Political Violence in Pakistan- Understanding Subnational Patterns

Transcription

1 CREATE Research Archive Research Project Summaries 2011 Political Violence in Pakistan- Understanding Subnational Patterns Jacob N. Shapiro Princeton University, C. Christine Fair Georgetown University Rasul Bakhsh Rais Lahore University of Management Sciences Follow this and additional works at: Recommended Citation Shapiro, Jacob N.; Fair, C. Christine; and Rais, Rasul Bakhsh, "Political Violence in Pakistan- Understanding Subnational Patterns" (2011). Research Project Summaries. Paper This Article is brought to you for free and open access by CREATE Research Archive. It has been accepted for inclusion in Research Project Summaries by an authorized administrator of CREATE Research Archive. For more information, please contact

2 National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events University of Southern California Los Angeles, California Political Violence in Pakistan - Understanding Subnational Patterns October 2010 to September 2011 Jacob N. Shapiro Princeton University jns@princeton.edu Other Contributing Investigators C. Christine Fair Georgetown University Rasul Bakhsh Rais Lahore University of Management Sciences "This research was supported by the United States Department of Homeland Security through the National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) under Cooperative Agreement 2007-ST-061-RE0001. However, any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations in this document are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect views of the United States Department of Homeland Security or the University of Southern California." Cooperative Agreement No ST-061-RE0001 Department of Homeland Security December 31, 2011

3 ABOUT CREATE The National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events (CREATE) was the first university-based Center of Excellence (COE) funded by University Programs of the Science and Technology (S&T) Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). CREATE started operations in March of This annual report covers the seventh year of CREATE funding from October 2010 to September 2011, the first year under Cooperative Agreement 2010-ST-061-RE0001 from DHS. While the text of this report focuses on the seventh year, all data tables, publications, lists of participants, students, and presentations and events are cumulative from the inception of CREATE. CREATE s research mission is to develop advanced models and tools for risk assessment, economic assessment, and risk management to counter terrorism. CREATE accomplishes this mission through an integrated program of research, education, and outreach, spanning the disciplines of economics, psychology, political science, industrial and systems engineering and information science. CREATE develops models, analytical tools, methodologies and software, and tests these tools in case analyses, representing critical homeland security investment and policy decisions. Due to the cross-cutting nature of research in risk, economics, and risk management, CREATE serves the need of many client agencies at the DHS, including the Transportation Security Agency, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, FEMA and the US Coast Guard. In addition, CREATE has developed relationships with clients in the Offices of National Protection and Programs, Intelligence and Analysis, General Council, Health Affairs, and Domestic Nuclear Detection. Using a mix of fundamental and applied research, CREATE faculty and students take both the long-term view of how to reduce terrorism risk through fundamental research and the medium-term view of how to improve the cost-effectiveness of counter-terrorism policies and investments through applied research. Please visit for more information. Page 2 of 9

4 Political Violence in Pakistan - Understanding Subnational Patterns Jacob N. Shapiro, Princeton University jns@princeton.edu Other Contributing Investigators C. Christine Fair, Georgetown University Rasul Bakhsh Rais, Lahore University of Management Sciences 1. Executive Summary Research Accomplishments Applied Relevance Collaborative Projects Research Products Publications and Reports Presentations Education and Outreach Products Executive Summary This project conducts econometric analysis of the relationship between terrorist activity and other forms of political violence and several variables including economic outcomes, development spending (mostly foreign aid), and public opinion. The PIs use a range of data sources that they have developed such as the newly created database of 27,555 geo-located incidents of political violence in Pakistan from 1998 through 2010, results of a 6,000 person nationally representative survey in Pakistan, panel data on economic variables developed from household surveys run by the Pakistan Federal Bureau of Statistics, and micro-level data on aid spending from USAID, NGOs, and the Government of Punjab. Our current project grew out of previous collaboration with Eli Berman s team on Models of Counterterrorism particularly two subprojects: Rational Peasants and Drivers of Militancy. The Rational Peasants subproject developed both the rational peasant (or hearts and minds ) and club models of insurgency and terrorism through a combination of rational choice modeling and testing using data from Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines. The Drivers of Militancy project conducted the largest nationally representative survey yet available on Pakistani attitudes toward militant groups. Results from this survey of 6,000 Pakistanis will be further examined in light of additional research that the PIs are leading in Pakistan. (Recent publications drawn from previous subprojects are noted below in the Research Accomplishments Section.) Despite the extensive informal literature on violent political organizations in Pakistan, little systematic research has studied the sources of variation in militant violence. Because of this, policies to combat militant violence are driven by intuitively appealing but fundamentally untested hypotheses about the causes of militancy, most prominently that poverty and lack of economic opportunity are key drivers of support for, and participation in, militant organizations. Fair and Shapiro s 2009 survey in Pakistan (supported by a CREATE grant) identified three correlates of substantial, sub-national variation in support for militant groups that are highly relevant to homeland security: (1) location of origin in terms of province, in general people from Punjab and Sindh were most supportive of militant groups; (2) socioeconomic status, on average low income Pakistanis living in urban areas were most negative towards militant groups; and (3) exposure to the consequences of terrorism, with support for militancy being robustly negatively correlated with terrorist violence in the year before the 2009 survey. We are now further developing these lines of research. Page 3 of 9

5 We conduct analysis with micro-level, geo-coded datasets. This analysis involves two approaches. First, we use surveys, both original and those conducted by others, to measure a range of relevant variables at the smallest possible geographic level. For Pakistan, this is typically the district (there are approximately 120 districts with the exact number varying over the period we will study). We then employ standard panel-data econometrics including fixed-effect, first-differences, difference-in-differences, and instrumental variable regressions to identify the causal impact of changes in key independent variables (economic activity, public opinion, etc.) on levels of political violence. Keywords: Terrorism, Economic Development, Political Attitudes, Micro data 2. Research Accomplishments This year, three articles were published in refereed journals reporting on topics supported by CREATE in prior years. Berman, Shapiro, and Felter s paper, Can Hearts and Minds Be Bought? The Economics of Counterinsurgency in Iraq was published in the Journal of Political Economy this August. This was originally published as a National Bureau of Economic (NBER) working paper and was the first to use data from Iraq to evaluate the effects of reconstruction efforts on violence levels. The econometric approach used in this paper has now been replicated by two U.S. government research teams working in Afghanistan. The article, Do Working Men Rebel? Insurgency and Unemployment in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines (Berman, Callen, Felter, Shapiro, 2011) was published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, a leading field journal in international relations. Bullock, Imai, and Shapiro s (2011) article in Political Analysis discusses the use of statistical methodology to analyze endorsement experiments, drawing on the CREATE-funded 2009 survey of political attitudes in Pakistan. In addition, three new working papers by Fair, Malhotra, and Shapiro examining the 2009 Pakistan survey are under review. The one examining links between socio-economic status and support for militancy received a revise and resubmit from American Journal of Political Science, while the other two are still under review. We have been working on data preparations to complement two separately funded projects that will provide important new evidence to inform our understanding of political violence in Pakistan. The Research Specialist funded by CREATE has been developing panel data from 8 waves of household economic surveys in Pakistan that will be combined with data from the two projects noted below to produce additional academic articles in support of the CREATE research agenda. Fair, Rais, and Shapiro developed data on 27,555 incidents of political violence in Pakistan from The database builds on standard approaches to coding quantitative event data from public sources to understand the phenomenon of political violence in Pakistan. A team of coders in Pakistan reviewed every issue of The Dawn, the largest-circulation English-language daily in Pakistan, during the period. A separately-funded U.S. team conducted 10% reliability samples from The Dawn and the Daily Jang, the largest circulation Urdu-language daily in Pakistan. The data identifies the actors, type of violence, their targets, and the locations where they committed violence. With these data, we can examine who committed violence, where, against whom and by what means. Building off Fair and Shapiro s successful survey effort in Pakistan in 2009 (supported by a previous CREATE grant), we secured separate funding that will allow us to refine both the endorsementexperiment methodology and to further analyze the causes of support for militancy. We are currently fielding a 16,000 person follow-on survey that will entail a representative sample of Pakistan s four main provinces as well as the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The instrument includes measurements of support for the Pakistan Taliban which we did not ask about in This survey uses refined experimental manipulations to test how support for specific militant organizations varies in Page 4 of 9

6 response to changes in the respondents expectations for their own socio-economic prospects and beliefs about the costs militants impose on non-combatant populations. Major Milestones: 1. Conduct analysis on geo-spatial variation in terrorism within Pakistan June 2012 Progress: Data 99% complete, final cleaning ongoing. Initial assessment of sub-national variation indicates huge differences in trends across both time and space in the nature and intensity of violence. Changes in terrorism and conventional guerilla attacks, for example, are strongly correlated in only two of five provinces (FATA and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa). 2. Merge violence data with data from public opinion and household economic surveys June 2012 Progress: Merging with data from 2009 survey complete. Merging with set of seven variables from household economic surveys complete. Merging with additional surveys awaiting receipt of data ordered from FBS. 3. Produce draft of an academic paper September 2012 Progress: Initial analysis completed. 4. Prepare data for posting on ESOC website (Data and code books will be prepared by September 2012, but will be posted after working paper is complete.) Progress: Codebook complete. Main data 99% complete. Reliability sample 90% complete. 3. Applied Relevance This project aims to establish an empirically-based understanding of the relationship between political violence, development, economic outcomes, and public opinion by studying subnational patterns in Pakistan. Dealing with the challenges posed by militant violence in Pakistan stands at the top of the international and Pakistani security agendas. The militant infrastructure (i.e. training camps) of regionally and domestically focused groups operating in Pakistan has repeatedly been used by operatives conducting transnational attacks. Moreover, operatives who have fought in foreign conflicts gain access to small, secure networks than can be used for later attacks. All else equal, more support for extremist militancy abroad translates into more individuals with access to secure networks, which in turn creates a greater threat that terrorist conspiracies will be able to operate in expatriate communities in the United States. 4. Collaborative Projects N/A COLLABOTIVE PROJECTS Project Title Institution Contact Name CREATE Lead Status DHS Centers of Excellence Political Violence in Pakistan and The Politics of Militancy in Pakistan: Wave II Political Violence in Pakistan Other Universities Georgetown University C. Christine Fair Lahore University of Management Sciences Rasul Bakhsh Rais Shapiro Shapiro ongoing ongoing Page 5 of 9

7 Research Area Referred Not Referred PDF Available for DHS CREATE researcher Shapiro (Princeton) collaborated with C. Christine Fair (Georgetown), Kosuke Imai (Princeton) Neil Malhotra (Stanford), Rasul Bakhsh Rais (Lahore University of Management Sciences), and Ethan Bueno de Mequita (University of Chicago) on research and publications. Shapiro and Berman continue to collaborate on research investigating the underlying theories and economic modeling that inform this study of political violence in Pakistan. 5. Research Products Research Products (Please detail below) # 5a # of peer-reviewed journal reports published 3 5a # of peer-reviewed journal reports accepted for publication 0 5a # of non-peer reviewed publications and reports 4 5a # of scholarly journal citations of published reports 60 5b # of scholarly presentations (conferences, workshops, seminars) 9 5b # of outreach presentations (non-technical groups, general public) 2 5c # of products delivered to DHS, other Federal agencies, or State/Local N/A 5c # of patents filed N/A 5c # of patents issued N/A 5c # of products in commercialization pipeline (products not yet to market) N/A 5c # of products introduced to market N/A 5.1. Publications and Reports CREATE PUBLICATIONS Shapiro, Jacob Princeton University 1. Berman, E., Callen, M., Felter, J.H., Shapiro, J.N., Do Working Men Rebel? Unemployment and Insurgency in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Philippines, Journal of Conflict Resolution. Vol. 55 no. 4, , August Berman, E., Jacob N. Shapiro, and Joseph H. Felter. Can Hearts and Minds be Bought? The Economics of Counterinsurgency in Iraq. Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 119, No. 4, August Bullock, W., Kosuke I, and J,N. Shapiro. Statistical Analysis of Endorsement Experiments: Measuring Support for Militant Groups in Pakistan. Political Analysis, Vol. 19, No. 4, pp (lead article), Autumn C. Christine Fair, Jacob N. Shapiro and Neil A. Malhotra. Islam, Militancy and Politics in Pakistan: Insights from a National Sample. Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp , September Fair, C. Christine, Neil A. Malhotra, and Jacob N. Shapiro. Democratic Values and Support for Militancy: Evidence from a National Survey of Pakistan. Working Paper Series, Social Science Research Network, June 24, Blair, Graeme, C. Christine Fair, Neil A. Malhotra and Jacob N. Shapiro. Poverty and Support for Militant Politics: Evidence from Pakistan. Working Paper Series, Social Science Page 6 of 9

8 Research Area Referred Not Referred PDF Available for DHS CREATE PUBLICATIONS Research Network, May 3, Blair, Graeme, C. Christine Fair, Neil A. Malhotra, and Jacob N. Shapiro. Pakistan's Middle Class Extremists: Why Development Aid Won t Solve Radicalism, Foreign Affairs Online, July 11, Presentations PRESENTATIONS - CONFERENCES Shapiro, Jacob Princeton University 1. Shapiro, J. "Modeling Terrorists' Financial Inflection Points." National Counterterrorism Center, McLean, VA, March 9, Shapiro, J. "The Roots of Militancy: Explaining Support for Political Violence in Pakistan." Harvard University Conference, "Islam & Muslim Societies: An Analytical Examination," Cambridge, MA, April 8-9, Shapiro, J. "Governance: Finding an Afghan Path to Stability." CSIS Conference on "Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Art of the Possible," Washington D.C., June 14, Shapiro, J. and Radha Iyengar. "Working with Data from Conflict Zones: Overcoming Data Challenges." Governance, Development & Political Violence Summer Training Workshop, UC Institute on Global Conflict & Cooperation, UC San Diego, June 23, Shapiro, J. "Studying Political Violence - Terrorism, Insurgency & Civil Wars." EITM Summer Institute, Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, July 5, Shapiro, J., Graeme Blair, Neil Malhotra, and C. Christine Fair, "Poverty and Support for Militant Organizations in Pakistan." American Political Science Association 2011 Annual Meeting, Panel on the Politics of Terrorist and Militant Groups, September 3, Shapiro, J. Chair, Panel on Conflict, Civil War and Violence, American Political Science Association 2011 Annual Meeting, September 3, Shapiro, J. Terrorist Ideologies and Organizations, the State of the Field. For 2nd Annual Minerva Research Initiative Conference, Washington D.C., September 15, Shapiro, J. Roundtable: (Il)legality, State Building and State Responses Violence, Drugs, and Governance: Conference on Mexican Security in Comparative Perspective, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, October 4, PRESENTATIONS - OUTREACH EVENTS Shapiro, Jacob Princeton University 1. Shapiro, J. with panelists Jasheed Chosky, Debra Hess Norris, moderated by David Skorton, opening remarks by Chairman James A. Leach. Briefing on the Humanities in the 21st Century: Addressing National Security & Other Global Challenges Through Cultural Understanding NEH Congressional Page 7 of 9

9 PRESENTATIONS - OUTREACH EVENTS Briefing - Sponsored by National Humanities Alliance and Association of American Universities, May 19, 2010, Washington D.C., 2. Shapiro, J. with Nolan McCarty and Anne-Marie Slaughter. After Bin Laden: The Implications for Foreign Relations and Policy:" Woodrow Wilson School Public Panel Discussion. May 9, Education and Outreach Products Education and Outreach Initiatives (Please detail below) # # of students supported (funded by CREATE) 1 # of students involved (funded by CREATE + any other programs) 2 # of students graduated 0 # of contacts with DHS, other Federal agencies, or State/Local (committees) 2 # of existing courses modified with new material N/A # of new courses developed N/A # of new certificate programs developed N/A # of new degree programs developed N/A Last Name First Name 1. Graeme Blair 2. Scherer Thomas 3. Ghosh Anirban CREATE STUDENTS University School Department Degree Research Area Funded Princeton University Princeton University Georgetown University Woodrow Wilson Woodrow Wilson Department of Politics Department of Politics Department of Economics PhD candidate PhD candidate PhD candidate Risk Assessment Risk Assessment Risk Assessment No support No support Partial support MEETINGS WITH ETERNAL ORGANIZATIONS National Counterterrorism Center, McLean, VA, April 2011 U.S. Department of Defense, 2nd Annual Minerva Conference, University of California Washington Center, September 2011 Other Outreach Berman and Shapiro s research supported, in part, by CREATE was recently cited in key government documents or presentations. Page 8 of 9

10 Majority Staff Report to Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, "Evaluating Foreign Assistance to Afghanistan cites articles by Berman, Shapiro, et al. in Report Appendix, July 8, Dept of Defense Appropriations Act, 2012: H.R. 2219, Amendment offered by Mr. Welch in House Consideration of Defense Appropriations quoted Jake Shapiro regarding CERP in Iraq and Afghanistan, July, Related research by Berman and Shapiro et al. was cited in a short paper by the Civil-Military Fusion Center, which belongs to NATO. Publications by Shapiro, Fair, et al. were picked up in the media (newspaper, online news and blogs) in the United States and abroad this summer. Graeme Blair, Christine Fair, Neil Malhotra and Jacob Shapiro Broke and dangerous? Poor logic. The Times of India, May 28, Fareed Zakaria s CNN Blog, "Report: Poverty does not breed extremism" cites, Graeme Blair, C. Christine Fair, Neil Malhotra, Jacob Shapiro s paper on "Poverty and Support for Militant Politics: Evidence from Pakistan," June 7, "It's Not the Poor Who Support Militants" Jacob Shapiro, C. Christine Fair, Neil Malhotra, Graeme Blair, The Express Tribune, 6/9/11. Blog Mention: "Who Supports Islamic Militants in Pakistan." Erik Voeten on Jake Shapiro, C. Christine Fair, Neil Malhotra, and Graeme Blair. Blog: The Monkey Cage, 5/10/11. Blog Mention: "Pakistanis don't like Violent Radical Groups, but Support for them is Higher in the Middle Class." Commentary on Jake Shapiro, C. Christine Fair, Neil Malhotra, and Graeme Blair. "Poverty & Support for Militant Politics: Evidence from Pakistan." Blog: Yglesias, 5/11/11. Professor Shapiro included findings from this research project in an undergraduate lecture in the spring of 2011 at Princeton University entitled, Violent Politics. Page 9 of 9