Author-Meets-Critics: Jason Lyall's Divided Armies

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

"Divided Armies" examines the question of why armies have varied so widely in their battlefield performance in conventional wars since 1800. Challenging traditional explanations of material power or regime type, the book argues that prewar inequality within a belligerent's society shapes its battlefield performance once war begins. Divided Armies tests this claim using a wide range of sources, including a new dataset of conventional wars (1800-2011), a natural experiment, three paired comparisons, and a microlevel comparison of four Soviet Rifle Divisions in 1941. The book's methodology also breaks new ground by explicitly incorporating counterfactual analysis and the use of randomization to select matched pairs of cases for process tracing using primary documents in multiple languages. Divided Armies also sheds light on a range of battlefield behaviors, including mass desertion, defection, and fratricidal violence, that have been ignored to date.

Taken together, the book issues a challenge to both existing theories and our ways of conceptualizing battlefield behavior in modern war. Many of these findings are controversial, however, as they arise from a central concept --- inequality --- that scholars have neglected or dismissed. This panel brings together a range of perspectives on the question of what drives battlefield performance and the role of inequality in explaining its variation over the past two centuries.

Sub Unit

• Division 21: Conflict Processes

Chair

• Jason Lyall Dartmouth College

Presenters

• Alexander B. Downes George Washington University

• Tanisha Fazal University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

• Michael Horowitz University of Pennsylvania

• Laia Balcells Georgetown University

• Yuri M. Zhukov University of Michigan, Ann Arbor