Max Schaub

What are the long-run consequences of wartime sexual violence for gender norms, and how do they propagate across generations? We argue that sexual violence activates both reinforcing and liberalizing responses, but these differ in their reproductive logic: fear, withdrawal, and household conflict are embedded in family life, while civic engagement and leadership depend on historical openings. We test this argument with surveys spanning three postwar generations in eastern Germany (n = 2,548) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (n = 2,059). Family histories of wartime sexual violence are common: 12.5% of German and 6.7% of Bosnian respondents report close-family victimization. In both contexts, exposure predicts more patriarchal gender attitudes, reproduced among later generations. Mechanism analyses point to deteriorating mental health, domestic conflict, and demand for protective masculinity. Liberalizing responses—women’s civic engagement and leadership—emerge in the conflict generation but do not transmit. Wartime sexual violence can entrench patriarchal gender norms across generations.

Can mass violence shape how descendants perceive and engage with politics? In Armenia, many citizens descend from genocide survivors, and the 2018 Velvet Revolution challenged the incumbent government. We argue that family memories of mass violence can foster intergenerational political vigilance: a learned orientation in which descendants perceive politics as consequential for private life and attend more closely to political developments. Using a nationally representative survey (n = 2,637), we show that descendants of genocide victims participated more in the revolution and were more strongly overrepresented in relative terms early in mobilization. The association persists after accounting for contemporary residence and in a historical front-line design. Descendants also report greater political interest and knowledge and perceive politics as more consequential, while preference- and network-based explanations receive little support. The findings point to political vigilance as a distinct intergenerational legacy of mass violence.

The book will explore a core dilemma of regime transitions: how should new regimes deal with the elites of the old order? These elites can pose a threat - undermining legitimacy, conspiring against new rulers, or mobilizing resistance. Yet they also hold valuable human and social capital that can strengthen state capacity and support regime survival. We will examine this tension through a unique natural experiment in post-World War II Poland, where the unexpected survival of traditional elites, driven by exogenous wartime shocks, shaped long-term opposition to authoritarian rule. While Nazi and Soviet forces systematically killed Poland's elites, one unlikely group largely survived: reserve officers captured by the Wehrmacht, spared as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions. Their capture was quasi-random, determined by battlefield contingencies rather than elite traits, offering rare causal leverage on elite survival. Drawing on original archival research on elite purges, untapped data on Polish elite biographies, and rich administrative and survey data from both communist and post-communist Poland, the book will trace the wartime fates and postwar roles of three elite groups - nobles, intellectuals, and officers - and show how surviving members of these groups shaped patterns of resistance, compliance, and development under communist rule.