Dan Gamarnik

BJPolS abstract discussing the effects of state interventions and aerial spraying of coca crops on violence in Colombia, analyzing the impact on local economies, insurgency movements, and civilian victimization from 2000 to 2015.

#OpenAccess from July 2025 -

Spraying Conflict: Aerial Drug Eradication and Armed Violence in Colombia - cup.org/473YHcr

- Juan Felipe Campos-Contreras, Camilo Nieto-Matiz & @llschenoni.bsky.social

I should also announce that I'm on the job market. Feel free to look around my website as well!
www.dangamarnik.com/home/cv

There's going to be a lot of dumb political noise following this decision, so it's worth being clear about the key finding. It does not ban tariffs. It simply says that you have to convince Congress.

For anyone interested, my PhD dissertation just got posted online! Finished everything just two months ago.

It studies why governments directly fight conflicts with foreign rebel groups and the consequences of such conflicts (also known as extrastate conflicts).

escholarship.org/uc/item/8392...

For anyone interested, my PhD dissertation just got posted online! Finished everything just two months ago.

It studies why governments directly fight conflicts with foreign rebel groups and the consequences of such conflicts (also known as extrastate conflicts).

escholarship.org/uc/item/8392...

Nuclear fusion can satisfy super AI's enormous energy appetite — Altman - Interesting Engineering According to Altman, AI will require vast amounts of energy to operate, and nuclear fusion would be the best bet for its source.

If Sam Altman and the AI industry's vision for the future requires data centers everywhere operated by fusion power plants, it's not a vision. It's a hallucinatory fantasy.
interestingengineering.com/culture/sam-...

Oh my sweet summer child, I remember when Kansas Republicans were threatening the KU geology and biology depts over the teaching of evolution and support for stem cell research. I'm sure closing literature will save chemists and oceanographers who study the carbon cycle

How Democratic Party consultants sold everyone on moderation In 2024, moderate candidates for the U.S. House barely outperformed the average partisan

Important @gelliottmorris.com analysis on moderation: Going from the average House Dem position to the most moderate position will net you just over 1 percentage point in the general election. Eh.

Here is the chart showing the growth of reported protest over time, 2025 vs. 2017, referenced in the piece below.

Just like from 2017-21

The sports thing is the only anti-trans thing that polls well, so they're going to force through every heinous rollback of our rights under the sports banner.

All because people refused to believe the science.

And @radiofreetom.bsky.social scoffs at quantitative social science

"Kurtzman era TREK is measurably “dumber” than its Roddenberry and Berman era counterparts"

People have to grow up at some point…they have to….

Please never speak about how you were a “gifted kid” in middle school if you are 30+ years old. Talk about something you achieved after turning 21. Make it up if you must. We’ll never know on here.

End of the month APSA eJobs update #polisky (there may be a few others listed today, will add later)

July 2024: 93 positions (62 assistant TT positions)

July 2025: 58 positions (40 assistant TT positions)

I exclude non-academic positions / PhD studentships from the total count.

Really? Someone was telling me there actually seemed to be a lot for July, though it is pre-cycle

My new article with Mert Can Yilmaz out in Research & Politics! An investigation into what does drive differences between UCDP and ACLED data and a response to a series of unfounded claims made by Clionadh Raleigh et al in a 2023 article. (1/4) Read it here doi.org/10.1177/2053...

Flowers (2025) introduces the HEX dataset to analyze global espionage exposures, revealing that most accused spies were state personnel motivated by money across 483 cases from 1946 to 2010.
academic.oup.com/fpa/article-...

Awful

Ozzy Osbourne, one of the inventors of heavy metal who became known as “Prince of Darkness,” died on Tuesday. He was 76. The news comes after he gave his final concert this month, closing out his career by reuniting the original lineup of Black Sabbath. https://trib.al/BmFKeBR

On Data and Democracy (Mid-Year Roundup): Charting the Assault on American Democracy and A Path Forward A narrative of a democracy in the balance, told through 29 data visualizations.

There’s so much interesting data in this latest by @adambonica.bsky.social on data and democracy. Highlights (or lowlights) to me include Supreme Court acting virtually opposite the lower courts, the U.S. being the biggest gerontocracy & low Dem turnout in 2024.
open.substack.com/pub/data4dem...

An understudied type of conflict is wars between states and non-state actors outside the state's territory or "extrastate" wars. These include the Soviet-Afghan war, US war in Iraq/Afghanistan (post-regime change) & Israel's wars in Palestinian territories.

These have been increasing:

New pre-print on why governments fight foreign wars against rebel groups.

Link: osf.io/preprints/os...

A short 🧵

Essential reading re the defense of academic freedom: www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

Here's the link again, any comments are welcome! I go into a lot more detail on all this in the paper and the appendix:

osf.io/preprints/os...

I find that when rebels that oppose the international order of an intervene (revisionist rebels) are seeking a state, and are more likely to get power, it substantially and significantly increases extrastate war.

This was true in both the directed dyads and synthetic diff-in-diff.

To measure this, I use directed dyads and a synthetic diff-in-diff of the Soviet Union from the 1970s to 1980s. I code international order membership from Braumoeller (2019) and data on rebel ideology & use data on target state control over territory to measure rebel power.