Its decision is constrained by the forces on the ground, how close it is to a federal base or whether it's close to a police base.
We do. This is a very deep. Complicated statistical analysis.
We actually have data on all of that. So, Rob, I'll do the books for you just to explain how I came to this.
So this is three of my books. Would you explain where I came from and why I got to this topic?
So my first book was on The Geography of Ethnic Violence. And you can see here this is a map of the Caucasus.
And in that book I was concerned about under what conditions is ethnic conflict?
So you have a society riven by ethnic cleavages. When will you get violence?
And so there I did a statistical analysis of all ethnic groups worldwide,
looked at their settlement patterns and their relationships to the central government to try and figure out,
does it matter whether they're urban or rural?
It turns out urban minorities tend not to rebel if they're part of a broader sort of imperial kind of state.
That's not the case for rural. So you think about the wars of former Yugoslavia.
It's pretty much rural areas that sort of were up for.
But then I did in-depth case studies and actually in that case, there was a situation in which Moscow negotiated, and that was with the Tatars.
Tatarstan was in literally parts when the Soviet Union was dissolved in Kazakhstan, declared that I just want a greater autonomy.
And Moscow was actually willing to negotiate with thousand. And we ended up not having violence there.
Not the case when dealing with the Chechens. Moscow wouldn't even really meet with them at all.
It really put down the line and said, absolutely not. So that was the first book.
Then my second book was looking at Civil War Termination, and there I was interested in how do you get a durable peace?
And again, looking at sort of the force structure and the security sector of a country after war ends, it turns out to be a critical factor.
And unfortunately, if you look at most negotiated settlement, although it may be a part of the negotiated settlement,
DDR, demobilisation, disarmament and reintegration are usually always part of it.
But the actual reconstitution, the true security sector reform of the military tends not to happen.
They may be part of the provisions, but then it's not implemented.
And so in that book, I looked at all kinds of civil war settlements from victory for negotiated settlement,
and learned a lot about how different sides think about the use of force within the state and
sort of the commitments that each side needs to make to one another in order to feel secure.
Right. Tonight, sort of key forms of fake ceasefires and stalemates which actually turn out to be more stable than negotiated settlements.
And as military types, you understand why you're less likely to go after somebody if they're armed, whereas a negotiated settlement,
one side usually will disarm or made sort, and the other side is that side to abrogate an agreement,
which is what happened in Sudan when going couldn't.
And then the third book was on the global resurgence of religion, investigating whether indeed there is a global resurgence of religion.
And then sort of what are the dynamics of that?
And in that book we had that the co-author, Dr. Timothy Shaw of Georgetown, Danso, taught at Notre Dame.
And in that book, we have a couple of case studies on civil wars and terrorism.
And what's important and what matters for this topic today is it turns out that religious actors are transnational actors,
do have networks and ties and ideas and institutions that flow across borders,
making it more difficult for states to sort of control what's happening within their borders.
And so going back to my first book, two things.
The first thing is I didn't differentiate ethnicity, meaning that I treated it the way most people or scholars treat it as a one category.
There could be differences in language, differences in race, differences in religion or differences in culture.
I didn't bother to unpack it. I just assumed that their ethnic differences from the centre versus the periphery, that was enough.
And I was irritated me because anybody who knows the point of politics in Chechnya in the first war,
it really was a national self-determination struggle. Right.
But after 96, when they sued for peace in general because of peace, Yeltsin was not very happy about it.
Basically, the Chechens won that war from 96 to 99.
That's when you started seeing religion coming in much more into Chechnya,
in part because it was an anarchic situation and some resources were coming in, ideas were flowing.
And so from 96 to 99, you started seeing religion take on a much greater role.
Well, I wasn't able to explain that because I didn't bother in my first book to unpack that.
I could explain other things, but I couldn't explain that. And so I have always wanted to do that.
And so that's what I'm doing in this research is really trying to understand, do different types of motivations matter for violence?
And I'm talking large scale violence.
And so I've been working on trying to really understand the core difference between an insurgent, a person, a citizen.
Ask me if I were motivated by nationalism.
If I say, you know, I did defend the US Constitution, I raised my hand, I was a patriot.
I wasn't necessarily fighting over American. What does that mean?
What happens is that you're fighting for some sort of imagined community.
There may or may not be blood ties. And the idea is that you are going to sacrifice yourself individually for a group.
And there is no guarantee that we as an individual is going to benefit from that.
It just means that my country, my nation is going to live on as a result of my sacrifice.
That's there. And there's something good about that, about my nation that I'm willing to fight and die for.
Moreover, you tend to be nationalism is within a confined territory, so you tend to be fighting over a particular set of lands or territories.
When you're fighting a long national story, you're thinking about fighting along national lines.
So immortality comes in, right? But it comes in for the group, for the nation.
It's not the case for religious actors. So if you read the work of Mark Juergens Meyer, Jessica Stern,
there really is a sense among some and I'm throwing that these are ideal types and being a very, very new person here.
There is a sense that the person believes if they really are fighting and dying for religious tenets, that they're going to have to somehow be safe.
Go to heaven here, implying that the Abrahamic traditions, Judaism, Islam and Christianity,
where there's a sense of heaven, and it turns out that Judaism actually heaven and salvation don't play a larger role.
But for Islam and for Christians, there is a sense of you're going to go to heaven and that you as an individual, your sacrifice,
if you really believe that you're doing this for God, for some divine purpose,
for some presidential reason, that your individual salvation will be there.
So you believe that it's not the case. The other thing is that attachment to a particular territory.
We know that there's Jerusalem.
I've done a lot of work in Jerusalem, but the idea of when you're part of a religious community, that's different from a national community.
Is that a true definition of a church is where your fellow members are?
So the Catholic Church is actually global? Yes.
There's Rome. Yes, there things that people say. But the real church is really where your members are.
And so the attachment to a particular land or circumscribed land is broader than it is for nations.
So you don't have this sort of self-contained. And we your united prophesies that this matters for how expansive a given fight
is if you're countering religious insurgents versus nationalists or insurgents.
So nationalist, we argue, would tend to be or tend to more readily look like defensive localised fights within a circumscribed territory.
And anybody who's looked in the history of Europe, we can we will pick on the Hungarians and Hungarians here.
You know, when the Hungarians pull out a map, they are always going to have a map that's the most expansive back to the 17th and 18th centuries.
They don't go to the 20th century. And it's because nationals are trying that they have a sense of what the land is, but it's still sort of located.
There's still a focal point about what constitutes the Hungarian homeland and most nations.
There's a couple of exceptions. The Roma don't have a homeland, but we know about them precisely because they're an exception.
So why Islamist insurgents are not picking on Islam.
And in fact, I've written another whole book in an article on why I think it's Islam.
I think it's where Muslim societies are in their sort of political development trajectory.
And we can I can give you that whole argument about because Christianity back in the 40,
50, 60 to 70 centuries was politicised and instrumentalized for political reasons.
And we just seem to be in a phase or a historical period right now where Muslim societies
are trying to figure out what the proper role of religion is within their societies.
And there are some interpretations that are more extremist.
And we can talk about sort of the reinterpretation of jihad, like YouTube and the idea that it's no longer an internal struggle,
but external struggle and individuals wrong has an individual responsibility to go out and defend their who.
So I've done a lot of work on civil wars and it turns out that most civil wars, upwards of three quarters, if you look at religiously inspired,
religiously based civil wars,
and that's where the combatants actually identify with the different faiths within the war or the fighting over religion.
So you could stand there was a fight after the Soviet Union collapsed.
Whether it was going to be a Sharia law, actually, Sharia law was going to be the main rule of the land.
Whereas the war, the former Yugoslavia, it's still debated among scholars the degree to which religion was central.
I think most scholars, if you had to really weigh in, just sort of a meta analysis,
there's a sense it was more much more peripheral than it was, let's say, in Afghanistan or in the Yucatan.
But if you so so there's peripheral and central. If you look at both types, nine out of ten of them involve Islam as one of the combatants, one side.
And then two thirds of them are the ones where it's between sort of Muslims and Christians involved as Muslims as one side.
And then if you look at terrorism, we know this itself. Muhammad has probably done the definitive study on this, broadly speaking, final piece,
done the work on the suicide terrorism all about denies religion with anything to do with it.
You know, a number of discussion point ones about it.
If you look at it since 1981, most of the suicide terrorism episodes that we've witnessed, it is people who are inspired by Salafi jihadism.
So this idea that you have an obligation to defend against outsiders, not only infidels, but apostates people,
do you think that fellow Muslims who don't accept your interpretation of scripture and then if you look at jihadi suicide missions,
most of them are committed by Islamists of the Salafi variant.
So types of religious violence are just like we didn't really differentiating aggregate different kinds of ethnicity and ethnic violence.
We didn't we were a little sloppy. Still is a field that feels like accumulation of knowledge we're getting there.
Thomas Hegghammer, I think, was the first person to differentiate different kinds of religious violence to get our head around it.
So there's the nationalist separatist. So this would be Chechnya after 99, right,
where you really had people sort of trying to split off because they some of the Chechens felt as if they needed to be separate from Moscow.
Then you have the pan religious. Some of the Chechens of Bucyrus would be sort of the national separatist, the more moderate era.
It would be a more he's a pan jihadist after pictures of these guys,
a pampered artist who thinks that all the Caucasus should be part of a caliphate that extends this arc across.
And then there's a revolutionary. I see these guys as vigilantes.
So these are the guys in the street, the kind of guys who are throwing acid in young women's faces.
They're trying to correct behaviour, they're social, they're vigilantes.
And so, again, looking at the data, we're trying to get a sense of if Moscow is facing different kinds of insurgents from a religious cut,
from the religious law, what should they be doing and how should they be thinking about combating them?
So again, sort of back to the introduction,
we think we hypothesise in this paper that the basis of motivation may influence the strategy of the actors and influence their priorities.
So what are they trying to achieve?
Are they going to go after federal structures or are they going to go to a bathhouse where there's wine and drinking?
Right. And so which one are they going to do?
So, national interest, national separatist, they're more likely to attack police stations, government officials, assassinations, that sort of thing.
But if they're more of this vigilante type,
then they're more likely to go after where they see sort of moral corruption happening and attacks like here,
the national cyber attack, Moscow, or anybody that they see as Representative Moscow or a proxy government that they think is sort of helping Moscow.
PAN-ISLAMIC They'll attack Western Muslim transgressors.
And then the revolutionary, the vigilantes will attack fellow Muslims, that they'll go after the apostates rather than the infidels.
So the empirical questions. I'm a barefoot empiricist. I love data and I like data to help me to adjudicate theories and I participate.
So that's why this paper is fun for me,
because we can actually go in and ask these questions and then sort of let the data adjudicate whether you agree with the interpretations.
It's different, but we have a number of empirical questions that we just did not know the answers to.
So one, how fit all does religion shape the insurgency?
What does it look like?
If you can really take and just say this was an insurgent attack that was based in religious motivation, does it look differently than other kinds?
Didn't know that question before we started the research. Do they fight differently from those with more traditional aims?
And here I'm talking about nationalists, what we think of most civil wars or insurgencies.
And then do they again select different types of strategies, targets and respond to different types of incentives?
So are they more likely to respond differently with selective incentives?
So the targeting sort of the punishment strategy, it turns out,
is do not like it versus and but it turns out that selective sense of punishment of nationalists works better.
And I think somehow it carries them better. And then the local global dimension of the fight.
Is it the case that these are local fights that sort of have this overlay for greater legitimacy?
Or is there really sort of a global pattern or global dynamics that are influencing?
And we have some data that show that indeed, actually, among the religious insurgents,
there does seem to be a connection to things happening globally or at least beyond the borders of the caucuses.
So here this is Bob Pape, although this looks like a straw man argument,
I think you guys agree Bob Gates argument is a strong argument, that religion has nothing to do with suicide terrorist campaigns.
And I just don't you know, I think Assad my Hagedorn has written a really beautiful rebuttal, Bob, to say you're right on some.
But the truth is there are many in many cases in which your argument that the religious dimensions are incredibly important for us to understand them.
But the point is, is that Bob's argument is that all violence is local, it's about the local occupier.
And if you remember when he published his first piece in the American Political Science Review, al Qaeda was not even part of the data set from 911.
His involved scratching his head saying, oh, how do you how do I explain that?
And what he ended up saying was that al Qaeda sees all of the Middle East as its homeland, which you could make that argument.
But the problem is there's a lot of al Qaeda affiliates that don't necessarily see the Middle East as as as reminiscent of that.
So this is one argument that's out there in the literature that all politics, all violence is local, all politics is local.
But then there's another argument.
And again, I think Assad has done a really nice job on this, but there are other people Kilcullen sort of marries the two,
saying that there is they say that because there's a local or global sort of connection.
But it's obvious that no, in this modern era, especially after 911.
So what's nice about the piece is going to be through his book is that he says people can see prior to 2000, prior to 1995,
but after 1995, there was a real shift where there seemed to be sort of this global community emerging to fight for global ideals.
And so the idea was that there's a linking of leadership, personnel, resources, ideas across different fights.
And so nobody has really adjudicated these two arguments empirically.
And that's what we're doing is a very simple exercise that we're trying to do.
Who who's more right and who's more wrong? It's not black and white.
We actually in the paper, we end up concluding that Kilcullen is probably more right than both.
And so, again, we're looking at the caucuses, the north caucuses, and pretty much the action happens in Chechnya.
But it does start emanating out after 97, 98 into Dagestan and then Russia.
And now we're actually seeing some of the violence going deeper into the Russian heartland, including in two, by the way, moderate Tatarstan.
We're now starting to see moderate imams being targeted in Tatarstan,
which is sort of it's a very tragic I told you I was going to show you some faces.
So we've had Boris Yeltsin restore peace, swiping power from Gorbachev back in the late 1980s,
early nineties, followed by Vladimir Putin, of course, the current president.
This is do die of who was the first president, who was the first leader of the Chechen independence movement.
He was an air force general, secular but pious. He was an Islamist.
He was a muslim who he had faith but kept it private to himself.
He was actually called back or called to Chechnya out of, I think it was Latvia with his unit.
And so we really he had been watching the independence movements in the.
And the Chechen independence movement asked him to lead it.
And so he did end up becoming the leader of the Chechen independence movement.
He ended up getting killed on the battlefield, committed national strike.
He died on the battlefield. Moscow killed him. He was replaced by a sort of more pious man, but still believe that religion should be kept private.
Was not interested in sort of imposing Sharia law throughout Chechnya because remember,
a large portion of the population is still Russian speaking or ethnic Russian.
It wasn't all Chechens. And on top of that, Chechnya, these espouse a particular kind of Islam, which is Sufi and very local.
And so it's very controversial.
And this idea of bringing in a Wahhabi Salafist Islam to a region that actually abides by a tradition, Islamic tradition, that's quite different.
But they tried.
And the guy who sort of initiated it was this guy, CIA, who had ran against McConnell for presidency and lost and was pretty upset about it.
He was not pleased for having to play second fiddle. And so he's the one that sort of really ramped up.
And so I had gone to Moscow and interviewed a lot of people who were associated with him to find
out who was the committed nationalist and to ask the question in sitting in the interim hotel,
which I think is now gone. And so was he a committed nationalist, or was did you really think that religion should be part of the public arena?
And his closest interlocutors could not answer that question. Most of them thought that you probably you did want political power.
He did run for president of Chechnya, but he was also religious and and deeply religious.
And I say that not really understanding what that meant for him.
I can't get in his mind, but it was a question mark. But in any event, he used religion, right?
In one of my articles to talk about opening, why we start opening, we use religion to challenge.
MISHLOVE And the thought of starting screaming to Putin, say, the Islamists, the Wahhabis are coming.
I need your help. And Moscow would not listen similar to what they were doing the early nineties.
They would not negotiate with the Chechens. So what did they do to kill them?
So moderate, right? Killed him. He ends up getting killed.
And so now we're stuck with this guy, Doku Umarov, who is trying to establish an Islamic caliphate across the Caucasus region.
And Umarov really does.
I have an interview about him, but his statements, if you go to the Kept Cause website, you can see clearly that they really do see themselves.
And he is the leader of a global jihadist enterprise.
All right. So why are the North caucuses a diversity of cases?
So we've got multiple republics, multiple regions and lots of data.
Moreover, we have variation across the region in terms of violence.
Some villages are highly implicated. Of course, Grozny is the heart of it all, but some say the heart of it all.
And then we have a variety of geographic socioeconomic factors, levels of unemployment.
One of the most common arguments stuff is these are just men who don't have anything else to do, you know?
So this is an opportunity structure so that they can go and fight.
But we so we can control for that. And then, of course, Moscow has, you know,
perpetrator where develop this narrative that this is sort of the heart or a heart of the global jihadist struggle,
and that what they're fighting is global jihadis. And so we sort of question that.
Is it the case? It might be the case. And actually there's some evidence to that, but it's not as strong as Moscow would have us believe.
And then you have locals and actually, Medvedev, when he came in,
he did actually say that a lot of this is locally driven and he helped develop a lot of Chechen
infrastructure and roads rebuilding it after the the obliteration in 1999 and following.
But the other thing is some people stress the local grievances more so the data.
So this is all episodes of violence is reported from 2000 to 2012 is 31,000 reported episodes.
So you can do a lot of you can play and really run a lot of different controls.
There were 9200 episodes of rebel initiated violence.
So we know that the rebels went in and they bombed the Republican House, but they would go into a federal police checkpoint.
Right. And then the government had taken about 23,000 responses or counter responses or attacks.
It's it's memorial, which is one of the most respected human rights organisations in Russia,
collected all these data and coded them into reports that we then could extract and analyse,
and they always gave the village name, the date, the time.
And what's really striking, we think some of these insurgents really didn't watch too much Hollywood movies,
is they often declare why they're doing what they're doing.
They say why they're doing it. And so we have some reports where they say, you know, you're all sitting here thinking,
why on this glorious afternoon, if we come back again, we're going to do this again.
And so the reports, a good number of the reports, we actually do know why the insurgents are doing what they're doing or they've
been captured and memorial has gotten hold of the jail records for the people.
So the reports have all it's it's the wonderful data set from that perspective is terrible
because the topic but it's a wonderful data set from that perspective and then they're geo coded.
So one of the questions we're interested in is the spatial distribution of violence.
And so we know exactly where pinpointing where each villages and we can see a village.
Why had it not violent episode do we see it right next door and visit Rosie or does it go to Village D over there?
And it turns out with the Islamists actually is more likely to go to Village D, whereas for the nationalists, it's more likely to go to the.
So the actors there described or self-described, they say who they are sometimes with terms such as Muslim, Salafist, Mujahideen or Wahhabi.
So again, we're looking for religious inspiration. What do you see you're fighting for?
And then, are there terrorist attacks, hostage taking, kidnapping, firefights, ambushes?
So we're looking at the actions and then the targets.
And so in order for us to have coded as an episode of Islamist violence and how to have one in each of those three categories,
so it's pretty we're pretty confident that we're doing that.
And again, for us, we said if a village experienced one episode of Violence over then has done it,
then in a month, then they were coded as a one in our analysis.
So again, I was telling you about the sauna. It's like I said, I think they watch too much Hollywood TV.
So to say, if we once again learn that drunkenness and debauchery, I mean, it's just great language take place here, we will leave anyone alive.
And so there's sort of warning saying we control the town. This is a social vigilante, a moral vigilante.
And then the group left the sauna without doing any harm. But the next time they come back and they move from a molotov cocktail at the at the sauna.
All right. So the key findings and wrapping it up, although I have some interesting data to show to support each of these key findings,
um, I'm going to run through each one of them.
So it turns out one of the key findings is that this violence overall is really a small proportion of the violence.
If you read the rhetoric coming out of Moscow, erm 97 let's say,
although in 96 they already started issuing concern about is when it's coming into the region,
but at least after 97, 98 you would think that all of the violence is, is in this,
but it varies in range anywhere from about, you know, seven, it matches 90%.
That's the most expansive definition we use. The intermediate is we're pretty confident that we that's actually capturing what we think of.
But it ranges from 3% to 17% of all violence, which means the vast majority of violence in the region is, if you want to think about it,
religiously inspired versus political, national separatist, get off our backs, get out of our territory.
All right. So most of the violence is not religiously inspired.
However, the violence that is religiously inspired is small, but it's increasing and it has been increasing over time and again.
It is there is evidence we have data showing that there are jihadis, outsiders, foreigners coming in, tracking that over time.
But you can see that over time the Islamist violence has been increasing over time.
And then you can see where most of what's happening in lighting in here is terrible.
So you can't really see. But Chechnya gets the bulk of it in terms of the both kinds of violence.
And then the Islamist is more contained in the Dagestan in the Chechen region.
But it has been spreading over time. And this is the number of events of 50, 100, 100, 200.
Um. All right.
Islamist attacks are more indiscriminate.
So one of the hypotheses is that if you really think that you're going to die and then other people are apostates or infidels,
you don't want to die and you don't want to take it out with you.
And so some of my earlier research showed that civilians in religiously inspired civil wars tend to suffer more deaths,
higher civilian casualty counts in religious civil wars.
And we find that here and this is percentage, the 43%.
Let's stick with the intermediate 36% of all Islamist inspired violent attacks kill civilians versus 29%.
And that's statistically significant. So if you're in so what it means to us is, is they're going after softer targets.
They're going after places where there's more civilians, cafes.
So you're sitting there having a nice cup of coffee, espresso with your friends, and somebody comes and you're more likely to be a target.
And Islamist violence, whereas nationalists, there's a sense that they circumscribe it.
They're a little bit more careful about what they're targeting people around them.
It's a tighter circle. And then again, Islamist violence is more deadly.
Another finding from some earlier work I had done in that.
Religiously inspired civil wars are more deadly overall, not just towards civilians, but overall.
And they tend to last longer. They last about a year and a half longer. On average.
This is all averages.
And you can see that religiously inspired attacks really result in fatalities 36% of the time, whereas non-religious only 26% of the time.
So they're more effective. I mean, if their job how is that any more conditional if their job is to kill,
it turns out the Islamists are more effective in doing that and that that follows from sort of the indiscriminate nature they're more likely.
So this is trying to get at the difference between nationalism and being tied to a particular land.
And indeed, if you look, Chechnya has seen 60% of all attacks that we think is conducted by nationalists and 45% by Islamists.
But what's interesting is the majority of Islamist attacks did not take place in Chechnya.
It took in the rest of the region as well has been suffering from Islamist attacks as well.
So Chechnya has bore the brunt of this, which makes sense is where the big push for national self-determination independence took place.
But it is more widespread beyond the broader region.
And the Islamist is is more widespread than the the nationalists.
And then here this is actually looking from you have a village and then we wanted to see where did the next attack occur, how far away.
And it's similar to the data about more expansive for the religious violence.
The Islamist was more expansive, so there was 133 kilometres.
So you imagine going and attacking a liquor store or a police station appearance and this made it clear why they're doing it.
They then drive about 133 km and perpetrate their next attack, whereas the nationalists stay put,
they only go 50 kilometres, 60 kilometres, so an hour away versus 2 hours away.
And again, this one supports the idea that nationalists are more self contained or they stay more self contained.
And then again, this is back to trying to adjudicate Magog Adam from hey, thinking that Colin is writing a secret.
Colin is right and looking at the relationship to mean number of international suicide attacks.
So this is using, um, the, the, um,
the suicide database put together by the US government and tracking it to the violence episodes that we have in our data dataset.
And you can see that the ism is violence more so tracks to global suicide attacks so and so the question is,
is is there a sense of camaraderie when you witness a suicide attack?
But this relationship, you can just see by the numbers, 16% to 40%.
They're not as large as you know.
They're still statistically significant, but there's not a huge relationship there, lending more support to the idea that it's more local.
It's not the case for holidays. I was really shocked that actually this is so tied to the religious calendar.
So Ron has in or has some interesting work really trying to track battles and wars based on what he sees.
His thinking is, is if you're really doing God's divine work,
then you're going to be favoured by God during Rosh Hashanah or, you know, seven days or something.
Right. And so he I think he we sent this paper to said, Monica, did you look at the religious calendar?
Well, here it is. And actually, it's actually pretty tightly connected.
And what's really interesting is that the target based ones, that they're the ones that those are sort of the vigilante guys.
They're the bad guys on the Hawks.
I mean, they go out and there are you know, you could make a secular, very practical argument for why they're doing it.
They're off from work. Right. But I don't know.
I think the idea the fact that it goes from the expanded definition of what constitutes an nuisance all the way down to the
guys that we really think are doing it for the reasons that there's it seems to lend support that the more intense you are,
the more that the religious calendar are you, the more it would be a theology of underpinning what you're doing.
And then this is back to sort of we're looking at this is a really complicated way.
But is it the case that if you go in you attack individuals with intelligence,
which is more effective against, um, know against Islamist than nationals.
And it turns out that it's less effective against nationalists but more effective against Islamists, meaning that the nationalist,
you can cow them more easily, you can actually nationalist, you can fight them more easily,
that you can actually get them to sort of stop the violence.
The Islamist, it's more difficult,
which is good news and bad news because if it is the case that we're seeing and we're seeing more Islamist violence,
the bad news is that governments are going to have a harder time fighting them.
It's worth going in and doing. Selective incentives.
Actually going after Islamist is not as effective a strategy.
So summary one of two and I'm finishing up now.
So it turns out that globally religious belief and practice are on the rise.
There's exceptions Western Europe, but only corners of Western Europe for Danes have no faith at all.
These 11% believe in God today. Um, but beyond sort of you can read the God century,
but we have lots of data on that sense and sort of people who are adhering to
religious traditions is on the rise and also pushing it into the public arena.
And then understanding the conditions under which conflicts would be framed in religious
terms is therefore critical because I have a slide show here that since the 1970s,
the proportion of civil wars that had a religious ten to them has really gone up.
And and so religious wars, they're not only increasing over time, half of all civil wars raging,
although I haven't done a count since for two years I stopped in 210, 2010, then half of all civil wars had a religious turn.
I think it's probably more now with Syria, Mali and Libya.
I mean, where are we with Libya today? And then religious wars are nastiest of all types.
Again, I already told you that they're harder on civilians. They last longer, the harder to terminate.
And by the way, they're more likely to recur. So if even if you get them ended, they're more likely to recur.
And then within that's the broad general finding within the caucuses itself.
Islamist violence is a small share. Overall, this is a really important finding.
I presented this work in Moscow. They don't care. They say they see Islamists everywhere.
But but it really is important because it really is going to call your attention to what we should do to be countering these.
And I would hope just thinking about different kinds of motivations.
We won't be so lumpen in our approach to trying to combat and combat it.
Most of the difference in sort of the targeting and the outcomes that we're witnessing is a difference in scale,
not kind, which again is very important. And you could think, well, Monica, why did you go through all this work?
Well, we actually didn't know. We really thought that the Islamists were going to be these die hard.
You absolutely can't put them down. There's some truth to that.
But it means that you're probably going to have to go even a little harder.
I hate to say that you were advocating more violence,
but and then Islamist violence does follow suicide trends more closely than nationalist or non Islamist is more geographically dispersed.
I think this is important because in a sense my looking at this sort of the play of what's happened in the Caucasus,
Moscow has sort of in some ways created a more dispersed fight than might have been the case.
And then Islamist violence is less responsive to coercion,
to this sort of selective incentive of going in and pulling somebody out and then, you know, good academic.
But this is really the Caucasus. This data are really tiresome caucuses.
And so I feel confident things about the Caucasus.
We really run the numbers and so does it hold.
And I'd be curious to have a discussion about that. If anybody knows any other wars or conflicts,
are they seeing sort of similar dynamics or do they know of any other studies that can
help us where we're starting to look at Syria and Mali because it's papers under review,
people said, how generalisable is this? I think it is, but I can't say that with any confidence at this point.
All right. Theoretical implications, motivations matter.
And we think that different kinds of bids matter.
So you watch the politics and we think that when religion enters the political arena, it can get very nasty.
And so you try to do that and then you try to control that and tamp down on that.
And then I do think the global aspects of transnational actors, such as religious actors matter.
There's interpretations of texts, and those interpretations flow over Internets.
We know about these sort of Internet ayatollahs and imams that are influencing people thousands of miles away.
And then the north caucuses, successful leads made religious bids besides was successful.
I hate to say it methodic was not now important because this interlocutor in Moscow did not listen and decided that assassination was a better option.
They were wrong. Methodic probably could have ushered in a period of peace in that region.
It was really a lost moment. And so now we're going to probably live another generation.
I mean, the violence is it's subdued.
They've put in place to be more off this young man who's basically a thug and he's put in place a police state and he's got Moscow's backing.
But but there's very little political liberty and sustained peace in the region and then variations and outcomes.
We think this is one of the clear conclusions in our paper.
But again, it's variation and count comes in scale, not in kind.
It's very important that we have to take these different kinds of motivations into account.
Policy implications. I'm at the New School of Government, the Public Schools, so I'm going to talk about the policy implications.
So Islam is disproportionately implicated in violence of all sorts, but most of the violence is directed at apostates.
As a great study done by West Point, try to wag its finger at al Qaeda.
And all its affiliates say that, you know, it is going to indicate you're trying to defend Islam.
The killing of fellow Muslims predominantly, I think, is the findings of that 85% or 90% of the victims.
And then I think that really trying to understand why a conflict escalates and thinking about our models that we use.
The security dilemma, the deterrence model. Spiral models.
Is it fear or is it greed is a combination of both. Why are the actors doing what they're doing?
So not all violence is local, but most of it is.
We actually think, again, that, you know, this is the data showing the global connections.
There are some relationships there, but they're not as strong, I think,
as a staff who would like us to believe that Bob is not completely right, it's weird.
And then we think governments are in a position to contain it, to make things worse.
So strategy matters, counterinsurgency tactics matter.
And then the first paper, turning a blind eye.
You actually do want to contain control borders. And so in the first paper, we do show that having more porous borders,
because it turns out the different republics have different border policies it actually can inflame.
So one of the policy recommendations out of the first paper, which we sort of are seeing in this paper,
is that if you want to sort of close your border and not allow jihadists, why are they there to mark up trouble?
So there we agree with Moscow or actually the republics was individual Republican leaders that decided to do border policy.
And our argument, which we think the data support is that it can only sort of locally the global jihad if there's grievances on the ground.
And, you know, in the case of the caucuses, of course, from the caucuses perspective, they think they'll be fighting a war for 300 years.
Moscow's perspective, they supposed to be fighting for a couple weeks, but this has been ongoing for a long time.
So history, you really have to understand the history and the grievances at play and respect them.
And starting in the nineties, at least we can talk about the modern Russian era.
Moscow just was not interested in listening. Medvedev seemed to be a little bit more sympathetic, but he's not there anymore.
And we've got Putin back, and Putin really does believe in an iron fist.
And so I will end it there. But I think you.