Ari Weil

What happens to the anti-government movement when someone they support takes power? When Donald Trump was elected in 2016, the U.S. militia movement faced a challenge of narrative coherence: the risk that the stories the movement tells were no longer logically consistent. This article investigates the Oath Keepers, a group that pivoted from staunch opposition to federal power to supporting Trump, and ultimately in 2020 called for massive military action to suppress protests and re-run the election. Through an analysis of 137 official Oath Keepers online statements and posts from 2015–2021 and over 4,000 comments by followers and members on
those posts, two narrative strategies are identified. First, the group extended their existing narrative by continuing to tell Revolutionary War metaphors but made Trump the new protagonist in those stories. Second, they used semantic adjustments to avoid hypocrisy as they embraced central state power. As they aligned with
Trump, the military gradually supplanted the militia as a key actor in their narratives of change. Additionally, in 2020 they told their followers to no longer use the term martial law in order to make their new narrative fit within their founding ideology. This article bridges work on narratives in terrorism studies and the large civil war literature on shifting alignments and provides a deeper understanding of the strategic messaging of anti-government extremists. At a more micro-level, the analysis of debates among followers gives insight into how anti-government extremists think about their relationship to the state.

When do rebel groups on the same side of a civil war choose to target another? Intra-movement conflicts are counterproductive yet occur surprisingly often. Existing scholarship focuses on the balance of power and ideology as causes. Yet this misses a critical element—the social costliness of infighting. I develop a theory of constituency costs: social sanctions that can result in the loss of funds, recruits, or supplies. To avoid incurring these costs, I predict rebels will attack when their rivals become unpopular among the shared constituency. This theory is tested on the Zionist insurgency in Mandatory Palestine, drawing on a diverse set of primary sources. The balance of Jewish public opinion was key in shaping when and how the Haganah chose to attack its rivals. This project contributes to research on rebel competition and broader IR scholarship that shows how public opinion can enable or constrain, even in weakly institutionalized settings.

This article analyzes how leaders understand geography. An important function of bureaucracy, when foreign policy crises or opportunities arise, is to provide leaders with geographic orientation – a detailed accounting of place and space needed to understand and respond to events. Maps and other materials are central to this. They shape leaders’ perceptions and can influence the likelihood of success and failure. We present results from an analysis of the maps and text included in daily, highly-classified intelligence summaries prepared for each president during the Vietnam War. We theorize that the need for a leader to attend to geography varies depending on the phase of war and the strategy chosen by the leader. We first show how these factors influence the volume and precision of geography-related material in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB). We then review qualitative evidence, including analysis by Central Intelligence Agency cartographers about map-making for the White House. These materials suggest leaders’ need for geographic orientation waxed and waned as Vietnam evolved from an intensifying war of punishment to a negotiated ending. The quantitative and qualitative findings underscore the bureaucracy’s central role in orienting busy leaders to novel situations and the sometimes counter-intuitive moments in war that most require leaders to be oriented. The article contributes to debates on bureaucracy and leaders while reinforcing the importance of a turn toward understanding perceived – rather than objective – geography in IR.