Dissertation Project
“Advising War: Limited Intervention in Conflict,” examines why great powers send military advisors to work with local militaries during conflict and the circumstances in which this form of intervention is likely to occur. When intervening in a civil war, how can great powers induce their weaker local partners to do what they want? Existing literature uses principal-agent theory to argue that principals can gain their agents’ compliance by consistently rewarding them for good behavior and punishing them for bad behavior (Berman and Lake 2019; Ladwig III 2017). I argue that intervening states frequently rely on a different, overlooked tool to manage local partners: sending military advisors to directly shape their militaries through monitoring and influencing them. Furthermore, evidence suggests that advisors actually can influence the local military's approach to civil-military relations and human rights like interveners expect, although effects vary depending on the intervener, how thoroughly advisors are embedded in the local military, and whether they are accompanied by diplomatic pressure on the local partner. The project formulates these questions using game theory, and empirically evaluates the theory using archival research conducted at eight physical and digital archives, interviews with 28 US military advisors, and original quantitative data on intervention with military advisors by the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom from 1946-2019. Qualitative case studies focus on U.S. intervention in El Salvador under the Carter and Reagan administrations (1979-89), Soviet intervention in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion (1978-79), and US and Russian intervention in Ukraine from 2014 to present.
Dissertation committee: Paul Poast (chair), Austin Carson, Monika Nalepa, and Paul Staniland
Dissertation committee: Paul Poast (chair), Austin Carson, Monika Nalepa, and Paul Staniland
Publications
Pape, Robert A., Alejandro Albanez Rivas, and Alexandra C. Chinchilla. Introducing the new CPOST dataset on suicide attacks. Journal of Peace Research. April 2021.
The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats presents the updated and expanded Database on Suicide Attacks (DSAT), which now links to Uppsala Conflict Data Program data on armed conflicts and includes a new dataset measuring the alliance and rivalry relationships among militant groups with connections to suicide attack groups. We assess global trends in suicide attacks over four decades, and demonstrate the value of the expanded DSAT with special attention to the growing diffusion of suicide attacks in armed conflicts and the large role of networks established by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State through 2019 in this diffusion. Overall, the expanded DSAT demonstrates the advantages of integration across datasets of political violence for expanding research on important outcomes, generating new knowledge about the spread of particularly deadly forms of political violence, and raising important new questions about the efficacy of current policies to curb their spread.
Poast, Paul and Chinchilla, Alexandra. Good for democracy? Evidence from the 2004 NATO expansion. International Politics (2020).
Did NATO expansion foster democratic development in Eastern Europe? Past scholarship offers conflicting answers to this question. We seek to bring clarity by focusing on the 2004 NATO expansion to include the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. We leverage the fact that we now as many years of data since NATO entry as we have between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 2004 NATO expansion. We also use newly available and highly refined data on regime type. We show that NATO membership and anticipation thereof had little to no influence on democratic development in Eastern Europe. However, anticipation of European Union membership appears to have bolstered democratic development. Although the results cannot fully rule out NATO playing a secondary role, they make clear that NATO membership was not a necessary condition for democratic survival in Eastern Europe.
Chinchilla, Alexandra and Poast, Paul. Defense Institution Building from Above? Lessons from the Baltic Experience. Connections QJ 17, no. 3 (2018): 61-71.
Defense institution building (DIB) seeks to create the means and mechanisms that enable effective capability aggregation within NATO. Can external assistance with DIB help states become suitable NATO members? We discuss the post-Cold War experience of the Baltic States to understand the role of external assistance in defense institution building and how this can enable a state to gain NATO membership. We then consider whether lessons in the Baltic experience are applicable to Georgia and Ukraine.
The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats presents the updated and expanded Database on Suicide Attacks (DSAT), which now links to Uppsala Conflict Data Program data on armed conflicts and includes a new dataset measuring the alliance and rivalry relationships among militant groups with connections to suicide attack groups. We assess global trends in suicide attacks over four decades, and demonstrate the value of the expanded DSAT with special attention to the growing diffusion of suicide attacks in armed conflicts and the large role of networks established by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State through 2019 in this diffusion. Overall, the expanded DSAT demonstrates the advantages of integration across datasets of political violence for expanding research on important outcomes, generating new knowledge about the spread of particularly deadly forms of political violence, and raising important new questions about the efficacy of current policies to curb their spread.
Poast, Paul and Chinchilla, Alexandra. Good for democracy? Evidence from the 2004 NATO expansion. International Politics (2020).
Did NATO expansion foster democratic development in Eastern Europe? Past scholarship offers conflicting answers to this question. We seek to bring clarity by focusing on the 2004 NATO expansion to include the three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. We leverage the fact that we now as many years of data since NATO entry as we have between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the 2004 NATO expansion. We also use newly available and highly refined data on regime type. We show that NATO membership and anticipation thereof had little to no influence on democratic development in Eastern Europe. However, anticipation of European Union membership appears to have bolstered democratic development. Although the results cannot fully rule out NATO playing a secondary role, they make clear that NATO membership was not a necessary condition for democratic survival in Eastern Europe.
Chinchilla, Alexandra and Poast, Paul. Defense Institution Building from Above? Lessons from the Baltic Experience. Connections QJ 17, no. 3 (2018): 61-71.
Defense institution building (DIB) seeks to create the means and mechanisms that enable effective capability aggregation within NATO. Can external assistance with DIB help states become suitable NATO members? We discuss the post-Cold War experience of the Baltic States to understand the role of external assistance in defense institution building and how this can enable a state to gain NATO membership. We then consider whether lessons in the Baltic experience are applicable to Georgia and Ukraine.
Work in Progress
"Warlord Coordination As State-Building In Post-Maidan Ukraine." with Jesse Driscoll, University of California San Diego.
Since 2014, cooperative consolidation of factional armed groups has taken place in Ukraine. The theoretical contribution of this paper is a simple model of militia consolidation. Analysis of the model illuminates a number of strategic dilemmas associated with U.S. support for Ukrainian military consolidation processes. Though flows of Western aid to Ukraine should never drop to zero in the model, some foreign aid is certain be repurposed to keep the incumbent Ukrainian regime in power. Non-territorial militias have very strong incentives to organize themselves into "blocking coalitions" to maximize rent extraction from the central state by threatening to sabotage political order. Implications for U.S. policy in Ukraine are discussed. The empirical contribution of this paper is an original analytic narrative that evaluates the model’s predictions using an original dataset of field commanders, descriptive results of an original survey of Ukrainian militia members, and a variety of qualitative evidence.
"Authoritarian Commitment to Military Professionalism: How Security Alliances Reduce Coups and Coup Attempts Under Dictatorships." with Tolgahan Dilgin, University of Illinois.
"Training Future Leaders: The Effect of US Military Training on Human Rights in Recipient Countries," with Genevieve Bates and Andres Uribe, University of Chicago.
"Do Threats Work? Third Party Intervention and Humanitarian Violations in Civil War."
"Gray Zone Bargaining: Coercion through Low Intensity Warfare and the Credible Threat of Escalation." with Jonathan Askonas, Catholic University.
Since 2014, cooperative consolidation of factional armed groups has taken place in Ukraine. The theoretical contribution of this paper is a simple model of militia consolidation. Analysis of the model illuminates a number of strategic dilemmas associated with U.S. support for Ukrainian military consolidation processes. Though flows of Western aid to Ukraine should never drop to zero in the model, some foreign aid is certain be repurposed to keep the incumbent Ukrainian regime in power. Non-territorial militias have very strong incentives to organize themselves into "blocking coalitions" to maximize rent extraction from the central state by threatening to sabotage political order. Implications for U.S. policy in Ukraine are discussed. The empirical contribution of this paper is an original analytic narrative that evaluates the model’s predictions using an original dataset of field commanders, descriptive results of an original survey of Ukrainian militia members, and a variety of qualitative evidence.
"Authoritarian Commitment to Military Professionalism: How Security Alliances Reduce Coups and Coup Attempts Under Dictatorships." with Tolgahan Dilgin, University of Illinois.
"Training Future Leaders: The Effect of US Military Training on Human Rights in Recipient Countries," with Genevieve Bates and Andres Uribe, University of Chicago.
"Do Threats Work? Third Party Intervention and Humanitarian Violations in Civil War."
"Gray Zone Bargaining: Coercion through Low Intensity Warfare and the Credible Threat of Escalation." with Jonathan Askonas, Catholic University.
Other Writing
Alexandra Chinchilla. Review of Groh, Tyrone L., Proxy War: The Least Bad Option. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. May, 2020.
Rauta, Vladimir, Matthew Ayton, Alexandra Chinchilla, Andreas Krieg, Christopher Rickard & Jean-Marc Rickli (2019) A Symposium – debating ‘surrogate warfare’ and the transformation of war, Defence Studies, 19:4, 410-430.
"The Development of the Modern U.S.-Polish Relationship and Its Future Prospects." with Stephen D. Mull in Projekt 'Polska': Silne i Bezpieczne Panstwo? ed. Anna Antczak-Barzan. Warszawa: Vizja Press, 2014: 255-267.
Rauta, Vladimir, Matthew Ayton, Alexandra Chinchilla, Andreas Krieg, Christopher Rickard & Jean-Marc Rickli (2019) A Symposium – debating ‘surrogate warfare’ and the transformation of war, Defence Studies, 19:4, 410-430.
"The Development of the Modern U.S.-Polish Relationship and Its Future Prospects." with Stephen D. Mull in Projekt 'Polska': Silne i Bezpieczne Panstwo? ed. Anna Antczak-Barzan. Warszawa: Vizja Press, 2014: 255-267.