-- This event has been cancelled. --

The Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law invites you to "Do Terrorists Win? Rebels' Use of Terrorism and Civil War Outcomes" with Page Fortna, Professor at Columbia Universtiy, on Tuesday, February 26 at 12:15 pm in Sid Richardson Hall, Room 3.122. Refreshments will be provided.

Why do some rebel groups resort to terrorism as a tactic while others do not?  Why some opposition groups engage in terrorism while others eschew this tactic is of obvious importance both to the study of terrorism more generally, and to policy makers.  But most existing studies of terrorism are not well-equipped to answer this question as they lack an appropriate comparison category.  Most studies of where terrorism occurs focus on why some states are more likely to be the target of terrorism, not on why some groups choose to use it.  In this talk, Page Fortna will examine rebel groups in armed conflicts from 1970-2010 as a universe of relatively comparable cases some of whom use terrorism in their fight against the government while others do not.  Fortna will test the conventional wisdom that terrorism is a “weapon of the weak,” as well as arguments about the effect of regime type, secessionism, religion, and a number of other prominent hypotheses on the causes of terrorism.

Page Fortna is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and a member of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. Her research focuses on the durability of peace in the aftermath of both civil and interstate wars, war termination, and, most recently, terrorism. She is the author of two books: Does Peacekeeping Work? Shaping Belligerents Choices after Civil War (Princeton University Press, 2008) and Peace Time: Cease-Fire Agreements and the Durability of Peace (Princeton University Press, 2004). She has published articles in journals such as World Politics, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and International Studies Review. She is currently working on a book project on the causes and consequences of terrorism in civil wars. Fortna was honored to receive the International Studies Association’s Karl Deutsch Award in 2010, and has been the recipient of grants from the NSF, the Carnegie Corporation, the Smith Richardson Foundation. She was a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University (2004-2005) and a Visiting Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA (2002-2003). Before coming to Columbia, Fortna was a pre-doctoral and then a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. Her graduate work was done in the Government Department at Harvard University (Ph.D. 1998). Before graduate school, she worked at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a think tank in Washington DC. She is a graduate of Wesleyan University. She teaches classes on international politics, war termination, cooperation and security, terrorism, and research methods.