Collective violence spreads through social learning among autonomous agents, especially when decisions of the observing agents are not simultaneous, but vicariously yet rationally made on the basis of information they receive from the actions of other agents on in-group. These actions and decisions can be expressed as a sequential game in which the outcome of […]
Category: Academic Articles
This paper sheds light on the recent spike in communal violence in India by theorizing unorganized violence as an epidemic. The basic premise is that riots, lynching, xenophobic assaults, and forms of spontaneous and uncoordinated violence spread rapidly when states fail to contain the initial violent events. Poor quarantine i.e. inadequate state response catalyzes the […]
This paper analyzes how mainstream parties respond to their niche challengers. We know that vote seeking behavior among mainstream parties motivate them to bracket the median voter (usually situated around the center of the political spectrum), which has a moderating effect on their electoral rhetoric. However,they shift their position relative to the mood of the […]
Natural disasters are increasingly overlapping with ongoing conflicts creating what scholars call dual disasters. However, these disasters also create’windows of opportunity’for the government and the rebels to take unprecedented actions. While the existing literature focuses on how governments deal with natural disasters, the rebel response to such exogenous shocks remains an understudied area. We seek […]
It is my second blog in the series on graduate education in the USA. I previously wrote an introductory post on the idea of graduate school: accessible here. I am also compelled to state that this guide is based on my personal experience as an applicant to various political science graduate programs, so it is best […]
Admission season has already kicked off, and my friends have started asking me questions about the graduate programs in the USA that I wish I knew the answers to before I applied. This blog post is the first in a series of posts on the process of preparation, selection, and admission to the (political/social sciences) […]