Peace Research Institute Oslo

Governmental and nongovernmental organizations have increasingly relied on early-warning systems of conflict to support their decisionmaking. Predictions of war intensity as probability distributions prove closer to what policymakers need than point estimates, as they encompass useful representations of both the most likely outcome and the lower-probability risk that conflicts escalate catastrophically. Point-estimate predictions, by contrast, fail to represent the inherent uncertainty in the distribution of conflict fatalities. Yet, current early warning systems are preponderantly focused on providing point estimates, while efforts to forecast conflict fatalities as a probability distribution remain sparse. Building on the predecessor VIEWS competition, we organize a prediction challenge to encourage endeavours in this direction. We invite researchers across multiple disciplinary fields, from conflict studies to computer science, to forecast the number of fatalities in state-based armed conflicts, in the form of the UCDP ‘best’ estimates aggregated to two units of analysis (country-months and PRIO-GRID-months), with estimates of uncertainty. This article introduces the goal and motivation behind the prediction challenge, presents a set of evaluation metrics to assess the performance of the forecasting models, describes the benchmark models which the contributions are evaluated against, and summarizes the salient features of the submitted contributions.

We examine the relationship between food insecurity and urban social disorder, featuring the degree of inequality and levels of governmental repression. We develop a formal theoretical model, and our empirical results suggest that food price volatility contributes significantly to conflict events as measured by the PRIO Urban Social Disorder data. We measure vertical inequality using the V-DEM egalitarian index, which is negatively significant; greater inequality sparks unrest. Inter-group horizontal inequality is also statistically significantly related to the risk of food riots. Government transfers are weakly associated with reducing conflict incidence. Governmental repression, in contrast, is associated with food riots across our estimations.

The 60th anniversary of the Department of Government at the University of Essex provides an opportunity to reflect on its many achievements and why these have been possible. This article argues that research excellence is a collective outcome that cannot be reduced to individuals. Research institutions tend to be successful because they manage to create productive environments, which can make individual scholars better and create synergies. The thesis is backed up by examples from the history of the department and more general research on the role of environments for research. The article considers possible insights with regard to present challenges to academic institutions, why productive environments can be difficult to maintain, and how we can try to nurture them.

This paper starts with a moment of profound uncertainty: could the research questions be addressed with our data? And if so, how could coding in NVivo play a role? Through an iterative process, fumbling, and patience, the emergent solution was to systematically use ‘memos’, teasing out ‘between the lines’ insights and coding the ‘memos’, thus integrating coding within the analytical process. Choosing to pay attention to how we do analysis, but even more so to write about it, matters for the trustworthiness of our findings. But it can also contribute to illuminating the empirically grounded, palpable and data‐centred orientations of geography.

Conflict scholars commonly employ public opinion surveys to understand the causes and consequences of violence. However, surveying in wartime presents a distinctive set of challenges. We examine two challenges facing polling in countries at war: under-coverage of national samples and response bias. Although these issues are acknowledged in the literature on surveying methods, they become significantly more pronounced in war zones due to the geographic clustering of violence and the heightened sensitivity surrounding certain opinions. We illustrate these challenges in the context of the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war, drawing on original panel survey data tracing the attitudes of the same people in Ukraine prior to and after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. We show that unit and item non-response bias in surveys conducted during the war are related to respondents’ political orientation, particularly their support for NATO membership measured in 2019. We conclude with lessons for those employing survey methods in wartime, and point to steps forward, in Ukraine and beyond.

Can international sanctions prevent civil war? Despite the increased scholarly and policy focus on conflict prevention, we lack an understanding of the impact of a commonly used tool of the international community – economic sanctions. We examine the impact of sanctions targeted against states with self-determination (SD) disputes. We argue that the threat of sanctions leads states to decrease repression and increase accommodation in these disputes, thus decreasing the likelihood of civil war. The imposition of sanctions, however, incentivizes the state to increase repression and makes the state a more attractive target for dissidents. Both dynamics make civil war more likely in the short term. Over time, however, states can adapt to the new economic reality created by a sanctions regime, and the risk of escalation to civil war will decrease. We conduct a series of statistical tests of the effect of threatened and imposed sanctions against the state on armed conflict onset in SD disputes, accommodation of SD groups, and repression. We find that threatened sanctions decrease the likelihood of armed conflict onset, make government accommodation of SD groups more likely, and lead to overall decreases in repression by the state. Imposed sanctions, meanwhile, increase the risk of civil war in the next year, but this effect dissipates over time. These results suggest that sanction threats can be a useful tool of conflict prevention, but failed threats can increase the risk of escalations of violence in SD disputes.

This article focuses on researcher distress and well-being. It presents a survey carried out with scholars engaged in conflict-related sexual violence research from various disciplines. Respondents were asked about how they reacted to the research they engaged in and how their respective academic institutions supported them. Academia’s understanding of and preparedness for research-related distress is limited. While there is a focus on researcher safety in the field, typically from the perspective of institutional insurance and liability, there is less focus on researcher well-being. Our findings suggest that there is a need, and indeed willingness, to address distress and well-being within the conflict-related sexual violence research community. The ability to do so, however, depends in large part on the institutional setting of the individual researcher. We find there are institutional differences between the fields of political science, law, history, and international relations on the one hand where scholars report more difficulties, than within the fields of anthropology, social work, psychology, public health, and gender studies, which appear more trauma aware. The findings show that there are great variations between different scholarly disciplines and institutions. We find a clear need to address these topics not only in academic reflections in scholarly articles, but also on institutional levels within academic communities.

An estimated two billion people live in areas presently affected by fragility, armed conflict, and violence. In many of these locations armed non-state actors (e.g. rebel groups) rather than the state are the primary governors (Word Bank 2024). An estimated 66 million live under the direct rule of armed non-state actors (Breslawski in J Glob Secur Stud 7(1):ogab017 2022). With the growing severity of climate impacts, armed non-state actors are increasingly engaging in governing over many aspects of climate change, including adaptation, displacement assistance, and the management of natural resources. By revealing the extent and range of these activities, we argue for the need to improve our understanding of the behaviours and motivations of non-state actors, especially the complex ways that climate governance is being integrated into their other —often violent—strategies. Better positioning armed non-state actors within the set of actors who provide climate governance is critical to supporting climate-resilient development to the populations who live in these areas while also managing the ethical and security dilemmas of engaging with these violent actors.

Introduction The risk of cardiovascular disease is increased in individuals with type 1 diabetes, despite good glycemic control. This study aims to evaluate early signs of atherosclerosis and predisposing factors in individuals with childhood-onset type 1 diabetes compared with healthy controls. Research design and methods The Atherosclerosis and Childhood Diabetes study is a prospective population-based cohort study with follow-up every fifth year. The cohort consists of 329 subjects with type 1 diabetes and 173 controls. Carotid intima-media thickness (cIMT) was measured at baseline and 5 and 10 years of follow-up. Data from the Norwegian Childhood Diabetes Registry were used in assessment of traditional risk factors. Results Mean cIMT in young women with type 1 diabetes increased significantly over a 10-year period compared with healthy controls (∆0.019 mm (0.001–0.035), p=0.035). At the 10-year follow-up the group with type 1 diabetes had a mean age of 24.2±2.9 years (13.7±2.8 years at baseline), diabetes duration of 15.6±3.4 years (5.4±3.3 years at baseline) and HbA1c of 8.2±3.6% (66±16 mmol/mol) (8.4±3.4% (68±13 mmol/mol) at baseline). Women with type 1 diabetes had significantly higher mean weight, body mass index, waist circumference, diastolic blood pressure (DBP), serum low-density lipoprotein (LDL)-cholesterol and apolipoprotein B, while men with type 1 diabetes had significantly higher mean DBP and urinary albumin-creatinine ratio compared with the control group. Mean cIMT change over time was not associated with long-term HbA1c or LDL-cholesterol burden in childhood and adolescence. Conclusion Young women with childhood-onset type 1 diabetes of relatively short diabetes duration had a higher mean cIMT over a 10-year period compared with their healthy female controls, with values similar to males.

We focus on the potential fragility of democratic elections given modern information-communication technologies (ICT) in the Web 2.0 era. Our work provides an explanation for the cascading attrition of public officials recently in the United States and offers potential policy interventions from a dynamic system’s perspective. We propose that micro-level heterogeneity across individuals within crucial institutions leads to vulnerabilities of election support systems at the macro scale. Our analysis provides comparative statistics to measure the fragility of systems against targeted harassment, disinformation campaigns, and other adversarial manipulations that are now cheaper to scale and deploy. Our analysis also informs policy interventions that seek to retain public officials and increase voter turnout. We show how limited resources (e.g., salary incentives to public officials and targeted interventions to increase voter turnout) can be allocated at the population level to improve these outcomes and maximally enhance democratic resilience. On the one hand, structural and individual heterogeneity cause systemic fragility that adversarial actors can exploit, but also provide opportunities for effective interventions that offer significant global improvements from limited and localized actions.

Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) provisions in peace agreements (PAs) are critical pillars of global peacebuilding efforts. Leading theories suggest that different DDR components address different peacebuilding challenges. Yet existing datasets conceptualize DDR as a binary variable, hindering our ability to observe which DDR components and in what combination are agreed upon by conflict parties and to assess their independent effects on peace. To address this problem, we introduce a global disaggregated dataset on DDR provisions in PAs from 1975 to 2021, identify third-party actors’ involvement, and whether women and children ex-combatants are referenced in the provisions. We show that DDR components do not always come together: 47% of all PAs contain at least one DDR component, but only 26.9% include the full DDR package. Moreover, third-party actors participate in more than half of PAs with at least one DDR provision, and the vast majority of DDR provisions do not reference women and child ex-combatants. We demonstrate the usefulness of our dataset by analyzing the determinants of DDR provisions in PAs. Our analysis shows that different covariates have different effects on different DDR constellations, highlighting the usefulness of our disaggregated approach. The DDR dataset can be a valuable source to better understand the processes, causes, and consequences of DDR provisions.

Recent research highlights how the same vulnerabilities that lead to disasters also condition the impact of hazards on violent conflict. Yet it is common practice in the literature to proxy rapid-onset hazards with disaster impacts when studying political violence. This can bias upward estimates of hazard–conflict relationships and obscure heterogeneous effects, with implications for forecasting as well as disaster risk reduction and peace-building activities. To overcome this, we implement an approach that measures and models the separate components of a tropical cyclone event: the hazard, the exposure, and the impacts. We then estimate a set of models that quantify how the incidence and intensity of organized violence respond to hazard exposure. We find little evidence that the average tropical cyclone enhances or diminishes violent conflict at the country level over a two-year time horizon. Yet rather than signaling that storms do not matter for political violence, unpacking this average result reveals two countervailing effects within countries. Conflict, and especially one-sided violence against civilians, tends to escalate in regions directly exposed to the tropical cyclone. In contrast, areas outside the path of the storm may experience a decrease in conflict. These results are heterogeneous with tropical cyclone intensity, and conflict escalation is more likely to occur in settings with less effective governments. Our results underscore the importance of ex-ante efforts targeting government capacity and effective disaster risk reduction to moderate the risk of violent conflict in the wake of tropical cyclones.

Purpose of Review Conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) is a frequent but not ubiquitous part of warfare, affecting not only survivors but also their families and wider communities. This thematic review describes advances in research on CRSV, reviews new developments in the literature, and proposes recommendations for future study. Recent Findings An increasing number of studies consider how to address methodological and ethical research challenges, how understudied victim/survivor groups as well as families and communities are affected by CRSV, how survivor-centered justice mechanisms can be developed to reduce impunity, and how CRSV is perceived by different actors. Summary Research is expanding to deepen and nuance knowledge on CRSV, particularly on CRSV by rebel groups and the experiences of diverse victims. The research community is also growing more diverse. Remaining challenges exist, in particular regarding data and measurement, justice and accountability, and violations by state-affiliated actors.

Disarmament of non-state groups during peace processes is rarely comprehensive and weapons usually continue to circulate. Nevertheless, disarmament is a normal component of final peace agreements and its modalities are often intensely negotiated by all parties. We unpack the puzzle of why disarmament is seemingly both crucial and not completed by building a novel theory of its role as a symbol of the transformation from war to peace. In doing so, we build upon findings from conflict studies, social psychology, anthropology, and feminist research in order to explore what weapons and disarmament mean for combatants, their armed group, and communities impacted by conflict. We posit that after joining an armed group combatants are socially fused through ritual behavior which often features weapons, and disarmament functions as a symbolic inversion process in which the weapon is transformed into a symbol of peace. This inversion process is observable through language and acts, such as public destruction of arms or turning weapons into works of art. We empirically illustrate our propositions by examining the case of FARC-EP’s 2016–2017 disarmament in Colombia. Our theoretical framework pushes existing academic boundaries of war-to-peace transitions in general, and research on disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration in particular.

This paper examines the strategic use of rituals in Myanmar after the 2021 coup, focusing on their role in political legitimacy. It explores how the military regime and protesters employed rituals in protests and observes divergent practices. The regime relied on symbolic rituals supported by monastic institutions, while protesters used rituals less aligned with normative Buddhist practices. The study highlights differing methods of ritual knowledge dissemination: hierarchical for the regime and network-based for protesters. Despite similar worldviews, their motivations and applications of ritualistic knowledge differ.

Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of empagliflozin in reducing all-cause mortality (ACM), hospitalization for heart failure (HHF), myocardial infarction (MI), stroke, cardiovascular mortality (CVM), and end-stage renal disease (ESRD) in routine clinical practice in the Nordic countries of the Empagliflozin Comparative Effectiveness and Safety (EMPRISE) study. Methods: This noninterventional, multicountry cohort study used secondary data from four Nordic countries (Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and Norway). Propensity score (PS) matched (1:1) adults with type 2 diabetes (T2D) initiating empagliflozin (a sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitor) during 2014–2018 who were compared to those initiating a dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitor (DPP-4i). Cox proportional hazards regression modelling was used to assess the risk for ACM, HHF, MI, stroke, CVM, and ESRD. Meta-analyses were conducted and hazard ratios (HRs) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) from random-effects models were calculated. Results: A total of 43,695 pairs of PS-matched patients were identified. Patients initiating empagliflozin exhibited a 49% significantly lower risk of ACM (HR: 0.51, 95% CI 0.40–0.64) compared to DPP-4i. Additionally, empagliflozin was associated with a 36% significantly lower risk of HHF (HR: 0.64, 95% CI 0.46–0.89), a 52% significantly lower risk of CVM (HR: 0.48, 95% CI 0.37–0.63), and a 66% significantly lower risk of ESRD (HR: 0.34, 95% CI 0.15–0.77) compared to DPP-4i. No significant differences were observed in the risk of stroke and MI between patients initiating empagliflozin compared with those initiating a DPP-4i. Results were generally consistent for subgroups (with/without pre-existing CV disease or congestive heart failure) and in sensitivity analyses. Conclusion: Empagliflozin initiation was associated with a significantly reduced risk of ACM, HHF, CVM, and ESRD compared with initiation of DPP-4i in patients with T2D when examining routine clinical practice data from Nordic countries.