Papers
Why Fight? Examining Self-Interested vs. Communally-Oriented Motivations for Palestinian Rebellion
Forthcoming, Security Studies, December 2009
Why do individuals participate in weak-against-strong resistance, terror or insurgency? Drawing on rational choice theory, many claim that individuals join insurgent organizations for self-interested reasons, seeking status, money, protection, or rewards in the afterlife. Another line of research, largely ethnographic and social network based, suggests that prospective fighters are driven by social identity—they join out of an allegiance to communal values, norms of reciprocity, and an orientation towards process rather than outcome.
This project tested these two lines of argument against each other by directly linking values orientations in a refugee camp to professed willingness to participate in resistance or rebellion in two different contexts. Professed willingness to participate in resistance, and especially in violent rebellion, is positively correlated with communal orientation and negatively correlated with self-enhancement values. The strength of correlation grows—negatively for self-enhancement and positively for communal orientations—as anticipated sacrifice increases. Results are discussed.
The Need for An Interdisciplinary Approach to Political Violence
White Paper to Launch MIT's Interdisciplinary Working Group on Political Violence, 2007-08 (Co-Founder)
The Role of Social Context in Terrorist Attacks
published in 'The Chronicle of Higher Education', 2006
Human Bombs: Rethinking Religion and Terror
'Audit of the Conventional Wisdom', MIT's Center for International Studies, 2006
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Report on Transnational Violence in the Persian Gulf
Conference Report, 2006
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Understanding and Defusing Human Bombs: The Palestinian Case and the Pursuit of a Martyrdom Complex
Presented to the International Studies Association, 2004
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