Political Science

Muhammad Omar Afzaal is a seventh-year Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Brown University, focusing on international relations, security studies, and comparative politics. His research connects territorial conflict, limited war, and civil-military relations. Omar’s dissertation, Dangerous Borders: Civil-Military Decision-Making Structures and Unintended Escalation, explains why escalation control needs to accommodate the nuances that varying territorial contexts offer in terms of decision-making structures and frameworks for limited war. His forthcoming book chapter on Pakistan’s Strategic Imagination of Civil-Military Relations applies structural topic modeling and content analysis in an original analysis of Pakistan’s extensive strategic community corpus to argue that Pakistan’s strategic culture has centrally accommodated the military because of the opportunistic collusion of both political individuals and parties with the military at critical junctures. Omar’s research combines a range of qualitative methods including archival research, elite interviews, process tracing, and content analysis, besides leveraging his fluency in Urdu.

Omar has taught wide-ranging courses in international relations, security studies, foreign policy, comparative politics, and American politics. He has also been invited to give lectures on the quantitative evaluations of environmental policies, armed clientelism and associational politics emerging from organized crime in Pakistan, and how the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, via the narcotics trade, produced national and local-level security implications for Pakistan. His teaching was awarded the P. Terrence Hopmann Award for Excellence in Teaching (Fall 2020).

Omar’s dissertation was awarded the USIP-Minerva Peace and Security Scholar Fellowship (2022/23) by the United States Institute of Peace. It is also the recipient of the Graduate Research Fellowship (2022) awarded by Watson Institute’s Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia. His research has been generously supported by the Brown University Graduate School and the Department of Political Science. Omar has a Bachelor of Arts from Grinnell College where he graduated a year early and a Master of Public Affairs and a Master of Arts in Political Science from Brown University. His previous research projects have been for Harvard University, Oxford University, the United Nations University - Maastricht, and the World Bank.

Job Market Paper Title

Dangerous Borders: Civil-Military Decision-Making Structures and Unintended Escalation

Job Market Paper Abstract

How and why do enduring territorial rivals tacitly limit their fighting across different levels of territorial contestation? Under what conditions does that fighting escalate to unintended conflict? In addressing these questions, I adopt a two-part theoretical approach. Using Pakistan, I first theorize that each distinct territorial status quo produces a different decision-making structure governing the use of force because of varying civil-military norms and different threat environments. I show that territorial context matters because it leads to varying civil-military involvement and influence in decision-making along different borders. I then introduce a theory suggesting that changes to the existing decision-making structure in a given level of territorial contestation can result in unintended escalation.

Focusing on the higher levels of territorial contestation in the India-Pakistan rivalry where Pakistan has an exclusively military-managed decision-making structure, I show that the Indian and Pakistani militaries have developed a tacit framework for limited war made up of implicit rules and limits of fighting and military-military conflict de-escalation mechanisms to prevent unintended escalation. I argue that when a change occurs in the form of civilian involvement in Pakistan’s exclusively military-managed decision-making structure along higher levels of territorial contestation, the civilian elites can cause unintended escalation by disrupting this tacit framework for limited war by breaching the implicit limits of conflict and undermining the efficacy of the military-military de-escalation mechanisms. My research uses a qualitative multi-case analysis focusing on Pakistan’s decision-making structures and militarized crises within each of the four distinct India-Pakistan territorial status quos. In doing so, I combine extensive archival research in Urdu and English across Pakistan and the U.S. with elite interviews I conducted with Pakistan’s top civil-military officials. My research finds that successful escalation control policies need to be attentive to the distinct civil-military decision-making structure and the specific tacit framework for limited war that each different territorial context presents.