Person: Zhukov, Yuri
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Zhukov
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Yuri
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Zhukov, Yuri
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Publication A Theory of Indiscriminate Violence(2014-06-06) Zhukov, Yuri; Bates, Robert H.; Bates, Robert; Colton, Timothy; Tingley, Dustin; Toft, MonicaThis dissertation addresses a simple puzzle: why do governments use indiscriminate violence against civilians? To deter a population from rebelling, a government should make rebellion costlier than the alternatives. Yet indiscriminate violence can make neutrality costlier than rebellion. With the help of mathematical modeling, archival data and micro-comparative evidence from dozens of armed conflicts, I show that indiscriminate violence makes civilians less likely to remain neutral, but not necessarily more likely to support the opponent. There is a threshold level of violence, beyond which it can become safer for civilians to cooperate with the more indiscriminate side. As long as civilians believe that supporting the rebels will be costlier than supporting the government, they will generally support or not actively resist the government -- even if the government is responsible for more civilian deaths overall. The amount of violence needed to meet this threshold depends on the combatants' relative informational endowments. If a combatant can selectively punish her opponents, she can employ a relatively low level of violence. Where she lacks the information for selective punishment, she will use methods more indiscriminate in targeting and more massive in scale. Violence is a substitute for intelligence.Publication Denial and Punishment in the North Caucasus: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Coercive Counter-Insurgency(Sage Publications, 2012) Toft, Monica Duffy; Zhukov, YuriA growing literature on the subnational diffusion of armed conflict rests on the proposition that political violence triggers more violence, in the same locality and elsewhere. Yet state efforts to contain such uprisings remain largely unexplored, theoretically and empirically. Drawing on a mathematical model of epidemics, we formalize the logic of conflict diffusion and derive conditions under which state coercion might limit the spread of insurgent violence. Using a new dataset of insurgent and government violence in Russia's North Caucasus from 2000-2008, we evaluate the relative effectiveness of four coercive strategies: (1) denial, which manipulates the costs of expanding insurgent activity to new locations, (2) punishment, which manipulates the costs of sustained fighting in contested areas, (3) denial and punishment, which does both, and (4) no action, which does neither. We find denial to be most effective at containing insurgent violence. Punishment is least effective, and even counterproductive. Not only does such a strategy fail to prevent the spillover of violence to new locations, but it may amplify the risk of continued fighting in contested areas. In the Caucasus, denial is found to be the least inflammatory counterinsurgency option for Russia. For it to succeed, Russia should physically isolate centers of insurgent activity from regions of non-violence, avoid the temptation of punitive reprisals, limit the insurgent's options, and convince him that he cannot succeed.Publication An Epidemic Model of Violence and Public Support in Civil War(Sage Publications, 2013) Zhukov, YuriHow do civilians respond to violence in civil war, and how do these responses shape combatants’ coercive strategies? Conventional wisdom expects civilian victimization to backfire, as a security-minded public “balances” against the side posing the greatest threat to its livelihood and survival. Yet combatants often expect a terrorized population to do the opposite, “bandwagoning” with those most willing and capable to inflict harm. Using an epidemic model of popular support dynamics, I explore the logic of balancing and bandwagoning in irregular civil war. I argue that when civilian strategy is clearly communicated to combatants, civilians are always better off balancing, and combatants are better off avoiding punishment. When civilian choice is not observed, the balancing equilibrium breaks down and patterns of violence depend on the local balance of power. The model’s results challenge the view that selective violence is most common in areas of incomplete control. Due to uncertainty over civilian behavior, violence in both divided and perfectly controlled areas can occur in equilibrium, inflicting great costs on civilians. I compare these predictions against the historical record of Soviet counterinsurgency in Western Ukraine, using new micro-level data from the declassified archives of the Soviet secret police.Publication Roads and the diffusion of insurgent violence(Elsevier BV, 2012) Zhukov, YuriHow does insurgency spread? Existing research on the diffusion of violence at the local level of civil war tends to under-specify the theoretical mechanisms by which conflict can be expanded, relocated or sustained, and overlooks the real-world logistical constraints that combatants face on a daily basis. This paper attempts to address both problems by taking a closer look at the role of road networks in the diffusion of insurgent activity. By explicating the logic of diffusion in a simple epidemic model and exploiting new disaggregated data on violence and road networks in the North Caucasus, this analysis challenges the conventional view that insurgent logistics are either self-sufficient or highly flexible. Roads shape the costs of sustaining and expanding operations, which facilitates the transmission of violence to new locations, but can also intensify competition for limited military resources between nearby battlefronts. At the local level, this dynamic makes the relocation of insurgent activity more likely than its expansion. Methodologically, this paper demonstrates that a failure to account for logistical constraints in the empirical study of civil war can underestimate costs of diffusion and overpredict the transmissibility of violence between neighboring locations. The use of road network distances can yield more conservative inferences and more accurate predictions of how violence spreads.