Politics is an inherently social activity, and political science tends to focus mostly on the actions of groups. Yet one common consequence of conflict is the atomization of groups — the creation of an environment so chaotic that individuals are forced to make important choices without the benefit of a group decision. This week and next on Deep Dive, we’ll look at research on how individuals — not leaders, but regular people caught in the storm of conflict — make decisions when violence looms.

A new paper by Aidan Milliff (indeed, Milliff’s job market paper, if you’re in the market for a promising political scientist) takes this question head on. Milliff investigates individual behavior during one of the most horrible and pressurized situations imaginable: a religious pogrom. In the wake of the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, mobs across India targeted Sikhs in a series of pogroms — Gandhi had been killed by her Sikh bodyguards after launching a campaign of repression against Sikhs. Some 3,300 people were killed in the pogroms, which also permanently displaced 13% of the Sikh population of Delhi.

Milliff divides responses to this violence into four broad categories: fleeing, hiding, adapting, and fighting. Some survivors of the pogroms recount staying silent in their homes as the mob approached, hoping to avoid detection or at least any action that would further inflame the mob. Others, even people who lived in the same neighborhood as those who chose to hide, took weapons and household items to the streets to defend their homes and temples — sometimes successfully, and sometimes at a heavy loss.

How, in the moment the mob approaches, do people choose between these impulses? Milliff argues that the choice is heavily influenced by how people understand two important variables: How well they can predict what is going to happen when the mob arrives, and how much they can influence what will happen when the mob arrives. People who believe themselves to be at the mercy of the mob — that is, to have little control over what happens — are likely to flee (if they cannot predict the extent of the violence) or to hide (if they can predict it and believe they can weather it). People who believe they can limit the mob’s violence — exerting control over the situation — are likely to fight in situations when they cannot predict the mob’s intention, and adapt to a new reality in situations where they can predict and shape the mob’s actions.

Milliff tested this theory by drawing on an archive of over 500 oral histories gathered from survivors of the 1984 pogroms and other, related anti-Sikh violence in the 1980s and 1990s. He combined human coding and text analysis software to evaluate the oral histories based on how the speakers described their beliefs about their ability to predict or control the violence. They combed the transcripts for stories, phrases, metaphors, and direct reflections to gather as much information about the speakers’ perceptions as possible.

The results found by human coders confirmed Milliff’s theory, showing a strong relationship between a sense of control and responding actively or passively to violent threats. The computer coding, which investigated more data but also produced noisier, less precise estimates, showed slightly less strong results on the particulars of choices about fleeing vs hiding or fighting vs adapting, but showed very strong results when looking at the bigger picture. According to the computer data, people who had high perceptions of their control and prediction abilities were much more likely to adapt and half as likely to flee as people with low perceptions of both characteristics.

Milliff’s understanding of snap decisions in conflict helps us grasp why there is often so much variation in how people respond to major threats. Going forward, gaining a better understanding of the political and psychological determinants of how people perceive their control and predictability may help people better understand how to assist victims in precarious situations.

Halima Gikandi spoke to analysts who are concerned that the global "war on terror" has not ended but merely shifted venues to Africa. Al-Qaeda and ISIS both have a substantial presence on the continent, and US involvement in counterterrorism operations in African countries has been on the rise in recent years. To analysts, however, interpreting local and regional conflicts in Africa through the lens of a US-led crusade against terrorism is wrongheaded. As one told Gikandi, “I don’t think the international approach in terms of fighting global terrorism can be relevant in this context or anywhere else.” Instead, they urge people to take conflicts on their own terms and consider local conflict dynamics.

Graham West and Rajanpreet Kaur recounted the prejudice and hate Sikhs in the US experienced in the wake of 9/11. Four days after the attack, a Sikh man in Mesa, Arizona, was murdered in a hate crime, the first fatality in a string of attacks against people perceived to be Muslim in the US. The killing and many other similarly-motivated attacks prompted the Sikh community to create the Sikh Coalition, a civil rights group that provides legal aid to Sikh Americans experiencing discrimination. Today, government discrimination against Sikhs continues, including in the form of Transportation Security Administration profiling. As with American Muslims, when the US government interacts with its Sikh citizens, often the only words it can say are a noun, a verb, and 9/11.

Rebecca Rosman profiled Abdul Saboor, an Afghan photographer who has been shooting images of migrant life across Europe. Saboor was a migrant himself, fleeing his home country in 2014 after working as a translator for NATO forces. He took up photography in a refugee camp in Syria and, after receiving asylum in France in 2018, has become an award-winning professional photographer. His work aims to educate the world about the plight and humanity of migrants attempting to make new lives in the face of largely hostile European policies, and it is informed by both his experience and his continued volunteer work in migrant encampments near Calaís.

If they ever discover the American Chopper meme format, we’ll have reached some sort of singularity.

“Mark Milley” does sound suspiciously like “Merkin Muffley.”

The McDonalds at Guantanamo is a real puzzler when it comes to evaluating the Golden Arches theory. Anyway, they commemorated 9/11 there.

The marks on his shoulder kept going back and forth between this and this.

Love to sit down at my Langley typewriter and begin a sentence, “Considering the likelihood of acquiring information through the use of the dolphin…”

This week in metaphors, America’s most hallowed Burger King trailer got patriotically repurposed into a cash cow for a military contractor in Afghanistan.

A truly savage takedown.