you know good afternoon oh yes let's record this um so good afternoon everyone and thank you so much for joining us we're really excited about this panel with these three great Scholars who are here to talk about war and conflict as the title of the panel suggests but also resistance Collective action and hopefully peace I will introduce you to the panelists um and then give each of them a chance to tell you more about themselves and their great work and I'm going to start with Laura aosta Gonza
lez who is a post-doctoral researcher in international and public affairs at the Watson Institute at Brown University Laura earned her PhD in sociology from North uh from Northwestern um and she's also the winner of the ASA section on peace war and social conflicts out standing published article award in 2023 uh the article is war commemoration and nationalism in Belgium 1914 to 1945 so you should all check that out next we have Benjamin case Ben is a post-doctoral research scholar at Arizona St
ate University's Center for work and democracy and uh he's an affiliate with the resistance studies initiative at UMass Amherst he earned his PhD in sociology from the University of Pittsburgh and uh he's the author of Street Rebellion resistance Beyond violence and nonviolence and I believe much more recently the anarchist turn in 21st century leftwing activism uh and then we have Dana Moss an associate professor in the department of Sociology at University of Notre Dame go Irish and an affilia
te of the Crockett Institute for International Peace studies Dana earned her PhD in sociology from UC Irvine and she's the author of the Arab Spring abroad diaspora activism against authoritarian regimes and coming out I think very soon uh in April is transnational repression in the age of globalization so we are so lucky to have all three of you here um uh for your own introductions I think we're going to go in the same order so Laura would you like to start and tell us a little B bit more abou
t you and your work absolutely thank you very much Jennifer and the other organizers of this panel for the invitation I am gonna share um a few slides with you can you see my slides okay great yes so thank you so much for that introduction uh I am going to be talking today about my research on Perpetual Civil Wars so it's not particularly About Belgium but um it's about my most recent research um and articles there I'm working at the minute but let's get started first I want to start by giving y
ou a sense of the dimension of the issue of Civil War perpetuation across the globe so this is a figure from the Upsala conflict data program and it shows the geographical of for 55 active state-based conflicts in 2022 so the majority of this conflicts here and when I talk about the majority is nearly 90% of all these conflicts are Interstate conflicts or what we commonly known as civil wars right so for those of you who are not familiar with the term or want to learn a little bit about Civil Wa
rs this is typically what we know as um armed conflict that happens within the territory of an internationally recognized State and the government is the principal combatant now the Insurgent organization uh that challenges the legitimacy of the incumbent government must be locally represented and must be able to credibly challenge the legitimacy of the incumbent government right so those are kind of like the two conditions that were thinking about now something uh or one of kind of like one of
the most significant features of the Civil Wars is that there are very very long conflicts right um in fact H we're talking that some of the Civil Wars last for more than five consecutive decades and in fact since 1946 the duration of Civil Wars has tripled and 50% of all postconflict states relaps into Civil War now uh what you're seeing here in this in this figure is that it's precisely the difference between the number of new Civil Wars each year which is the dash line at the bottom and the n
umber of ongoing Civil Wars which is the solid line in this figure right so after 1946 what we see is kind of like an increase in that gap between the number of new Civil Wars and ongoing Civil Wars what this is showing us is that there kind of like this sharp change in the trend in the duration of Civil Wars now I am not the first sociologist to have noticed this pattern others like Andreas Bimmer and anona have written extensively about this and they have focused mostly on explaining the chang
e in this trend since 1946 now there's a lot of research in political science and in psychology as well that has made really important contributions to understanding the causes or pretty much to understanding why Civil Wars last for so long right so I am happy to speak more about these different explanations in the Q&A now talking about my research um my research is generally motivated by this issue um and by this point I hope I convinced you that it is a very important issue at least in in my p
erspective um and I have addressed the perpetuation of Civil Wars uh asking many different questions such as how does the sustained exposure to violence affect people's preferences for conflict resolution I have also worked on on a project in Belgium a where we were asking about the how the experience of War brings Nations together or breaks them apart and more recently I'm working on projects that ask why do some countries but not all fall into cycles of Perpetual Civil War um in another H co-a
uthor project we're looking into the effects of War making and peacemaking over sustained periods of time and how this then can help us understand some of the mechanisms that sustain Civil War in in the long term and I am also working on on a recent project in understanding what is the effect of civil wars on Intergroup divisions so basically if that cleavage or if that division that or originated the Civil War in the first place is the same one or changes throughout the the ongoing Conflict by
the end of it so hard how our society is divided across across groups now I want to I want to talk or discuss kind of like a theme that I have noticed across um across my research and I have noticed or I have found different instances of a mismatch between how actors are represented and portrayed in the media and there are actual identities existence and actions on the battlefield and I mean existence because sometimes actors get is the term that people use skape coding right sometimes bystander
s get dragged into the eye of the political storm without even actually playing a role in the battlefield so this is the level of incongruencies that that I'm going to be talking about now why does this happen or why do I I I keep finding these in congruencies well we we know as sociologists that amid public uncertainty and anxiety people are constantly trying to make sense of the ongoing violence right people are really actively seeking for explanation so they want to know who did what to whom
and why and who they can trust who is a friend and who is a foe now additionally we also know that in Conflict um the misrepresentation of reality is a common discursive strategy to shape people's opinion and gain their support but also this serves as a strategy to delegitimize the opponent so it's not uncommon to find that you know some actors get scapegoated or some or the enemy gets disproportionately blamed for the violence so why do I think that this matters for understanding Civil War perp
etuation or the duration of Civil War well I have found that they matter because people base their opinions on how the conflict should end on who they think are the true victims of a conflict right I can more talk about this findings in the Q&A but very briefly I found that people whose objective experience of violence does not allow with their subjective understanding of victimhood they tend to base their preferences for conflict resolution more on their feelings about in groups and out groups
then on the likelihood that these policies are going to make their lives better and when I talk about this in congruence or this disassociation I am talking of the groups that are off the diagonal here so the groups of people who think that they're victims of the conflict but didn't actually experience objective victimization and the same happens for those who were actually victims but don't see themselves as victims now I want to show you another example from my uh recent most recent research i
n a different project I also found that who gets blamed for the violence matters for the reoccurrence of conflict and I mean this n in the traditional way in which we're kind of like used to thinking about conflict in the sense that violence makes antagonisms and divisions between enemy groups harder or stronger right but in the sense that sometimes actors that are not even on the battlefield get blamed for violence that they're not committing so what is happening here is that they're introduced
in the public in the imaginary of the public as an imagined enemy or what I called an imagined third in this case and this as I show in in in in my in my recent research and I can talk more about this it can unleash almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy right preemptive violence against this imagined third can then cause Rebel groups to organize under the banner of that imagined third and then kind of like completely reshape antagonisms in the country and restart conflict in the long term so b
asically this figure here is kind of like supposed to to show us that even though we would expect that most actors in Conflict will fall along this diagonal meaning that the perpetrators of violence would also proportionately get blamed in political discourse or criticized in political discourse for violence we can find that some actors are disproportionately blamed for violence that they actually didn't commit now in conclusion um I there's a few things that I think my research kind of like sho
w us that are new about the duration of Civil Wars primarily that in congruences between discourse and reality matter not only for not only because they're they're not true depictions of reality but mostly because they can limit or enable the possibilities for conflict resolution in very significant ways they can affect the way in which individuals come to understand themselves and their opinions about others in relationship to the war whether they're perpetrators of victims it also shapes citiz
ens and armed actors preferences for conflict resolution and very importantly we have to think that local and international actors escalation or deescalation of conflict and their responses to perceived or imagine through threats or actual threats um can also be driven by by these in conr significance in congruencies with what happens in this course and in reality and that's a little bit of my research thank you very much for listening that was awesome thank you uh next up we'll hear from Ben ok
ay great thank you I'm here we go okay um yeah thank you Jennifer for organizing this and um to my co-panelists I'm excited to be here with you all and really looking forward to a good discussion um so I'm a political sociologist uh and I come to my scholarship from the applied perspective of um someone who spent more than two decades in labor political and Community organizing um and I stay embedded in and committed to um multiple social movement struggles and that's really the um you know that
that's that's really the my like orientation and my fuel in in doing these kinds of research so I actually have several different areas of recent work um um similar to L that that I think are pertinent here so I'm going to briefly introduce each and then kind of share some some data from one of them by way of a transition to the discussion um so um my first book as as Jennifer kindly mentioned in the uh introduction is called Street Rebellion resistance Beyond violence and non-violence it was p
ublished in 2022 by AK press and um this is a mix method study of riots and riers it came out of my doctoral studies um so I challenged the uh the binary language of violence and nonviolence that often get imposed on protests and social movements um as um really hurting more than it helps in terms of um us understanding what's going on in these moments um there was a at least a time where there was the field of nonviolent studies was um very influential on in movements on the ground um in in thi
s understanding of non-violent protest being definable and being categorically more effective and in fact what I show is that most uprisings around the world involve um a mix of more and less physically confrontational actions um that that really defy these this hard binary of violence and nonviolence and looking into those gray areas is in fact um not just productive but actually essential to understanding movement uprisings in our time so I look at um a lot of data I look at data on riots and
nonviolent demonstrations and I show that um in moments of Uprising especially in multiple countries around the world you see these um variables moving together right so there's all these arguments that nonv that riots will will demobilize nonviolent actions and I show how that's actually not the case um in many cases um riots actually have a positive uh a mobilizing effect on non-violent actions um in the in the in the the year in which the riot happened and the following year as well um I also
conduct uh in-depth interviews with activists in the US and South Africa who participated in riots and um show that uh the affective experience uh and symbolic nature of physical resistance of of rioting is often more important than the material effects and outcomes of those actions um that embodied sensation of physically fighting back against overwhelming systems of control is really important to people um and um and has um a potentially really important long-term impacts um so this um short
book from the Cambridge element Series in contentious politics just came out a week or two ago the anarchist turn in early in 21st century leftwing activism it's actually free on the Cambridge element site I think through April 4th so if you're interested you should download it and check it out um this is a collaborative project with John marov Hillary Lazar and Danny bur um and this is a mixed method study also um looking at the rise in Anarchist ideas and methods um in movements on the politic
al left in the 21st century so across the world we see um increased dissatisfaction with liberal democracy in theory and in practice we draw from multiple other studies to show that um we also see on the political left a move away from traditional State socialist Alternatives um away from centralized planning and hierarchical party leadership and instead we see um increased use of practices associated with the anarchist Cannon such as decentralization horizontalism Mutual aid direct action prefi
guration uh and so forth um and we argue that um uh Anarchist Theory can be more productively brought into sociological analyses of uh social movements and civil conflict so my current research uh for my my day job if you want at the center for work and democracy which is a labor funded Research Center at Arizona State University um This research is on ballot initiatives it's another mixed methods study I'm very fond of mixed methods um uh study of of the effect of ballot initiatives as as movem
ents have turned uh to direct votes to try to pass policies that um they were unable to get um through the Democratic party or through the the representative electoral system um and the top line here is that uh people vote a lot differently when you ask them to decide on policies than when you ask them to decide on POL on politicians and and parties um and this is something we see across red and blue States um so specifically socially egalitarian and economically redistributive redistributive me
asures um are overwhelmingly popular in red and blue States um so which sort of contravenes this notion of like a country that's polarized down the middle and you know it's red and blue along party lines everyone hates each other of course there's there's like truth to that in some ways um but votes on on things like ta taxing the wealthy to fund Public Schools or raising the minimum wage or expanding access to Affordable healthare show that actually super majorities in red and blue States tend
to support these kinds of measures and likewise um we also show that oh by the way the image I'm showing is a public report that we put out in 2022 I should have mentioned um so that's free on the center for work and democracy website and the the book uh um from this research is now under contract with Verso I'm working on that now um so just like we see um egalitarian policies and and redistributive policies being widely popular in red and blue States we also see anti-democratic push back um uh
to ballot initiatives coming from both Republicans and Democrats we hear a lot in the media about um anti- ballot initiative um uh U reactions happening from Republicans to try to stop ballot initiatives for example to um to pass through reproductive Freedom um so that of course is something we see but we also see almost identical anti-democratic um push back to ballot initiatives in Democrat controlled municipalities like Atlanta and Washington DC where movements are using ballot initiatives t
o try to pass um policies that would challenge profit and Power in those places um and so um this work is meant to on the one hand um uh discuss movement strategy sort of um uh hybridizing um a more direct action approach and a more electoral approach drawing from a kind of um non- reformist reform uh Theory uh and also to highlight the um uh oligarchic nature of the US political system in many instances um okay so by way of transition I want to share a few graphs that come from the street book
The riots book um so um I have um data on riots and nonviolent demonstrations from the cross National time series data archive and I look at this for 10 different countries in different regions they're organized alphabetically this is the first It's Brazil um from just after World War II until 2020 um and the purpose of these I have 10 different countries that I chose for their geographic distribution and for the different regions for the country that I felt had would have the best um chance at
having accurate data um in in the in the data set um and so the purpose in the book was to show that that um riots and non-violent demonstrations have um tend to occur together um especially when there's major shocks to one you almost always see a shock to the other and this was meant to flesh out the um the the quantitative analyses of this data that I show but in this case for the purposes of this uh this conversation I actually want to draw your attention to the right end of the graph the par
t that that depicts um riots and nonviolence demonstrations in the past decade for all of these different countries okay so this is Brazil China Ethiopia France Iran and by the way this data stops in 2020 so many of these countries have even more um major uprisings since then like Iran for example that are not here um Mexico Philippines South Africa the United Kingdom and the United States and you'll notice that for all of these um there's significant spikes often the largest in all of this data
but but one way or another significant spikes in the last decade and not single spikes but almost always multiple um uh spikes in succession increasingly rapidly um so we're seeing this across the world and this is the US by the way uh this is only until 2019 and I showed it that way uh in order uh to so that readers could see the variation over time when you add the data from the George Floyd Uprising in 2020 this is what the US looks like so that Uprising is so massive that it essentially fla
tlines the rest of the data um and so by way of transition I just want to point out the fact that none of the the contradictions none of the Sparks that gave rise to many of these uprisings including in the US in the US for example we'd say the global Justice movement occupy climate Justice movements for black lives and George Floyd Uprising um but also uh the uprisings that have happened around the world in in recent decades um uh these uprisings have been put down or abated um but basically no
ne of them have been resolved in terms of their core issues that sparked these or even mitigated in fact many of them many of the the um the sparking events and issues have been exacerbated so I'll leave it there for now and look forward to the discussion yeah I'm sharing my screen here thank you Ben uh Dana you are next great thank you I'm gonna see if I can share my screen as well and I just want to say while I'm figuring this out that um I am so stoked to be here with Laura and Ben I am such
a big fan of their work and they do such great writing so if you haven't read their stuff already please do that and it's great to see you again Jennifer and all see all the great things that you're doing as well um so yeah I just I wanted to just um put up kind of a little advert here since my book is free and I think free free is the best price um but let me just trace a little bit about like where I'm coming from and where I'm going I since you know we're we're doing this quickly um I've alwa
ys been really interested in how people achieve social change and particularly how they resist authoritarian types of top- down coercive control um in ways that create a lot of you know that kind of control creating a lot of human suffering um I've always been really interested in that and I think it's been part of my you know personality the kind of person who gets in trouble kind of um you know is sort of interested and Rebellion naturally and coming at this from a theoretical perspective I th
ought you know the study of social movements is such a great home to study processes of social change of course not all social change comes directly from social movements but I became interested in in what a lot of Scholars call the repression descent Nexus which is you know when does government repression succeed in controlling and and neutralizing descent in some way at least for a certain period of time and when does it actually Stoke protests and then sort of at the end of that like when do
people sometimes get what they want at the end of all these protest and riots like you know Ben was talking about um so a couple of Studies have really shaped my thinking on these matters uh I've done fieldwork in Jordan where I talked to activists who ranged from sort of you know striking labor workers all the way to NGO human rights folks and it brought my attention to the fact that um uh repression often looks really different uh depending on um our perspective and people's experiences and th
at the existing literature had not done a very good job of accounting for things other than arrests or or those types of quantifiable data that are oftentimes more public and easy to access so I learned a lot more about the different kinds of sort of soft quote unquote and hard power that are used against activists by authoritarian regimes but also why authoritarian regimes are paradoxically sort of not always willing to use hard repressive Force to quell people so how do people leverage that in
order to push for their rights I think is a really important question Freedom House I think just put out that we're in like the 18th straight year of democratic decline in the world so these questions about when people power can actually be harnessed for change are really occupying me right now another study that um I ended up doing for my dissertation and then became the book that that's sort of pictured back here and I can like stop sharing the screen I'm not focused enough to be able to like
handle that kind of coordination right now so then the next thing I did was study how the Arab Spring revolutions that were popping off in 2011 you all are probably old enough to remember my students were like legitimately playing Pokemon in 2011 so they they don't remember so in any case this was a wave of revolutions that spread across places like Tunisia and Egypt and Yemen Etc I had been a peace activist um in some capacity for Yemen in the past I know that's kind of random that's another s
tory but I was really interested in what was going on in some of these authoritarian states that hadn't been extensively studied you know turkey and Egypt have been extensively studied but not so much particularly in sociology in places like Syria Yemen or Libya when these revolutions were happening though simultaneously like I couldn't get the Visas I needed to go where I needed to go to interview like revolutionaries on the ground and sometimes it wasn't safe to do things like that so I ended
up studying what was happening outside because right in my almost literally in my backyard at the time I was a you know PhD student in California you had uh diaspora communities uh first and second generation immigrant communities from some of these states coming out to protest for freedom and democracy and their home countries fundraising for their home countries and doing and sometimes even going back home to fight in these conflicts even if their families had been in exile for a gener generat
ion so I was really became fascinated in this in this dimension of the revolutions and it ended up being a neat thing to study because turns out we haven't really done enough to theorize how revolutions are actually transnational phenomena they pull in a lot of different actors as Laura knows from her research on civil wars too it's like you know Civil Wars just attract all sorts of superpowers geopolitical Powers who get involved right who are trying to like sway the outcome to their um to thei
r you know expectation or their ideal and so the roles that diasporas have to play sort of in uh this Boomerang effect that kek and sing talk about which is like what's going on in the home country in these authoritarian repressive contexts where people really need help in order to win these revolutions and in the policy centers in places like London or DC diaspora is often form Brokers between those um and they aren't going to determine the outcome of conflicts but they can save lives on the gr
ound they can certainly influence policy when they're invited to do so um and a lot of them experienced a real kind of political Awakening from the Arab Spring because they felt newly empowered to come out so the last part of that research trajectory which links into that is my research on state-led transnationalism so I've kind of gone from what's going on between activists and and and agents in the state what's going on across them and now I'm interested in how states are trying to fight back
against diaspora activists and other kinds of transnational actors who are trying to name and shame them and undermine their legitimacy and support Rebel groups at home um in that case I found that what's been going on with a lot of these communities I've studied for a long time is that authoritarian regimes uh would send agents uh and use all kinds of methods to spy on diaspora communities try to control the the sort of political activities they were doing and essentially replicate certain type
s of authoritarian repression Within These commun unities right now this is happening and targeting Chinese communities weager communities Tibetan communities um this is an active thing that is actually growing so I was able through some of my work on transnational repression which is again showing how these Home Country regimes deploy different tools abroad to try to crush descent in diaspora and immigrant communities um I've joined with some other Scholars who are in political science yay our
friends in political science who are very very interested in transnational repression because um states are more easily able to locate activists abroad these days because everybody carries around a tracking device and a supercomputer social media machine in their pocket and um unfortunately we see that transnational repression acts as egregious as the murder of journalist Jamal kogi and turkey Renditions kidnappings all kinds of awful human rights abuses they're actually on the rise right now be
cause again this is happening in a glob Global context where authoritarian regimes aren't just operating with more and more impunity but they're collaborating with both like populist authoritarian type leaders like our former president Donald Trump um I don't mind saying that on the record I don't think that's that controversial and uh you know and and anyway so the point is there are a lot of uh collaborations happening between different types of actors to actually penalize these groups abroad
and keep them quiet so the literal ground in which people people have as a place of sanctuary and refuge where they can express their civil liberties and their political freedoms and rights is actually shrinking so what's that's been making me think of and this is the last thing is how a lot of folks who are very important human rights activists Nobel Prize winners um but also people who just are like ordinary people doing kind of volunteer type work they are really residing in this intersection
of the kinds of discrimination racism islamophobia xenophobia IA that comes from settling in a place like the United States and they're also facing uh pressures from having ties to their home country if they've got family if they've got assets if they've got any tie that they want to retain to the Home Country they have to worry about what they say and do because they might get on a blacklist or you know what's happening with a Saudi Arabian activist now in the United States and Canada is their
entire families are being thrown into prison because they dare to say something about uh Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman uh from like Toronto right these regimes are so sensitive about censorship and their image right now um it's putting a lot of pressure on these activists so that's some of the work that I've been really privileged to do because I feel like there's more policy attention to this now and we're able to push for better Refugee protections um ice unfortunately can for example arre
st and Deport someone who's a registered Asylum seat on the basis of what's called a red notice a red notice is something that interpole the international criminal agency which is not a police agency it has no arresting Authority it just exchanges warrants between states to be like hey there's a red notice this terrorist might be trying to like get into your country right like if you find him arrest him well unfortunately these red notices are politicized right Syria can issue red notices agains
t human rights activists abroad this happens all the time turkey Russia it it's just happen happening all the time so unfortunately repressive agencies like ice will potentially detain and Deport someone on the basis of a red notice issued through Interpol which is actually in violation of federal law in the United States but happens anyway because it's not being coordinated so I'm thinking a lot about how like repressions different forms of repressions are intersecting for different groups and
making even some groups who have fair amount of privilege in terms of their education or their wealth they're still being targeted right they're being targeted in part because they have some kind of Social Capital so um that's what I'm thinking about and I'm just like really happy to be with you all uh and it's fun to do these things like this is how we go to school you know as we like learn about each other's work and all the cool things we haven't had time to re read so I'll stop there thanks
thank you um before we jump into questions I actually wanted to give you all a chance to comment on each other's work or you know comment on any connections or differences that you see um so I will open the floor to the three of you to do that uh yeah you put us on the spot yeah so I didn't have an order in mind either and I just this moment realized like I might have given you an order but then have a question muted so I have a question okay I love both your works so much ben I am dying to know
what has been the reception to your critique of the sort of like you know glossy nonviolence literature um because that was something we talked a lot about when I was in Pittsburgh and I just I think you did such a beautiful and effective job so congratulations to both of you on your Awards as well like you did such a beautiful job I think of showing that it's a lot more complicated than we've assumed in the past but yeah what's been the response thank you uh yeah thanks for asking Dana and als
o yeah thanks for your your help on the uh on the project in general you'll find Dana's name in the in the thank yous in the acknowledgement section um you know for activists I mean it was really meant for an activist audience that's why I chose to publish with AK press and um for for the audience that I wanted um to read this it's been great so I'm really gratified for that given a number of talks to activist groups and um gotten some really thoughtful feedback um generally really positive but
but but overall um really productive and generative and that started some good conversations I'm really happy about that um and and through that I've been able to also help some other folks with with kind of activist oriented studies um around around these types of topics which was my hope so I'm very happy about that I also did hope if I'm being honest that it would pick some fights because um I think those could have productive here um and again the reason I got into this research in the first
place was because as an activist as an organizer um I saw this really heavy-handed effect that some of the non-violence research had on the ground that wasn't always great and um and I wanted to complicate that I wanted to have that discussion I wanted to have that debate and I've not been able to do that I'll say overall so I've really had um basically Silence from um from that crowd that's unfortunate although um not not entirely um I will say that there there's been a number of folks who've
reached out and who've asked me to review their work and so there has to to some extent there has been um some stuff there but not not to the level that I would have um that I would have hoped for in my in my wildest dreams um but yeah we'll see I think it's partly because you argued it so effectively but I'll shut up now thanks Ben that's great I I appreciate that that that's kind of you but I also think I guess I'll also just take the moment to say I think the moment has shifted also I think w
hen I wrote it I mean it takes a long time to do this research and write a book and at the time that I was doing it this was a really fiery debate in movements and also for a lot of Scholars it was starting to become that um but there was this real dominant Theory um about about you know the effect of non-violent protests you know coming from like the Erica chenowith and Maria stefans and those sorts of folks and um that entire like that argument has gotten pretty quiet in the past few years and
I think there's a number of reasons for that and I think like some of them are located in Ukraine I think um you know there was there was always a um some level of exchange between um some of the gloss is glossier as you put it some of the glossier nonviolence research and um US foreign policy and so I think that um given some of the foreign policy shifts in the past few years I think maybe the funding has situation has changed for for those sorts of things um also there was a paper that Chen w
ithth published um I believe in 2022 late 2022 it was just before the book came out that quietly walked back some of the the more bombastic claims that had been made it got very little press um I think it was in Journal of Peace research but I could be wrong about that um and so I think I think there's been kind of quiet recognition that some of these claims about the the superior efficacy of of um like um exclusive nonviolent protests were overstated yeah I can I was also gonna ask yeah you go
ahead yeah should I yeah just just to answer to Jennifer's question I feel like I noticed that um a few commonalities um across her work particularly thinking about um Ben's work and kind of like your your your focus on nonviolent um forms of protest I think that the Civil War literature is heavily sort of like um they have thought thought a lot put a lot of thought into the the organizational and the military capacities of actors but not so much on kind of like what are the effects precisely fo
r kind of like the the the longevity of the Civil Wars of for sustaining Civil Wars of everything that happens outside of the battlefield right all of these kind kind of like other nonviolent forms of protest and the role that actors take that is not necessarily just mobilizing taking up on arms so I think that um in that way I think that um it it is also a very productive kind of like line of thinking um and and to kind of like draw a bridge from perhaps that research into what's happening in t
he Civil War literature I think um I was also thinking about Dana's work which sounds absolutely fascinating I want to hear more about that and actually to to to to share something that that I that I found in my research now that I'm thinking about like what was the start of kind of like the Communist enemy in Colombia back in the mid 20th century I see that this sort of like misalignment or why blame a third that has nothing to do with the original fold line in the conflict was due to Internati
onal pressures and was the the meddling and the action the pressure that was put into local actors for blaming a third right so even though we tend to think that this is not consequential it's so important for kind of like the shape and the long-term development of what happens locally how even local actors come to understand each other over time right so it and and yet again this is not just with arms and guns right this is kind of like just by making all these claims so um yeah I just wanted t
o point that out can I also just um I was I was gonna also um ask maybe some open-ended questions of each of you I've really enjoyed revisiting both of your work for in preparation for this um and um La uh the your theory and Society paper from 2021 the victim dissociation paper I really love that paper it's it's so good deserving of all the all the awards and credit that it got um I would love to hear you talk more about because like um yeah I mean just like great in all in all the ways and but
in the conclusion um you know you you talk about you know in the sections where you get to kind of you know spin out your thoughts a little bit aside from just the the Empirical research you talk about the US context um and um you know specifically in that case you're talking about the the ways victimhood and survivorship are framed in terms of sexual assault and um I would also love to hear you comment on the ways you might see the the the effects that you recognize playing out in in US politi
cs um in you know in in the ways that like the the most hot button issues the one that that soak up a lot of media airspace um you know like the you know whether it's like um you know critical race Theory or or like you know whatever ever like the pronouns and trans politics and schools and libraries and like the sorts of things that the right-wing uses to mobilize people for example um I would just love to hear you comment on the ways you see uh like victim narratives playing into that in the i
n the breakdown that you have um and then um yeah Dana so many things that I would love to hear you talk about but I think um specifically in our moment I think transnational activism is like a big thing right now and not to get too you know not to get too into it but I just love to hear your thoughts on um on the like transnational networks that have maybe either um you know that have continued since you know since the the research you did for your first book or um or that have sort of sprung u
p since then and the effects those are having on on domestic politics like in the US because something that I noticed that is like you know um it feels as though there's a breaking down of boundaries between National transnational frames for political mobilizations and um you know we see all kinds of different flags and and mobilizing um uh orientations happening in in protests that are not you know based domestically so I'd love to hear you you talk about that and I have other questions about h
ard and soft repression but I'll just stop there should I start yeah okay thanks well for then thanks so much for this great question questions um yeah I I actually when you were talking about your project on anti-democratic mobilization kind of like this Democratic backsliding I was also thinking about kind of like how we have seen kind of like this politics of victimhood being mobilized um across the world really in the US even with brexit in in in so many different contexts right in in the wa
y that I that I think that that in theor in society kind of like can illustrate or help us think through these kind of like electoral results that might seem kind of like unexpected or kind of like surprising in certain ways is kind of like perhaps to think about why sometimes we see what we would think people who have directly been affected by some form of discrimination or Violence by being part of a of of a certain group actually even kind like mobilized against the interest of their own grou
p i i i that is the part that I found so surprising particularly in the case of Colombia right I mean I was we were seeing kind of like direct victims who people who had lost their family members their son was disappeared so throughout so many instances this they they wouldn't support the peace agreement and and I just couldn't wrap my hand around that right I was like why would you not just put an end to this right right and and this is kind of like where kind of like we I could see how they co
uld verbalize very well kind of like all of the arguments put forward by politicians in these very sort of like dichotomous terms of who's really getting getting the benefit of this policy who's really getting the benefit of this and that is not my group that is exactly the others right those who don't deserve this recognition those who don't deserve the benefit from the policy and I think that that plays out in the US and in different context perhaps in similar ways right what happens with this
discourse about victimhood victimization of the group is that then it becomes almost kind of like irrational in that term to think that you would vote or support support a government policy that would benefit the enemy for a lack of a better word right so um so I I think that in the context of of Trump's election I was constantly wondering why did he have so much for instance um support from the Latin diaspora in Florida right for for getting elected when he was speaking such horrible terms abo
ut Mexicans and Latinos generally right I I mean that seemed kind of like it really didn't make sense to me or how would um um black and brown politicians endorse his election when he was in in his rethoric he was speaking you know about crime and such terms that seemed really counterintuitive so I I think that victimhood dis Association in that sense help us really to understand when kind of like different um understandings of of of of of in groups and out groups play a role in politics and whe
n they do not yeah but thanks for that question oh right I was just so like my mind was just so blown with um ideas from what Lara just said oh wow that's awesome so I'm gonna answer I'm gonna address Ben's question and then hopefully tie it to laures if I Remember by then um you know transnational kind of advocacy humanitarianism and mobilization of cash arms I mean anything you name it is really Central to any of the sort of quote unquote domestic conflicts that we see so um around Ethiopia er
ria Somalia around uh Hong Kong around Ukraine uh turkey any place that's getting you know not only increasingly repressive but where they active sort of fight over what people can say and from where um it's it's it's very important uh the Hong Kong diaspora has even you know through intermediate I reached out to me to talk about strategies like how do you advocate for you know something when you know the countries you're advocating too are not only often times a case of an enemy of my enemy as
my friend because they perpetuate so much of this top down racism right like that you have to deal with in the host country which Laura is saying like a lot of people are not voting according to that but in any case um um yeah like how they how they're like reconciling these things basically so uh they're looking for ways to capitalize on you know um sort of pro-democracy stability and all of the anti-china rhetoric here but that unfortunately oftentimes puts really well-intentioned humanitarian
uh peace otherwise peace activists um in the position of advocating for intervention by a country like the United States into their home country and this is where diasporas get caught between a rock and a hard place because there's no one else with the capacity to do anything Visa China's intervention in Hong Kong besides a very powerful International Organization or a state like the us but then that aligns them with a lot of politician who preach anti-asian hate at home so this this um you kno
w sort of I'm trying to figure out so sort of for a next side project how to ground this intersection of sort of local power issues and and transnational ones in people's you know experiences obviously transnational repression is a very clear example of how that manifests but it doesn't always manifest just in you know sort of the state pursuing people across borders it can manifest in community mistrust it can manifest in how people build Civic organizations right are they doing it sort of alon
g like quote unquote sectarian lines from the home country like what's happening you know these Transformations are really fascinating but now I'm also interested because I've been thinking about this right I'm like no matter how much diaspora mobilization you have in bellarus or the United States or wherever for Ukraine that alone will never win that war right like it matters a lot how many resources they can get into Ukraine but they cannot win that war for Ukraine right they can just try to b
e this auxiliary support um the only thing that's really going to get Russia to stop fighting that war is if it starts impacting them extremely negatively in a domestic way and we've already seen that the Russian establishment around Putin and in the military is sort of fragmented and divided and that there have actually been a lot of desertion from the military so now I'm thinking if we want to understand conflict but also how it resolves we need to understand when militaries fall apart so righ
t now my next other project is on how members of the military resisted the war in Vietnam which was fought by our country 50 years ago and so I'm interviewing veterans who are a lot of times at the stage of their life in their 70s or so this is the boomer generation um who willing to talk about some of these things for the first time or at least get it off their chest before they pass away and so I'm hoping that that research will also help us to see how resistance undermines authoritarian contr
ol and even B violence against people of a foreign you know place like Vietnam or Ukraine um but uh that's very much in progress there's a ton of really good literature on defection but like Ben's nuan you know there's not a good literature on the all the different ways that people may resist and continue to retain that Insider status as military members right like it's happening at the same time so I'm excited about that because like again thinking about how repression Works sort of at differen
t levels and in different ways our embodied experiences though definitely reflect a lot of that and I'm looking forward to doing more work on that this is fantastic um I uh want to ask I I am worried that I prepared too many questions for the time that we have alloted so um I'm going to skip around a little bit in my own notes and make sure that we get to some questions that I really want to ask um so first because this um panel series is supposed to be about the 2024 us election uh I do want to
ask one question that like sort of ties this back into that um though all of you actually have done um like drawn really interesting connections I think to like contemporary us politics um but I want to know uh what you see in um like the news in the US like what do you read in the New York Times or or any other news media that like us politicians or political thinkers are getting wrong about the sort of um conflicts that you study um uh you know or like either um like cross-national conflicts
or like intra um country International conflicts um where the US like isn't necessarily a party to it I mean what don't policy makers get wrong about Middle Eastern countries and their relationships and their histories I would say that one of the big ones is the assumption that alliances are formed along these political religious islamist lines very simply um and they're they're not at all uh we don't just have sort of Shia versus Sunni in the Middle East and that's not how a lot of times these
alliances are first formed and in fact again to go back to geopolitics and the role of transnational politics so many of the various political machinations that have happened since the you know formal independence from colonialism uh come as a result of a lot of international meddling in the region um and the alliances that were formed during the Cold War is what I'm trying to say if anybody ever gets a chance the edited version is horriable do not watch it but if you can find a three-part long
form uh fictional film about Carlos the left-wing sort of terrorist activist who ended up taking a lot of um famous people hostage at an earlier point in time this shows how leftist movements and Ben knows way more about this than I do but how leftist radical movements were really connected all over the world um during this time where they were really trying to revolutionize and uh use violent mobilization against all different kinds of like you know causes and foreign powers and uh Western impe
rialism and and so forth and I love thinking about this because it kind of puts the movements back in it puts the movement back in movements you know what I mean like movements move around they don't just stay in one place they look for resources abroad they look for ties abroad you know and um and it's a lot to keep track of but it can also tell us a lot about or explain a lot I think about what's going on that we we can observe um yeah um yeah I guess I like uh one or two come to mind yeah as
Dana said there's there's an endless list but I think a couple come to mind and um they both revolve around something that I've been thinking a lot about um you know in the activist world as well which is the um kind of the deterioration of Reliance on formal organizations and movements and much uh more common the much um a heavier Reliance on informal networks and and and those sorts of of connections um because I think when it comes to social movements you know media journalists and you know I
've I've dipped my toes in that world enough to know you know you're trying to write a story you need to look for someone to explain it you need to quote from someone here or there you look for the organization you look for you can get a with some so that's what's going to get reproduced um so then we get this idea like there's these organizations I me most humorously in in you know the past few years it was like you know the anti-fascists right antifa as the the Fox News people like to pronounc
e it um there this whole you know this whole wave of of like just horrendous like actually I mean hilarious depending on how you look at it analyses about how how this is an organization and what it does and just like anybody who's ever you know been into an activist meeting knew that there's no organization called this um there's only loose networks of people who who Associated themselves as anti-fascists there have been organizations that were specifically like antifa organizations um you know
like anti-racist action in the past or ones like that but for the most part um it's it's informal groups and um and you know that that leads to just all these misunderstandings I think activists in a lot of cases are totally happy to let pass totally happy if if the media fear and you know um consequently the authorities often misunderstand what they're doing um but I also think this um this comes into play in lots of other ways that that are much more um relevant to elections where I think the
the media spheres that you know are stereotypically but you know there's truth to it that are really based in um Urban coasts um deeply misunderstand a lot of what's happening in a lot of the country and they they're drawing lessons from electoral maps that don't actually reflect what people are thinking and I get this a lot from the ballot initiative research where it's like you know you go to you talk to people in South Dakota which is a solid red State I mean they haven't voted a Democrat uh
you know for for president for I mean like half a century or something like that um it's all R state government um most people hate the Republicans you know what I mean like people hate politicians people don't trust politicians and if if we der from this this like we're going to map out red and blue based on who votes what in the presidential elections and therefore we understand what people think because we associate the Democrats with CNN and the Republicans with Fox News and you know there'
s this kind of like half-baked analysis that comes out of that that I still feel like is kind of the norm um which is just deeply wrong about a lot of things um and I think it relates to something similar about assuming that because someone votes one way or another on the day that they therefore associate with this political party in the sense of like you know a political party of a century ago or something like that whereas you know that's not what the parties are now and that's not what voting
means now for a lot of people in the US yeah what what do politicians in the US media get wrong about the Colombian Civil War and so many things but um I would say perhaps something that stands out would be the the issue that this is a war but about drugs right that if we fuel a lot of money into fumigating spreading you know chemicals over um all these coca leaf plantations then kind of like this is how we're intervening and this is how the age should be put into motion this is exclusively abo
ut armed groups still having the means to fight um it also kind of like and perhaps what gets missed is kind of like what message that sends as well for how people come to understand government intervention and how to end the war right and and by that I mean how even Colombians come to see people who are fighting this war as criminals exclusively driven by greed right how how how what has been the role in sending this Aid into in the 19 70s to grow all of kind of to grow the middle class the Col
ombian middle class as a way to um to kind of like take the country away from the path of potentially expanding communism right and and and what what what that was also telling people about the E communism as an evil that was coming after them and that it could potentially be the worst thing that could ever happen to Colombians ever so in a way Aid matters in the way in which kind of like how they sent and how they help and come to understand this conflicts in very simplistic terms not simplisti
c but kind of like a problem of one thing or a division between one group and another it kind of like really perhaps overlooks right the effect that it has in how the local populations come to understand each other and the people who mobilize in this mercies and then that it it really has a very strong effect in the possibilities for Building Bridges and kind of like really bringing this conflict to an end I would think perhaps that is something I don't know if they're getting it wrong but they'
re certainly kind of like perhaps not thinking about this um potential effects yeah okay uh I'm going to use my latitude as moderator here to ask one more question and then we'll open it up for Q&A um I wanted to know if there are any themes that you all have seen um in the conflicts that you study like for instance antecedence to conflict or like the role of things like globalization or climate change or like particular ideologies um that like keep coming up in um in conflict or you know war or
um protest Etc either that was like a really loaded question or a really soft ball question I can't decide I'll let you decide can you maybe rephrase it that might help um yeah I guess what I'm thinking about is um I think all of you to to some degree are not just looking at like War or conflict or resistance in like one particular case but but you know at least two or three or like multiple cases um and so I'm wondering if you see like you know oh very often um you know like an antecedent to t
his conflict is um I'm going to say misunderstandings between groups that that feels like the most polyana is thing I could have said but you know like like it's a fight over resources that are scarce because like that's the primary issue in this area or you know is there a theme that you see like consistently comes up when you are looking at um the conflicts that you study that's an interesting question I guess I I'll I can I'm happy to start um and I'm also because of I made the mistake but be
cause I I like introduced a number of different areas of my work now I'm trying to like filter each question into like which which one does it make the most sense to base this in but um I guess what comes to mind is in thinking about um studying riots and violent protest um one of the most common themes that comes up in looking at the data and in in talking to people is the um initial spark of police violence right that's not controversial people generally under I think people who like look at t
hese things seriously gen generally understand that um but and not just police violence in the sense of like George Floyd being murdered in public you know in broad daylight by police officer but also I mean to to take that example the third precinct was burned in Minneapolis which sparked the you know the George Floyd Uprising not directly after George Floyd was murdered by Derek chovin peaceful protest took the streets and police attacked peaceful protesters and then it escalated into that so
the the the the direct Catalyst for a lot of this is police attacking uh demonstrators but at did at a deeper level um you know when we get into the interviews um and I'm also OB I'm drawing from some you know personal experience as well but when you get into the interviews I mean it's there's there's this sensation of of raw frustration um with the the compounding crises that people are facing and you're trying to just say something and then there's people in armor who are agents of the state w
ho are there to stop you to shut you up to hurt you for that and there's can be like these raw reactions of U that that that can like spark in these moments and um I think I think that there's um I think there's you know there there's something that's worthwhile to pay attention to there as we see um you know uh rius protest increase in frequency and ferocity around the world um I think the combination of of um you know real and also this goes to to L's research too like real and perceived um um
you know um victimization by um various systems and then on top of that um you know agents of the state violently enforcing that um is a really a potent combination for sparking uprise Laura do you want to go next or yeah um sure I'll go next um I yeah I I noticed that in my presentation I was actually thinking okay like what is the common theme and and I think it's I would say it's it's perhaps that that I have found so puzzling and it's kind of like this this sort of like this connection betw
een like what we think that a conflict is about and how the people who live the conflict in the small communities these collected narratives about the conflict really sometimes don't have nothing to do with it um like what was kind of like surprising to me was particularly in the case of Colombia in the 1940s in the 1950s the the the war prior to the current War we we think about it or we memorialize it as a war between liberals and conservatives that were fighting against each other in their co
mmunities they really hated they wouldn't marry each other they if you know if you were wearing the wrong color and you were in the wrong place people will attack you this is kind of like how we come to understand this war now when we we read about the civilian accounts of how the war unfolded in these communities we we notice that they in that they had a sensation that it was the the government attacking them right IR regardless of political affiliation there was this state oppression and it wa
s this state oppression that then kind of like worsens when the state comes to think that all of these communities are pretty much motivated by International Communists who are arriving in the country and then the violence escalates it kind of like confirms what they were already thinking elevates Their Fear of the repression and then drives the mobilization and that's kind of like what I'm seeing in my data right but what is interesting about this is that this is perhaps thinking about a very h
uge scale of an entire Civil War but but this is not uncommon perhaps at a lower scale and I was really surprised um to perhaps see I don't know if if if if with the attacks in Russia you saw that Vladimir Putin um said that he had grounds or or he would suspect that it was Ukraine who had actually the incentives to attack Russia despite of you know perhaps evidence or the international media speaking about it in different terms right even Isis claiming that they committed the attack right no he
decided to blame someone else right so this is this is really what we're seeing and it's kind of like behind um what we see that is happening on the ground and and and the reasons for why blame another for why steer the discourse into a different direction I think that in sociology there's kind of like a lot of productive research that could could help us kind of like make a more kind of like direct link between what happens at the micro level and what happens at the civilian level and what is
really happening in political discourse and kind of like try to systematically think about what how one thing influences the other right how not just that these are completely separated domains but there is a point where kind of like what happens on one kind of like reverts and has implications for the other yeah that's so important for thinking about the role of misinformation in US politics today too and laara what you were just saying really was making me like have flashbacks to what I've bee
n reading about what was happening in Vietnam uh in terms of like local level um you know repression basically and how it impacted mobilization on the ground in the South there it's really amazing I I think about repression as like basically a strategy of divide and conquer it's maybe not just that like I haven't I'm sort of theor ring on the Fly here okay um and like Ben I'm very interested in these reactive spontaneous moments of Confrontation which are often extremely consequential for the wa
y conflict unfolds both violent and nonviolent um but particularly violent so I think about the ways in which states are being effective in dividing and conquering people and like part of it is through this is through narrative and misinformation and um and part of it is through actual violence right and and like Ben talking about these police confrontations with almost every with and and if you kind of like broen police officer to security agent like what he said describes almost the beginning
of every single confrontation in the Arab Spring that I can think of um so I mean this is such a key part and these intersections between local level National level and international forms of repression is really interesting but I mean obviously it's really sad that you know uh there's so much media and there is so much um scapegoating going on everywhere that is just an easier story it seems for people to buy than the actual structural more complicated story uh and the harder to fix story is th
at the scapegoating is working to a large capacity um it's just distracting people from the basic plain facts and this is why you have a lot of political sociologists who know what they're talking about comparing us to you know like sort of pre-nazi Germany because we have some uh unfortunately in the ven diagram of those two things this is one of the commonalities um and unfortunately you know the current conflicts have not de uh partisan IED or de bifurcated you know or made better more solida
rity I think around these things I've I've only seen like more of that um I think you know probably the best we can do as Educators is to make people aware that this is happening so that they can at least question when they are uh at war with themselves or with someone else right like is this actually true is this actually true um you know and and and Putin has immense whatever Putin says has an incredible amount of power like if he says the white helmets are not a legitimate humanitarian organi
zation in Syria and instead they're Islamic State terrorists unfortunately that has real life consequences in Syria and so to does the of Donald Trump both for domestic and foreign policy in the future and like Ben is saying I as a peace activist in the past uh really can't stand the current state of the Republican and Democrat politics but we are making a lot of compromises these days in order to protect some basic Collective Goods um and unfortunately I think we're going to be kind of defendin
g the little ground that we've we've made because we have made some ground like we have gained ground in civil rights and human rights but then the backlash against that is just so enormous I think that's where we are right now so I think we're going to continue to see this in waves and the last thing I'll say about your question Jennifer is that I the thing that irks me the most is when when Scholars say the Arab Spring failed and here's why here's why we know that the Arab Spring did not creat
e longstanding developed Democratic states in any of the places where it occurred including including all of its different iterations and waves which went on for like over 10 years however in many of these cases including ex like sort of extreme examples like in Libya and Yemen people's power and the coalitions that coales around those did succeed in usurping presidents and Pharaoh type authoritarian dictators who had been in power for 30 and 40 years the things that happened after that are a co
nsequence of you know what was left of the state when these dictators left and international conflicts and conflicts over resources on the ground right that's like phase two but we shouldn't expect anything different because it takes time and some degree of stability to build the kind of Ideal outcome that we want to see in these places so I know activists get discouraged and I feel like the Arabs spr has now been kind of dismissed as this abstract failure but I want to say that it was the most
impressive embodiment of people power and bravery that I've ever seen in my life I was watching it sort of 247 on Al jazer at the time and that um you know and that it wasn't for nothing we're going to be seeing the the consequences of that play out over the course of the Next Generation and there's going to be another wave at some point so I think we have to be patient we have to understand not everything happens on the timeline that we want or expect and we have to be very very respectful full
of activists who like sacrificed everything for revolutions that did not go their way you know they're still paying the price so that's all what I'll say about that thanks okay we'll take the last few minutes if you have questions I'd love for you to put them in the Q&A um though uh yeah I mean we have a group that maybe could open it up someone had a hand up yeah that's right um oh all right we have a Q&A um someone says uh amen France had Napoleon before durable democracy but mea has to get t
o democracy immediately uh not a question but could demand a response if you'd like thank you so much I will say like um if people are feeling shy I have a question that actually came up for me while um watching you all talk which is really about about like there's I I think and you know again as somebody who's like oh um not you know like I'm not in the literature the way you are I'm not studying this um obviously the way you are so to me this is like a popular perception and not a like scholar
ly perception of like conflict as a very discret phenomenon like coming from the us like we have these handful of Wars we won them there's a good guy and a bad guy you know they last a few years you know I don't remember how long our longest war even was but but okay so yeah so it's like the time scale for what Americans often see as a conflict is just very small and you know as we're maybe approaching another civil war on issues that never really away from the first Civil War I can't help but w
onder if we're completely wrong um so all of you at some point had brought up something about like Perpetual conflict you know uprisings that are on issues that aren't resolved um like a rise and not fall in authoritarian regimes since we've like started studying them um and you know like do you want to speak to that or have any any notes for Americans who are just learning that conflict isn't what we thought it was yeah sure I mean I can very briefly I mean I think that you're exactly right um
I mean I think in the US um public discourse and uh in many cases scholarly research but I think yeah public discourse is is is accustomed to approaching war and conflict as um episodic and as an aberration that you know is a departure from what otherwise should be a you know a peaceful status quo and um I think yeah to some degree that was all an illusion but you know the type and scale and frequency of of wars and massacres and uprisings and conflict that we're seeing now um and the types of f
ractures we're seeing in you know institutions that we may have thought were Rock Solid like after Donald Trump's first election um you know they're challenging they're challenging us to think differently um and um you know I think that that that normal science of approaching these things and that's not to say that we can't study you know specific episodes of of you know of of history or of conflict of course we can but in general I think it may be more productive or at least sometimes to challe
nge oursel to switch the lens and see these as um you know upsurges in what's otherwise an underlying condition of growing disorder um and I think that that can be a productive lens to look through go ahead Laura if you'd like to speak I can go last I was also gonna add real quick if that's okay because this is also thinking on what you were talking about about um you know like the Egyptian revolution in 2011 and some of these others I mean what that taught a lot of us and me too um you know bac
k when I was a a Plucky occupy organizer that year um was you know just how quickly the can escalate and how quickly systems that seem to be Rock Solid can come apart in the face of mass uprisings um that can happen extremely rapidly and that's an example of that for mobilizations that can also happen for people in terms of of Civil Wars you know like people who all who are living a life that they you know perceived as normal and the next thing you know it's radically different because the Civil
War has escalated or your country's caught between you know whatever other forces so um yeah just just adding that in yeah thank you so much for that and look it's it's it's interesting I mean I I started my presentation with saying that in 2022 there were 55 active state-based conflicts across the world so I I find it puzzling actually like the fact that depending on where we live in the world we still tend to think of of Civil Wars is episodic and you know um and short when in reality at leas
t the reality that I grew up in In Living in Colombia was like for the entirety of my life I had been at War right and and and something that was really really puzzling is like like why does it seem that for some societies there's no way out now I think that the study of Civil War generally could benefit a lot from more sociologists hopefully um in getting engaged and involving in the research because I think there's so much that we can learn from actually the vast amount of work that exists in
United States Intergroup relations and actually in how systems of Oppression and discrimination become perpetuated over time and even though we don't see what happens in the United States and we shouldn't see it as a state of Civil War because it is not well there there is there are similarities in terms of how certain systems of Oppression also kind of like Get put in place in in places with Civil War and of course there are differences for why there's so much violence in those places and we do
n't see it in the same light or at the same scale in others but it also helps us to understand that this there's nothing episodic about this right there the if anything it it's really productive to start thinking about them about like how how do they keep perpetuating what what what is it that explains the CLE what is it that sustains kind of like these processes of discrimination of Oppression of different minority groups across the world so so so yeah the study of Civil War seems like very min
or in sociology but I do think that there's so much that the discipline generally has to offer and can become a lot more more vocal and and kind of like engaging conversations that happen predominantly in political science or in other fields and I feel like we could really really um bring a new light into into how we come to understand this yeah yeah that that was great that's what I was thinking too Laura um I will just comment also that I'm thinking about the importance of what a military does
when a government decides to become more repressive crack down on its people give them a legal orders something along those lines is key to what's going to be happening in the United States moving forward key to what's going to be happening in Ukraine and I found it was really key to what was happening in Vietnam as a result of just the mass disorder that uh that war created within the US Military and particularly in the Army um essentially uh Nixon canceled the draft and for these last 50 year
s we have seen the two longest American wars ever because we have an increasing separation between society and the state we have What's called the all volunteer Force which is draft through economic means right through need through you need to go to college right you need to have a job um instead of a draft and I think about this a lot because I teach my students about the importance of resistance to Injustice at a time where like they were my age when we were invading Afghanistan I knew nothing
about Afghanistan all I knew was that we'd all been sort of prepped with this patriotic sort of propaganda for the Gulf War in 1990 when I was a kid but moving forward none of my brothers my friends my colleagues nobody was impacted by this war because of my privilege and because of our Collective privilege and a lot of Vietnam veterans are very proud that they resisted the Vietnam War but they regret that Wars have been able to become longer for certain perpetuating Powers because Society for
the most part unless they have a personal familial tie to the military as a job are essentially insulated from a lot of the costs of those Wars yet we know that violence always comes home to roost at some point whether states are successful in repression or control is only temporary just as resistance comes in waves right so just speaking to your point about the fact that conflict seems episodic like it is amazing to me that you see people waving in this very conservative part of Indiana a Ukrai
nian flag above the American flag but if somebody waves a Puerto Rico or Mexican flag above the American flag they're literally accused of being traitors and that they should go home so again the geopolitics that's like infiltrating are the the that Association of like Good Guys bad guys as you were saying or Laura is saying you know victimhood offending group um or even what violence is and when it's legitimate is pretty incredible and so yeah there's a lot to think about but I do think we need
to think about how people within in the state are going to be reacting to future events not just how people on the street are going to be reacting because without those alliances um the people who are in power can do a lot of harm okay uh this has been really amazing and I am like remiss to stop but I want to respect the stop point for our panelists and also for the audience um but I do encourage those of you who had unanswered questions like first of all please go read the panelist work uh and
also I think all of you are on social media so that might be a good place to connect I don't want to like tell people just go email them it's F you know but like if you know them or you know yeah maybe Reach Out by email um but yeah thank you all so much for joining us and uh look out for announcements for our next panel which will be in the fall you you all get a summer break um so yeah take care and I'm gonna stop the recording great thanks to you all for organizing you did an awesome job I d
idn't ask any questions because I had a kid in the background but thank you everybody great to see
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