Camber Warren

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Camber Warren:
I am currently serving as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the International Conflict Research (ICR) group and the Center for Comparative and International Studies (CIS) at ETH Zurich. Prior to my arrival in Zurich, I also served as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton’s Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, after graduating with a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University in 2008, with concentrations in International Relations and Political Methodology. My research interests include interstate security, international communication, civil conflict, ethnic politics, statistical methods, and computational modeling. I have designed and taught courses on ethnic identity and guerilla warfare and have led sections in a variety of traditional International Relations subdisciplines including: international law and institutions, national security policy, and international political economy.

My first book project, The Breakdown of Peace, is based on my dissertation research, which examined the relationship between national mass media structures and the construction of symbolic national allegiances utilizing a variety of methodologies, including multilevel hierarchical linear models, structural equation models, Bayesian model averaging, social network analysis, agent-based computational simulations, and qualitative process-tracing. In it, I develop a structural approach to the analysis of the causal effects of mass communication, which focuses on the distribution of opportunities for transmission and reception rather than the details of message content. The central argument is that mass media structures are critical to the development of national, sub-national, and transnational symbolic allegiances because they create communities of shared experience and thereby generate symbolic touchstones which allow individuals to feel connected to a seemingly unified moral community. This framework thus endogenizes the emergence of intra-state security dilemmas, by describing the structural conditions under which divided group loyalties are more likely to emerge. It also overturns much of the conventional wisdom concerning the relationship between media and collective violence by demonstrating that mass communication networks, which have frequently been blamed for stoking inter-group animosities, can actually serve as powerful forces for domestic peace and stability.

Concurrently, I am also developing independent projects on interstate conflict, alliance formation, and treaty compliance into article length publications.