Monica Duffy Toft is an American international relations scholar. Her research interests include international security and strategy, ethnic and religious violence, civil wars, and the relationship between demography and national security. Among her researches, her theory of indivisible territory explains how certain conflicts turn violent while others not, and when it is likely for a conflict to become a violent. [1] Since 2017 she holds the position of Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts University, and Director of the Fletcher School's Center for Strategic Studies.
Toft graduated from the U.S. Army's Defense Language Institute in 1984 with highest honours. She then completed the Associate of Arts General Curriculum of the University of Maryland's European Division in 1987. In 1990 Toft graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in political science and Slavic languages and literature from the University of California Santa Barbara. She went on to the University of Chicago, where she completed both an M.A. (1992) and a Ph.D. (1998) in political science.[ citation needed ] The title of her doctoral dissertation was The Geography of Ethnic Conflict.
Toft's professional career began in the U.S. Army where she worked as a Russian linguist from 1983 to 1987. After completing her education, Toft joined the faculty at Harvard University where she was a professor of international politics at the Kennedy School of Government and Assistant Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies. When the Olin Institute closed in 2007, Toft then established and directed the Initiative on Religion in International Affairs at the Kennedy School. [2] In September 2012, Toft joined the faculty of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford as Professor of Government and Public Policy. During this period, she also spent four months as Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. She left Oxford in 2017 to join Tufts University.
Toft is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Minorities at Risk Advisory Board, and the Political Instability Task Force. She is also Principal Investigator of the Commonwealth Initiative on Religious Freedom or Belief and a senior research scholar with the Modeling Religion Project, Institute for the Biocultural Study of Religion, Boston University.
Her work has been recognised through numerous awards, grants and fellowships, including being named Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Foundation of New York for her research on religion and violence in 2008, awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to Norway in 2012, and granted Princeton's World Politics Fellowship in 2015 .[ citation needed ]
Toft is married to Ivan Arreguín-Toft, [3] also a scholar of international security and strategic studies and an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University. [4]
A civil war is a war between organized groups within the same state . The aim of one side may be to take control of the country or a region, to achieve independence for a region, or to change government policies. The term is a calque of Latin bellum civile which was used to refer to the various civil wars of the Roman Republic in the 1st century BC.
An ethnic conflict is a conflict between two or more ethnic groups. While the source of the conflict may be political, social, economic or religious, the individuals in conflict must expressly fight for their ethnic group's position within society. This criterion differentiates ethnic conflict from other forms of struggle.
Peacekeeping comprises activities, especially military ones, intended to create conditions that favor lasting peace. Research generally finds that peacekeeping reduces civilian and battlefield deaths, as well as reduces the risk of renewed warfare.
A failed state is a state that has lost its effective ability to govern its populace. A failed state maintains legal sovereignty but experiences a breakdown in political power, law enforcement, and civil society, leading to a state of near-anarchy.
Regime change is the partly forcible or coercive replacement of one government regime with another. Regime change may replace all or part of the state's most critical leadership system, administrative apparatus, or bureaucracy. Regime change may occur through domestic processes, such as revolution, coup, or reconstruction of government following state failure or civil war. It can also be imposed on a country by foreign actors through invasion, overt or covert interventions, or coercive diplomacy. Regime change may entail the construction of new institutions, the restoration of old institutions, and the promotion of new ideologies.
Interventionism is a political practice of intervention, particularly to the practice of governments to interfere in political affairs of other countries, staging military or trade interventions. Economic interventionism is a different practice of intervention, one of economic policy at home.
State-building as a specific term in social sciences and humanities, refers to political and historical processes of creation, institutional consolidation, stabilization and sustainable development of states, from the earliest emergence of statehood up to the modern times. Within historical and political sciences, there are several theoretical approaches to complex questions related to the role of various contributing factors in state-building processes.
The Logic of Violence in Civil War is a book which challenges the conventional view of violence in civil wars as irrational. The book presents a theory for levels of violence, as well as why selective violence and indiscriminate violence are at varying times employed in civil wars. He argues that higher levels of violence happen in territory under near-hegemonic rule, as opposed to completely fragmented territory or fully controlled territory. He argues that violence will tend towards being indiscriminate in territory under fragmented control but be selective in territory under near-hegemonic control.
Sectarian violence in Iraq refers to the violence that developed as a result of rising sectarian tensions between the different religious and ethnic groups of Iraq, most notably the conflict between the Shi'i Muslim majority and the Sunni Muslim minority within the country. With the creation of a modern nation-state, sectarian tensions arose slowly and eventually developed into recent violent conflicts such as the War in Iraq (2013–2017) and the Iraqi civil war (2006–2008).
Jack A. Goldstone is an American sociologist, political scientist, and historian, specializing in studies of social movements, revolutions, political demography, and the 'Rise of the West' in world history. He is an author or editor of 13 books and over 150 research articles. He is recognized as one of the leading authorities on the study of revolutions and long-term social change. His work has made foundational contributions to the fields of cliodynamics, economic history and political demography. He was the first scholar to describe in detail and document the long-term cyclical relationship between global population cycles and cycles of political rebellion and revolution. He was also a core member of the "California school" in world history, which replaced the standard view of a dynamic West and stagnant East with a ‘late divergence’ model in which Eastern and Western civilizations underwent similar political and economic cycles until the 18th century, when Europe achieved the technical breakthroughs of industrialization. He is also one of the founding fathers of the emerging field of political demography, studying the impact of local, regional, and global population trends on international security and national politics.
Global Peace Index (GPI) is a report produced by the Institute for Economics & Peace (IEP) which measures the relative position of nations' and regions' peacefulness. The GPI ranks 163 independent states and territories according to their levels of peacefulness. In the past decade, the GPI has presented trends of increased global violence and less peacefulness.
Security studies, also known as international security studies, is an academic sub-field within the wider discipline of international relations that studies organized violence, military conflict, national security, and international security.
The capitalist peace, or capitalist peace theory, or commercial peace, posits that market openness contributes to more peaceful behavior among states, and that developed market-oriented economies are less likely to engage in conflict with one another. Along with the democratic peace theory and institutionalist arguments for peace, the commercial peace forms part of the Kantian tripod for peace. Prominent mechanisms for the commercial peace revolve around how capitalism, trade interdependence, and capital interdependence raise the costs of warfare, incentivize groups to lobby against war, make it harder for leaders to go to war, and reduce the economic benefits of conquest.
Political violence is violence which is perpetrated in order to achieve political goals. It can include violence which is used by a state against other states (war), violence which is used by a state against civilians and non-state actors, and violence which is used by violent non-state actors against states and civilians. It can also describe politically motivated violence which is used by violent non-state actors against a state or it can describe violence which is used against other non-state actors and/or civilians. Non-action on the part of a government can also be characterized as a form of political violence, such as refusing to alleviate famine or otherwise denying resources to politically identifiable groups within their territory.
Political demography is the study of the relationship between politics and population change. Population change is driven by classic demographic mechanisms – birth, death, age structure, and migration.
Kimberly Marten is an author and scholar specializing in international security, foreign policy, Russia, and environmental politics. She held the 5-year-term Ann Whitney Olin Professorship of Political Science at Barnard College from 2013 to 2018, and then returned to chair the Barnard Political Science Department for a second time from 2018-2021. She was the director of the Program on U.S.-Russia Relations at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute from 2015 to 2019, and the Harriman Institute published a profile of her career. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and a frequent media commentator.
In international relations theory, the bargaining model of war is a method of representing the potential gains and losses and ultimate outcome of war between two actors as a bargaining interaction. A central puzzle that motivates research in this vein is the "inefficiency puzzle of war": why do wars occur when it would be better for all parties involved to reach an agreement that goes short of war? In the bargaining model, war between rational actors is possible due to uncertainty and commitment problems. As a result, provision of reliable information and steps to alleviate commitment problems make war less likely. It is an influential strand of rational choice scholarship in the field of international relations.
Jack Lewis Snyder is an American political scientist who is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Columbia University, specializing in theories of international relations.
Rational choice is a prominent framework in international relations scholarship. Rational choice is not a substantive theory of international politics, but rather a methodological approach that focuses on certain types of social explanation for phenomena. In that sense, it is similar to constructivism, and differs from liberalism and realism, which are substantive theories of world politics. Rationalist analyses have been used to substantiate realist theories, as well as liberal theories of international relations.
Determinants of violence against civilians in a civil conflict are factors that may either provide incentives for the use of violence against civilians, or create incentives for restraint. Violence against civilians occurs in many types of civil conflict, and can include any acts in which force is used to harm or damage civilians or civilian targets. It can be lethal or nonlethal. During periods of armed conflict, there are structures, actors, and processes at a number of levels that affect the likelihood of violence against civilians.