Announcing the Dissertation Proposal Defense of Gary E. Smith for Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Security Studies
Title: Leader Psychology and Civil Wars
Abstract
How does the psychology of leaders affect civil war behavior? And what effect does a civil war have on a leader’s psychology? This project proposes to investigate the complex relationships between civil wars and leader psychology, with some models that include psychology as predictor variables for different civil war behaviors, and other models that investigate the effects of civil wars on the psychological characteristics of leaders. In the last two decades, the study of civil war has been of particular importance in the field of conflict studies. However, like much of the research in conflict studies, there is an emphasis placed on the role that structural and situational factors play on civil war onset, severity, and duration. Such an emphasis on exogenous structural factors misses the fundamentally important role that leaders (both insurgent and government) may play in shaping each of these different civil conflict behaviors. Using at-a-distance measures of key psychological characteristics, this dissertation project aims to explore which factors make a leader more likely to initiate a civil war, which factors make a leader more likely to lead his or her group down a path that increases civil war severity, and which factors affect the timing of a leader’s choice to pursue a negotiated settlement to the conflict. The final section of this project explores the way that events within a civil war can affect the psychological traits of leaders, essentially investigating learning effects and other temporal changes in the psychology of leaders on either side of the conflict. Using Correlates of War civil war data, an original data set on the psychological characteristics of state and insurgent-group leaders, and appropriate control variables from a variety of sources, this study will investigate civil wars during the Post-WWII era.
Date: December 6, 2016
Time: 1:00 pm
Room: HPH 305G, Political Science Conference Room
Committee:
Mark Schafer (Chair)
Kyungkook Kang
Jonathan Powell
Wei Wang
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