About the event: International relations scholars have long studied how technological shifts impact the course of wars, especially as armies are forced to innovate on the battlefield. From the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, SpaceX’s Starlink service (a private company) has played a vital infrastructure role for Ukraine’s military, something it was never envisioned or designed to do. In addition, in contrast with past conflicts, Starlink’s major policy choices are primarily controlled by a single individual – Elon Musk –  who has his own political preferences and agenda, distinct from the U.S. or other countries. We leverage a natural experiment to ascertain the effect of Starlink access for Ukrainian forces on battlefield outcomes. We leverage a geographic discontinuity to determine the overall effect of access to Starlink on Ukraine’s territorial control as well as overall volume of munitions and combat activities. The design relies on an idiosyncratic mismatch between SpaceX’s internal system (which uses fixed hexagon shapes) for allocating access and the actual boundaries of the frontline and Ukraine’s provinces. Second, we use a difference-in-differences approach to examine how Starlink access mattered before and after a late 2022 policy change at SpaceX decided personally by Elon Musk to limit Starlink access to Ukrainian forces in certain areas and for certain activities. Initial findings are that Starlink access significantly improves Ukraine’s ability to hold territory, though it appears not to greatly affect the volume of drones, artillery or other munitions. The results suggest Starlink mostly affects quality of strikes rather than quantity. 

Co-authored with Tatsuya Koyama and Yuri Zhukov.

About the speaker: Renard Sexton is a Visiting Scholar at CISAC and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Emory University.

Sexton studies conflict and development with a focus on local level violence and interventions intended to curb violence. His research covers insurgency, terrorism, social conflict around natural resources, and police crackdowns; he has regional expertise in Afghanistan, Southeast Asia and Andean Latin America. His research has been published in top scholarly journals, including the American Political Science Review and American Journal of Political Science. His policy pieces and commentary have been published by The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, International Crisis Group, Foreign Policy and other outlets. Before joining Emory, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and Economics of Conflict fellow at the International Crisis Group.

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No filming or recording without express permission from speaker.