Camber Warren

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I am currently serving as a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Princeton’s Neihaus Center for Globalization and Governance, after graduating with a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University in May 2008, with concentrations in International Relations and Political Methodology. My research interests include international security, international diplomacy, 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 dissertation examines the relationship between national mass media structures and the construction of symbolic national allegiances. In it I utilize 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. 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.

To test this theory, I collect data on the structural properties of the most prominent public communicative structures in the contemporary state system – those constituted by the mass media networks of newspapers, radios, and televisions – in 177 countries for the period 1945 – 1999. I then use this data to test the implications of the theory at two separate levels of analysis: (1) at the individual level the theory is tested using cross-national survey data on media exposure and state allegiance from over 30,000 respondents in 38 countries, and (2) at the state level the theory is tested using cross-national time-series data on civil conflict, identity fragmentation, and regime stability. I each case, the central finding is that mass media structures are fundamentally involved in generating the conditions for the formation of collective audiences (that is, audiences which are composed of members who are jointly aware of themselves as a collective). The evidence demonstrates that such collective audiences, when constituted on a national scale by dense public communicative structures (i.e. mass media), make individuals more inclined to feel affective attachments to their country, and reduce the propensity to sociopolitical fragmentation thereby lessening the risk of large-scale civil conflict.

While at the Neihaus Center, I am working on converting my dissertation into a book manuscript. I am also developing independent projects on interstate conflict, alliance formation, and treaty compliance into article length publications.