“Civilian Control of Political Decision-Making Institutions and Civil War.”
Date and Time: March 21, Friday, 2025, 12:30-14:30
Venue: A130 Seminar Room
Speaker:
Dr. Rizwan Asghar, Trinity College Dublin
Abstract
Previous research has emphasized the importance of institutions that allow representation of opposition groups’ interests in reducing the risk of civil war. However, the extant research has overlooked the function of top executive policymaking bodies that play a key role in formulating legislative agendas and are responsible for policy implementation. Considering the role of top policymaking bodies (cabinet and state councils), this article examines the effect of variation in civilian control of political decision-making institutions – an institutional dimension that remains uncaptured by typology of regimes in existing literature. I argue that weak civilian control of political decision making increases the risk of civil conflict by reducing civilian input, enabling pursuit of military’s hawkish preferences and making accountability for actions of the military elite more difficult. The results provide strong support for my hypothesis and are robust to alternative explanations. I complement these results with a case study of El Salvador (1975–1980), which corroborates the causal mechanisms highlighted in the theory.
Short biography:
Rizwan Asghar is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Political Science at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Davis. His research broadly focuses on international security, civil-military relations, conflict dynamics, and nuclear proliferation. From a methodological perspective, his interests are in quantitative approaches to causal inference, survey methods, and machine learning. The primary focus of his research is to understand implications of variation in civilian control of political decision-making institutions for the onset and duration of civil conflicts. He also makes a methodological contribution in the literature by developing two-dimensional latent measures of civilian control, which distinguishes between objective and subjective dimensions of civilian control. His other stream of research employs survey experiments to examine the mechanisms through which military power, traditionally viewed as an instrument of hard power, can also serve as an effective tool of soft power and diplomacy. His research has been published in Conflict Management and Peace Science.