Under Review
Overcoming Isolation: Dramatic Confrontation and Protester Casualties
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Why do some protests result in more fatalities in response to repression than others? The literature largely neglects the conditions that influence protesters' decisions to risk their lives in the face of repression. This article argues that as protests become more regionally isolated, protesters are more likely to confront repression, leading to higher fatalities. To prevent state injustice from being overlooked or forgotten by the general public, protesters become increasingly motivated to highlight it through dramatic confrontations, particularly in more geographically isolated areas. This argument is supported by OLS regression and meta-regression analysis of Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) models within an Interrupted Time Series (ITS) framework, utilizing Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) from 1997 to 2025 across African countries. Causal mechanisms are presented by a descriptive case study of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea.
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Navigating Violence Between Surface and Below:
Effect of Protester Reaction to Violent Flanks on Mobilization
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Does the emergence of violent flanks increase or decrease the mobilization of unarmed protests? This article seeks to reconcile the conflicting results in the literature by shifting its attention to two factors that remain unexamined in the field. First, it focuses on nonviolent protesters' responses to violent flanks rather than their presence. Second, it highlights the discrepancy between surface-level and actual protest fragmentation, shaped by nonparticipants' limited observation of true fragmentation. This article argues that nonviolent protesters' endorsement for or opposition to violent flanks affects mobilization differently depending on the extent of fragmentation discrepancy. The greater the discrepancy, the more nonviolent protesters’ responses influence mobilization, with the direction determined by whether surface-level or actual fragmentation is more pronounced. The hypotheses are supported by analyzing the Nonviolent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes dataset (NAVCO 2.1), Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), and examining the 2019 Hong Kong anti-extradition protest.
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Works in Progress
Riding the Tide: How Online Activists Leverage Repression