 I'm sorry not to be there with you and Helsinki, I'm glad to be part of the panel looking forward to the conversation. I'm going to be presenting some work that draws on my 2020 book, How Insurgency Begins, as well as a newer working paper that builds on it with co-author Stephen Rengases. And the research question that I want to focus on today, it's a secondary question to the book in the central one for the paper is why and how do rebel groups, non-state armed anti-state actors use violence during the initial stages of their group formation before they become a substantial threat to the state they seek to challenge. And before I provide an answer, it's worth pausing to ask why I think we don't already know this. I already have an expansive large literature on conflict onset, but in fact, focus is very little on conflict start, especially in the highly weak state context that are the center of the book and the paper that I'm presenting here. And what I mean is that most studies, at least in the social sciences, examine the correlates of conflict onset usually defined as a threshold of violence, usually 25 recorded battle-related deaths. And most leading theories of conflict onset take for granted the existence of an already formed organization. Something that looks like this, distance army, Uganda, one of the cases I studied for the book. And so they're insurgents, they don't have fancy uniforms or heavy conventional military equipment, but they're a sizable organized group. But of course there's an earlier phase, a period when people initially begin to come together to begin conspiring and committing violence against the state. Period when rebellion may look something more like this, a small group who are clandestine, still building an organization, and while they may be starting to commit violent acts, haven't gained substantial coercive capacity or organizational capacity, right? And so using fieldwork throughout several reasons of Uganda for the book, I retrace groups in this earlier phase and contrast it to after they become violent groups and ask why. Why only some make it to viability? Why don't scholars usually study these initial phases? And the answer is pretty simple. It's really hard to do so systematically due to lack of evidence, right? Nation rebels are often clandestine, often informed in very remote areas of low capacity states where journalists are only minimally present if at all. And so the early phases leave just kind of a faint imprint on news media or even the historical record sometimes. And so I'm going to argue today, even beyond this, that the rebel groups also often in the initial phases commit violence in a way that makes them difficult to distinguish from criminal groups, okay, which exacerbates these problems of making it hard to detect them and count them early on. Okay, and the consequences of this is that we have sort of an omission of small conflicts in our body of knowledge, I think, and of systematic evidence about the very initial phases even of those go on to become large conflicts. And so my evidence for this is I collected, but if that was all conflict onset articles since 2013, major conflicts in political science journals and found that 78% of them rely on one of four data sets. So the data sets have obviously been an incredible public good for those to study conflict, but they happen to they intentionally omit rebels that fail early, those that don't cross thresholds of at least 25 battle related deaths, right? So it's an intentional but this leads, I argue, and I'm going to present some evidence today that supports this that it leads to really substantial omissions. And you may reasonably wonder like, well, who cares if we miss out on small conflicts, right? Of course, it's a large scare violence that we should be most focused on stopping. But, but of course, there are, you know, small conflicts can cause really grave humanitarian issues for the people who are affected by them. But it also means from sort of inference standpoint, it's very easy to because of issues of the selection of problems and the data confuse the causes and processes about the start of conflict with those of its escalation. And sort of more simply means that we might just sort of mischaracterize what's going on at the start of armed conflict, right? And why they erupt. And I'm going to argue actually today that this common characterization of conflict erupting doesn't really capture what's going on at the start of conflict for a large portion of armed conflicts that they often simmer first at a very low level. Okay, so this is, this is important to understand, you know, to get a clear picture of how conflicts began, both for theoretical micro foundations and for thinking about how one could intervene effectively before conflict does escalate. Okay, so what I'm trying to do here today, and in this broader project is to bring into focus these early stages of rebellion that have largely remained obscure. So why and how do nascent rebels use violence? A core part of my argument, and recall, this project is focused on very low capacity states. Those are the minimal presence to detect emergent threats in their peripheral territories. Okay, so that's a key scope argument of what I'm going to argue here. And I argue that in those contexts, barriers to entry for rebels are low, right? Where states have trouble detecting emergent threats, rebels can and do start poor, right, without substantial material resources or substantial weaponry, weak from military standpoint, and therefore vulnerable to fee. Not all will, right, but the modal group is the most common for this to happen where barriers to entry are low, which they should be in low capacity states. And therefore, right, if states, even if they're weak states, but if they receive accurate information about who the rebels are and where they are, even low capacity states should be able to end a poor, weak rebellion. Right, and this makes nascent rebels in these contexts really reliant on civilian silence, right, if civilians inform the state, if they know that there's a rebellion forming, they know who and where they are, right, then that can lead to the demise of the rebels in a very early stage, right. But this means that committing violence is really dangerous for rebels. It's a very public act, right, it's a very conspicuous act, right. So why do it, right? Why not just lay low until you're ready to go with a strong army and you're no longer so vulnerable, right. I argue that while it's dangerous and also be useful, right. If nascent rebels use violence carefully, right, if they're sure to attack targets that they think they can sort of successfully attack, right, then they might gain arms, right, even just attacking at night a couple police officers and gaining their weapons can be really useful for these nascent rebel groups, right. They're poor, they need weapons. At the same time, they want to test and shape their operational environment, right. Early attacks can help them understand how quickly the state may be able to identify them, right. Back in the, in the early phases, they may still be able to just give up and melt back into the population. They may also be able to shape the operational environment with sort of careful, select targeted killings of those who they think may be likely to attack them and turn them into the state. And this may importantly shape civilian beliefs about them, right. If they commit violence in a way and then, you know, sort of quietly whisper through the community that, you know, about how competent they are and how serious they are, right. They may demonstrate to civilians who are wondering, maybe perhaps seeing them or wondering about turning them into the state may convince them to, it's not a good idea to share information with the state, right. But this, I argue, you know, the culmination of key empirical explanations is that we should expect rebels to commit small scale attacks, right. They are weak, weak groups and therefore if they're going to be successful and gain arms, right, and commit targeted killings, right, these are going to be small attacks in small number of people, right, carefully planned. So probably in frequent or sporadic, and we shouldn't expect like very large public declarations of credit claiming, right. Not the kind of thing that would show up in the newspaper, right. There could again be whispers to trusted people who they think won't let them out, right. But we wouldn't expect public proclamations of this was us in these early phases, right. And by the way, I should say, actually, by the way, meanwhile, governments, right, don't usually have an incentive to declare this, there's a there's a rebellion here at least early on when they're still figuring out what's going on, right, and they're trying to convince civilians that anything going on should be shared with the state. Governments tend to have incentives to discredit new armed groups, right, and we see pretty frequently in qualitative accounts of early uncertainty of governments calling them bandits, mere bandits. And then this is going to change after groups become viable and talk about this more in the Q&A, but like groups with political aims are going to need to invest in military training and larger scale attacks if they're going to extract political concessions to the government, right. So that's here's where they're going to diverge from what we would expect from most criminal, not all criminal groups, right, that would have not have as political aims tend to have more economic aims. Okay, so we'd expect violence is grow and scale and frequency after groups become viable, right, and diverge from criminal groups. And I use two forms of evidence in the in the paper, I should say this this builds on some some case evidence, right, they trace out some of those ideas through case studies in Uganda using fieldwork in the book. But for the paper I introduced a newer data set on rebel group formation in Africa and the aim of the data set I worked with undergrad research assistants to try to as close as possible code all instances of rebel group formation in Africa from 1997 to 2015. I can talk about this more in the Q&A, I mean we're we're certain we fell short in capturing all groups because in several cases, we sort of saw traces we were using a mix of Akled and GTD to first look at conflict events and try to figure out if we're identifying a group formation, other secondary sources, human rights organization sources and geos, right, but this is all work you know using the internet and libraries from the US. There was no fieldwork as part of this and we you know saw traces of maybe there was a rebel group here but we just couldn't pin it down which which demonstrates the importance of local local sources more than the conclusion. We were able to capture 151 rebel groups in these countries this is a map of the number of groups we captured in each country we we we coded in each country during this period and only 33% of those groups that we counted or in these are commonly used conflict event data sets you should do pre-o the Uppsala pre-o armed conflict data set or the global terrorism data set and right so this is evidence that the existing data sets are on armed groups are really missing quite a lot at least in in Africa of armed group formations right and it's worth noting just with basic regression analysis is it not surprisingly right groups that committed larger scale violence right at least an an attack a single attack that resulted in at least 25 battle related deaths that sort of high conspicuous types of violence is highly correlated with inclusion in those data sets right so this is just more evidence that it's sort of the lower level groups that don't make it into the data sets right and then among these groups quite interesting for interruption but may I ask you to wrap up more thank you and yeah great I'm almost there so only 18% of those 151 groups committed one of these substantial attacks in their first year right and and about a third only committed one of these substantial attacks in their first three years right so again we see that many groups initiative 40% of them went on to endure so many sort of flame out quickly but many go on and endure for quite some time but still in their initial for a few years are only committing smaller scale violence okay so limitations with the data preclude a lot of fancy analyses with them so we turned to historical cases where there's actually really good evidence from rebellions that are known for how large scale and political and ideological they were we actually went back and retraced them just as in Napoleonic Spain the 19th century and Mao's CCP and Republican China vietnam in in French into China and we retraced them you know with a variety of historical sources and you know it helps to support the theoretical and contentions that it was really difficult to distinguish these groups in their early phases from criminals right again even these groups have went on to become sort of iconic examples of political ideological large-scale rebellions so I hope I've contributed here is some new theory and evidence on early rebel violence that shows that rebel group formation is more common than we usually assume or count in our data sets and this is just due to to really um severe measurement challenges that point to the importance of things like Aklad's uh conflict observatories that make use not only of news media but the local sources um and implications for conflict prevention in the state suggest is that you know early rebel violence is often small scale and ambiguous in nature right and may even appear criminal so we should we should be you know tracking criminal violence and really scrutinizing it with local sources if we're interested in understanding the early stages of armed conflict onset thanks a lot for your time