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My name is Jason Hartwig and I am a doctoral candidate in Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania and Graduate Affiliate of the Penn Identity and Conflict Lab. My work focuses on armed conflict, state-building, identity, and intervention. This research agenda spans international relations and comparative politics. I am also a combat veteran and have spent over a decade in security sector reform positions grappling with armed conflict around the world. These formative experiences with war have profoundly shaped my academic career in an effort to understand conflict processes to better prescribe approaches to mitigating and resolving violent conflict.
I frame my research around three broad questions. First, under what conditions do groups and individuals mobilize to commit violence during wartime? Second, how does violent conflict and efforts to manage violence inform state-building processes? Finally, how is military force employed effectively to achieve political ends? I approach these questions through a mix of econometric and qualitative approaches, often employing entirely novel data, including a first of its kind dataset of violence during the U.S. Civil War.
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My dissertation project, Combatants and Communities: Security Orders during Civil War, examines how violence between community groups is managed during civil wars through what I term "security orders." Within this work, I introduce a novel approach to conceptualizing and measuring territorial control and additionally theorize how the salience of particular identities can mobilize communities to participate in violence or cooperate in the absence of external arbitration. I find that indirect modes of territorial control over low social cohesion communities exacerbate communal violence, while direct modes of control can contain violence. In line with literature on civilian efforts to avoid violence during wartime, I find that high cohesion communities are able to mitigate internal conflict even with limited external arbitration from government.Part of my dissertation, and standalone paper entitled "The End of Rebel Rule," is forthcoming in the Journal of Peace Research, and demonstrates the adverse local effects of the external peacekeeping intervention in Somalia. In other work, I advance a novel approach to considering the effects of military innovation, highlighting an innovator’s curse, where states that have successfully employed major military innovations embark on a path that ultimately leads them to devastating defeats in systemic wars. In a separate project, I theorize new approaches to understanding the employment of military force through capturing asymmetries in capabilities within domains of command and control, mobility, and massed fires. My previous professional experience includes service as an armor and cavalry officer in the United States Army, during which time I led tank and scout platoons in the troop surges in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have additionally worked in the U.S. Department of Justice and supported the U.S. Mission to Somalia. I also had the pleasure of spending a summer as a seasonal park ranger at Vicksburg National Military Park. I hold a Master's Degree in Security Studies from Georgetown University and a Bachelor's Degree in History from Dartmouth College, where I additionally minored in Native American Studies and graduated with Suma Cum Laude honors. I was born and raised in Gettysburg, PA. I try to spend as much time outside as I can manage and enjoy hiking, fishing, running, and managing my garden. I live in Philadelphia with my wife, daughter, and our dog, Scout, who followed me home from Afghanistan many years ago.
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