Qualitative Comparative Analysis and the Study of Non-State Actors

What is it about?

Suppose you wanted to find out under what conditions non-state actors (NSAs) rebel against state authorities or to investigate what factors lead governments to contract private military and security companies (PMSCs). For these and similar research aims there will rarely be a single cause to account for the outcome. Instead, you might discover that multiple factors bring about the phenomenon of interest and that these interact in specific ways. Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is ideally suited to analyse these kinds of causal relations, especially if the aim is to conduct a comparative study of at least a medium number of cases.

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