Journal of Peace Research

The association between religion and violence has raised much interest in both academic and public circles. Yet on the individual level, existing empirical accounts are both sparse and conflicting. Based on previous research which found that religion plays a role in the support of political violence only through the mediation of objective and perceived deprivations, the authors test Conservation of Resource (COR) theory as an individual level explanation for the association of religion, socio-economic deprivations, and support for political violence. COR theory predicts that when individuals' personal, social or economic resources are threatened, a response mechanism may include violence. Utilizing two distinct datasets, and relying on structural equation models analysis, the latter two stages of a three-stage study are reported here. In a follow-up to their previous article, the authors refine the use of socio-economic variables in examining the effects of deprivation as mediating between religion and political violence. Then, they analyze an independent sample of 545 Muslims and Jews, collected during August and September 2004, to test a psychological-based explanation based on COR theory. This study replaces measures of deprivation used in the previous stages with measures of economic and psychological resource loss. Findings show that the relationship between religion and support of political violence only holds true when mediated by deprivations and psychological resource loss. They also suggest that the typical tendency to focus on economic resource loss is over-simplistic as psychological, not economic, resources seem to mediate between religion and support of violence.

While it is recognized that the progenitors of war are multilayered and complex and that they consist of political, historical, religious, demographic, economic, and psycho-cultural forces, this article reports on research that looked at the role of one them, demographic trends. Demographic trends can influence the rise of ethnic territoriality and ultimately violent resolution. Two of the three protagonists in the war, namely the Bosnian Muslims and the Bosnian Serbs, are the focus of the study. The level of abstraction at which these rival ethnic groups were sensitive to demographic trends, and therefore the level at which that rivalry played out, was the local municipality, the opstina where competition over jobs and political power was manifest. It is at this level that basic tenets of ethnic competition theory are considered to have been at work. An index of ethnic competition is introduced to measure competition in terms of the relative balance of ethnic populations. This index is complemented by analysis of the trend of relative ethnic population numbers over the two decades prior to the war. Data from the Yugoslavian census show how the demographic position of the Bosnian Serbs declined dramatically in over 90% of the opstinas throughout the country. These population trends are translated into an index of demographic disadvantage. Positive correlations between the two indices (ethnic competition and demographic disadvantage) and discrete-event data of hostilities between Serbs and Muslims are found to be significant. In addition, there is some evidence that the geographic pattern of the propensity for violence, while clearly part of a broad strategic Bosnian Serb national campaign, is also associated with local prewar demographic dynamics.

Those 45 of the hundreds of wars of the first eight decades of the twentieth century that resulted in at least 32 thousand military plus civilian fatalities are each described in brief. About three such high-fatality wars were usually progressing simultaneously in any year, and there was only one year during the period in which none was being waged. The total number of fatalities was about 86 million, between 1% and 2 % of all individuals living during the period. It is concluded that war remains a routine, normal human activity, an activity that accounts for a small, continuing fraction of premature deaths.

World population problems have remained the con cern of demographers and historians. Even today, when politicians or international organizations deal with such questions, they consider them either an individual and personal, or a specifically internal and national problem, rather than viewing the population issue from a global perspective. The author argues that individual and national population decisions impinge on broader interests- illustrated by the 'tragedy of the commons', here explained in game theoretical terms. He urges that for the World Population Year 1974, the world population problem be presented as a dilemma of worldwide scale, soluble only by worldwide action.

This article summarizes the results of a recently completed, comprehensive coding of 779 human rights instruments from 1863 to 2003. As such, it offers an extensive portrayal of how, and to what degree, this powerful doctrine has been formally institutionalized over time. Following a brief overview of the data collection process, selected results from this study are presented that highlight how many human rights instruments have been drafted, what kind of violations have been most prominent, the number of rights that have been specified over time, and the ultimate aspirations that are linked to the realization of human rights. Next, potential applications of this dataset are discussed regarding both human rights and peace research scholarship. Specifically, the results shed new light on the historical development of human rights by highlighting key periods of instrument growth in the late 19th century, the interwar years, and the post-World War II period. In addition, the data can effectively augment recent quantitative studies that measure the effect of treaty ratification on internal state violence by helping to generate more extensive ratification information, develop better measures of state compliance, and construct new measures that assess how human rights principles get translated into national practice and potentially mitigate state violence over time.

In 2009, UCDP recorded 36 active armed conflicts, down by one from 2008. Having remained fairly stable over the past few years, the number of armed conflicts is now substantially lower than during the peak years of the early 1990s. But compared to the early years of this decade, the figure has increased by 24%. Six of the conflicts reached the level of war (more than 1,000 battle-related deaths) in 2009, up by one from 2008. No interstate conflict was recorded, but seven intrastate conflicts were internationalized, in the sense that one or both of the conflict parties received troops support from an external state. The most intense war in terms of fatalities was that in Sri Lanka. Eight of the armed conflicts listed for 2008 were not active in 2009, but during the year, one entirely new conflict erupted in Myanmar (Kokang), two were restarted by previously recorded actors in Angola (Cabinda) and in Rwanda and four previously recorded conflicts were restarted by new actors in Central African Republic, India (Bodoland), Nigeria and Yemen. Only one peace agreement was concluded during the year, which is decidedly lower than the annual average recorded for the past 20 years.

In 2010, UCDP recorded 30 active armed conflicts (i.e. with a minimum of 25 battle-related deaths). This is a substantial reduction in relation to the 36 conflicts registered for 2009. A drop of this magnitude has only been reported four times previously in the post-1946 period. However, only in two of these instances was this part of a general downward trend. Thus no major inferences should be drawn, except perhaps that the reduction in conflicts in Africa seems to be part of a trend. At 30 in 2010, the number of active conflicts is at its lowest level since 2003. Furthermore, the number of wars (1,000 or more battle-related deaths) declined from six in 2009 to four in 2010. The most intense war in terms of fatalities was in Afghanistan. Eight of the armed conflicts listed for 2009 were not active in 2010, but during the year two new conflicts erupted - Mauritania and Tajikistan - both involving rebel groups that had previously fought in neighbouring countries. Only two peace agreements were concluded during the year. While this is one more than 2009, it is decidedly below the annual average for the post-Cold War period.

The major historical issue in the Israeli-Arab/Palestinian conflict is the causes for the 1948 Palestinian exodus. Among the Israelis/Jews there are two main narratives regarding this issue: the Zionist one - the refugees fled, for various reasons; and the critical one - some fled while others were expelled by the Jewish/Israeli security forces. This article explores the way the Israeli/Jewish historical memory (i.e. the Israeli/Jewish research community) related to this historical issue from 1949 until 2004. According to the findings, until 1957 this memory exclusively presented the Zionist narrative. However, from 1958 to 1976 this Zionist trend largely continued but was accompanied by considerable critical studies. Later, from 1977 to 2004, this memory was characterized by the almost exclusive adoption of the critical narrative (with major increase in its significance since 1988). These findings contradict the way the literature relates to this memory as almost exclusively Zionist until the late-1980s. Other aspects of this memory are also discussed, such as the explanations for its characteristics, the significance of non-academic scholars, the contribution of scholars who reside externally to the given country, state-research community relations, the influence of present interests on the portrayal of the past, and gender issues. The findings have theoretical implications for collective and historical memories.

This article aims to demonstrate that differences in the two major datasets can significantly affect the results of predictions of mass political killing. Mass political killing (such as Hitler's killing of some six million Jews, or the Rwanda genocide of 1994) has been studied for decades with the aid of valuable datasets measuring 'democide' and 'genocide and politicide', respectively. Without attempting to take sides as to whether one or the other is a more valid measure of the phenomenon of mass political killing, the authors aim in this investigation to see what independent variables best account for the onset of mass political killing, with the state-year as the unit of analysis. The predictor variables are level of economic development; types of war and violent unrest short of war; and regime type. By using a Cox proportional hazard model, the authors find that important regime effects either appear or disappear depending on the dataset used, with regime generally having a significant effect on onset of democide, but not having a significant effect on onset of geno-politicide. It is important for the scholarly community to be aware of these dataset effects, which may be the source of some of the most important existing controversies in the literature on explaining mass political killing.

Once considered a 'hot topic' among scholars, research on coups d'état has waned in recent years. This decline is surprising given that 7 coups have happened between January 2008 and December 2010, bringing the last decade's total to almost three dozen. One explanation for the lack of coup research is the absence of a temporally and spatially comprehensive dataset to test theories. Also absent is a discussion of what makes coups distinct from other forms of anti-regime activity. This article seeks to remedy these problems. The authors present a new dataset on coups from 1950 to 2010. They begin by explaining their theoretical definition and coding procedures. Next, they examine general trends in the data across time and space. The authors conclude by explaining why scholars studying a variety of topics, including civil wars, regime stability, and democratization, would benefit by paying closer attention to coups.

While the negative economic consequences of civil conflict are well known, does civil conflict have sector-specific effects that threaten food and economic security? This article surveys the effects of civil conflict on reported marine and inland fish catch, focusing on the effects of conflict through redeployment of labor, population displacement, counter-insurgency strategy and tactics, and third-party encroachment into territorial waters. Analysis of 123 countries from 1952 to 2004 demonstrates a strong, statistically robust and negative relationship between civil conflict and fisheries, with civil wars (1000+ battle deaths) depressing catch by over 16% relative to prewar levels. The magnitude of this effect is large: the cumulative contraction in total fish catch associated with civil war onset is roughly 13 times larger than the estimated effect of an extraordinarily strong El Niño, the ocean-atmosphere phenomenon associated with global declines in fisheries. Robust evidence of a Phoenix effect is lacking: post-conflict fisheries do not quickly bounce back to prewar catch levels due to more rapid growth. Analysis of conflict episodes indicates that conflict intensity, measured by battle deaths, negatively affects fish catch, while population displacement and conflict proximity to the coast do not. While these findings contribute to the growing literature on the economic effects of civil conflict, they also are important for regional fisheries management organizations, which must increasingly pay attention to sociopolitical factors that dramatically affect the utilization of aquatic resources.

This article takes a two-step approach to improving our understanding of how US foreign policy signals affect the likelihood of coups in Latin America. First, a large body of qualitative literature has developed a 'conventional wisdom' on this subject, suggesting that pressure from the USA plays a key role in stabilizing favored leaders and destabilizing unfavored leaders. Meanwhile, quantitative scholarship analyzing coups focuses almost exclusively on intrastate factors. The first step brings these two bodies of work together by providing quantitative evidence that hostile US signals increase the likelihood of coups, while supportive signals have a stabilizing effect. The second step moves beyond the conventional wisdom by (1) reconsidering theoretical assumptions within the conventional argument and (2) identifying anomalies within the preliminary empirical analyses. These efforts reveal several factors that are likely to impact how coup plotters respond to US signals. Among these factors, empirical analyses indicate that US signals are particularly important when economic dependence on the USA increases, during the middle of a US president's term in office, when they have moderate levels of consistency, and when they specifically mention the military. Overall, the first stage of this article provides a robust confirmation of the conventional wisdom, while the second stage moves the literature down a path that is largely unexplored by previous work.

This study focuses on the relationship between national identity and intractable conflict. Abdelal's definition of collective identity that refers to the level of agreement regarding the purposes, practices, relational comparisons with other entities, and narratives that define collective identity was adapted to national identity during intractable conflict and was later applied to Israel's national identity. A review of the Israeli 1969-2006 election platforms shows that in the 1980s and 1990s significant changes occurred in Israel's national identity. The most significant changes included: changes regarding the territorial purpose of Israeli identity; changes in practices on who may become an Israeli citizen; changes of perception of the relationship between Israel and the Arabs; and a growing Israeli acceptance of Palestinian identity. Since 2000, following the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, some components of Israeli national identity have reverted to their original form. The study indicates that the Arab-Israeli conflict triggered changes in Israel's national identity, but the conflict also seemed affected by changes in that identity. The article connects the changes in Israeli national identity to specific mechanisms and conditions of conflict resolution and reconciliation.

There is surprisingly little empirical scholarship on the spread of capitalistic economic policies under the rubric of `globalization' and domestic peace. While the classical liberals saw free markets leading to social harmony because of self-interest of individuals, who cooperate for profit, Marxists and others viewed markets as anarchical, requiring state intervention for obtaining justice and peace. The authors argue from an opportunity-cost perspective that the payoffs to rebellion are structured by how an economy is governed. Closed economies are likelier than more open ones to accumulate `rebellion specific capital' because of high payoffs to organization in the shadows. Using an index of economic freedom that measures how free people are to transact in an economy, the authors find that countries more favorable to free enterprise have a reduced risk of civil war onsets, a result that is robust to the inclusion of institutional quality, per capita wealth, and sundry controls. The results hold up despite a battery of specification changes, alternative data, and testing methods. The findings do not suggest that states under conditions of capitalism lose their autonomy to provide the public good of peace, as skeptics of globalization claim. Peacemakers will do well to build institutions that reward productive investment over rent-seeking, alongside democratic institutions that ultimately gain their legitimacy on the back of good economic performance and well-functioning markets.

This article presents a new dataset of transitional justice mechanisms utilized worldwide from 1970-2007. These data complement the growing body of quantitative and comparative analyses of transitional justice. This article summarizes three important contributions made by the dataset. First, it includes five transitional justice mechanisms (trials, truth commissions, amnesties, reparations, and lustration policies), allowing scholars to avoid many of the methodological errors committed by performing single-mechanism studies. Second, it provides an expanded sample, both temporally and geographically, to facilitate greater comparative and policy impact. Third, the dataset enables scholars to analyze transitional justice across a variety of political contexts, including democratic transitions and civil wars. These data illuminate a new set of general trends and patterns in the implementation of transitional justice worldwide. The findings show that countries adopt amnesties more often than other mechanisms. They predominantly grant them in the context of civil war and to opponents of the state, rather than state agents. Courts rarely prosecute those currently in power for human rights violations. In civil war settings, rebels, rather than state actors, face trials. In post-authoritarian settings, courts try former authoritarian actors, but do not address crimes committed by the opposition to authoritarian rule. The dataset also reveals regional patterns of mechanism usage. Trials, lustration policies, and reparations occur most often in Europe. Non-European countries more frequently adopt truth commissions and amnesties than do their European counterparts, with a particularly high number of amnesties granted in Latin America.

Armed conflicts have been a permanent feature of the northeastern region since Indian independence. Surprisingly, relentless conflicts in this remote region of India have received little attention in the literature. Although some studies on conflicts in India have made important contributions to understanding and analyzing the causes of conflicts in general, none of them has paid specific attention to the ongoing conflicts in the northeastern region of India. Relative deprivation and persistent economic and political discrimination are often identified as the major causes for armed rebellion in this region. I provide a first quantitative test of this argument, exploring whether deprivation and continual economic and political discrimination explain the probability of armed conflict incidence across nine northeastern states of India during the period 1970-2007. The main findings from probit estimations show that poverty (relative to the rest of the country) and economic and political discrimination explain conflict outbreaks, after controlling for income, population pressures, state capacity, ethnic affiliations, forest area, peace years, neighboring conflict incidence, and distance to New Delhi. The study also reports considerable support for the baseline results when controlling for potential reverse feedback effects using the generalized method of moments. These results are robust to alternative estimation techniques and sample size.

While globalization advocates have argued that market liberalization and economic integration will strengthen human rights by promoting economic development and facilitating the diffusion of rights-supportive norms and values, critics contend that the same processes threaten to undermine human rights through economic exploitation and the repressive actions of pro-growth governments. To contribute to this debate, the authors examine the relationship between one aspect of economic globalization, foreign direct investment, and human rights performance. But the authors go beyond existing studies of the human rights impact of foreign direct investment, which generally lump all forms of FDI into a single aggregate indicator, by focusing on one specific form of FDI, transnational mergers and acquisitions (M&As). This is a particularly important area to explore given the human rights literature's emphasis on multinational corporations as both potential violators of human rights and catalysts for improvements in human rights performance. This study examines the impact of cross-border M&As, which have become an increasingly prominent form of foreign direct investment over the last 25 years, on human rights performance globally from 1981 through 2006. The results of the statistical analysis show that transnational mergers and acquisitions have a positive impact on human rights conditions across several indicators, including physical integrity rights, empowerment rights, workers' rights, and women's economic rights. This positive impact of cross-border M&As is particularly pronounced in developing countries.

This study addresses state militarization under conditions of ethnic and other diversity. Recent scholarship in economics finds that high diversity leads to lower provision of public goods. At the same time, conflict studies find that highly diverse societies face a lower risk of civil war despite the ‘primordialist’ claims about ancient hatreds, fear, and insecurity in such societies. Investigating possible links between these two separate lines of research, we explore whether diversity prompts governments to militarize heavily in order to prevent armed conflict, which would then crowd out spending on other public goods. Using military expenditures, personnel and arms imports as indicators of militarization, we find that higher levels of ethnic (and possibly linguistic) diversity predict lower levels of militarization, whereas religious diversity does not matter. If high diversity lowers the hazard of civil war, then it does not happen via a ‘garrison state’ effect. If diverse societies spend less on public goods, then this is not because they are crowded out by costly militarization.

The evidence of coming climate change has generated catastrophe-like statements of a future where a warmer, wetter, and wilder climate leads to a surge in migrant streams and gives rise to new wars. Although highly popular in policy circles, few of these claims are based on systematic evidence. Using a most-likely case design on Kenya 1989–2004, with new geographically disaggregated data on armed conflicts below the common civil conflict level, this study finds that climatic factors do influence the risk of conflicts and violent events. The effect is opposite to what should be expected from much of the international relations literature; rather, it supports the observations made by recent anthropological studies. Years with below average rainfall tend to have a peaceful effect on the following year and less robustly so for the current year as well. Little support is found for the notion that scarcity of farmland fuels violence in itself or in election years. More densely populated areas – not areas with a low land per capita ratio – run a higher risk of conflict. Election years systematically see more violence, however. The findings therefore support the notion that large-scale intergroup violence is driven by calculation and political gain rather than desperate scrambles for scarce land, pasture, and water resources.

Civil conflict and state failure has often been linked to breakdowns in regime legitimacy. Trust in government is a critical element of regime legitimacy and the state's ability to mediate between the demands of competing groups within society. We contend that government capability is a primary factor in shaping individuals' ascription of legitimacy to the state. Capable governments foster perceptions of legitimacy while poor institutional performance decreases the degree to which individuals trust their government. While some tests of this relationship exist in extant literature, much of the work fails to integrate both micro- and macro-level factors, is confined to regions with established state performance, or is based on single-country studies. Our approach avoids many of these deficiencies by using 32 Afrobarometer surveys collected across 16 different countries from 2000 to 2005 and employing hierarchical linear models to estimate the effects of temporal-specific, state-level variables on levels of individual trust. We find that higher institutional capacity is associated with increased levels of individual trust in government across African countries. Furthermore, we demonstrate that this effect on political trust is independent of other individual-level attitudes, socio-economic characteristics, and a state's prior internal conflicts.

This article relies on data from the 2005–09 World Values Survey to examine individual and cross-national variation in perception of the seriousness of global warming. The data show that a large majority of the public in all countries are concerned about the problem of global warming and that this assessment is part of a broader concern for global environmental issues. The widespread concern implies that global warming has the potential to generate mass political participation and demand for political action. Motivated by a value-based approach to the study of public opinion, the article shows that perception of the seriousness of the problem is positively correlated with high education, post-materialism, and a leftist position on the left–right scale. In addition, religious beliefs are important, suggesting that there is some diversity in the value basis for the issue and that it is not only linked to the ‘new-politics’ perspective. Variation across nations in wealth and CO2 emissions is not significantly related to the publics’ assessments of the problem, and, somewhat counterintuitively, people from countries relatively more exposed to climate-related natural disasters are less concerned about global warming. We suggest possible explanations for the latter finding and discuss our results in relation to the broader literature on environmental change, insecurity, and the potential for conflict.

Why is armed civil conflict more common in resource-dependent countries than in others? Several studies have attempted to unravel mechanisms on why natural resources are linked to armed conflict, but no coherent picture has yet emerged. This article seeks to address this puzzle by concentrating on the issue of how rebel access to natural resources affects conflict. It uses data on gemstone and hydrocarbon localities throughout the world and controls for the spatial and temporal overlap of resources and conflict. The results show that the location of resources is crucial to their impact on conflict duration. If resources are located inside the actual conflict zone, the duration of conflict is doubled. Interestingly, oil and gas reserves have this effect on duration regardless of whether there has been production or not. In addition, a country-level analysis suggests that oil production increases the risk of conflict onset when located onshore; offshore production has no effect on onset. These results support the assertion that natural resources play a central role in armed civil conflicts because of the incentives and opportunities they present for rebel groups.

For many years experimental observations have raised questions about the rationality of economic agents--for example, the Allais Paradox or the Equity Premium Puzzle. The problem is a narrow notion of rationality that disregards fear. This article extends the notion of rationality with new axioms of choice under uncertainty and the decision criteria they imply (Chichilnisky, G., 1996a. An axiomatic approach to sustainable development. Social Choice andWelfare 13, 257-321; Chichilnisky, G., 2000. An axiomatic approach to choice under uncertainty with Catastrophic risks. Resource and Energy Economics; Chichilnisky, G., 2002. Catastrophical Risk. Encyclopedia of Environmetrics, vol. 1. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Chicester). In the absence of catastrophes, the old and the new approach coincide, and both lead to standard expected utility. A sharp difference emerges when facing rare events with important consequences, or catastrophes. Theorem 1 establishes that a classic axiom of choice under uncertainty - Arrow's Monotone Continuity axiom, or its relatives introduced by DeGroot, Villegas, Hernstein and Milnor - postulate rational behavior that is [`]insensitive' to rare events as defined in (Chichilnisky, G., 1996a. An axiomatic approach to sustainable development. Social Choice andWelfare 13, 257-321; Chichilnisky, G., 2000. An axiomatic approach to choice under uncertainty with Catastrophic risks. Resource and Energy Economics; Chichilnisky, G., 2002. Catastrophical Risk. Encyclopedia of Environmetrics, vol. 1. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Chicester). Theorem 2 replaces this axiom with another that allows extreme responses to extreme events, and characterizes the implied decision criteria as a combination of expected utility with extremal responses. Theorems 1 and 2 offer a new understanding of rationality consistent with previously unexplained observations about decisions involving rare and catastrophic events, decisions involving fear, the Equity Premium Puzzle, [`]jump di

This article presents ACLED, an Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset. ACLED codes the actions of rebels, governments, and militias within unstable states, specifying the exact location and date of battle events, transfers of military control, headquarter establishment, civilian violence, and rioting. In the current version, the dataset covers 50 unstable countries from 1997 through 2010. ACLED's disaggregation of civil war and transnational violent events allow for research on local level factors and the dynamics of civil and communal conflict. Findings from subnational conflict research challenges conclusions from larger national-level studies. In a brief descriptive analysis, the authors find that, on average, conflict covers 15% of a state's territory, but almost half of a state can be directly affected by internal wars.

While some of the intrastate war literature calls for the disaggregation of civil conflict, most of those studies focus on the geography of civil conflict failing to take into account the various actors involved in such conflicts. This study addresses the multi-actor nature of civil conflict by examining whether 'actor aggregation' affects the inferences drawn from quantitative studies of civil conflict. Using two cases, Cambodia (1980-2004) and Indonesia (1980-2004), the authors examine how multiple dissident groups' behavior aggregated together can affect the inferences drawn from quantitative studies of government-dissident interactions. The results demonstrate that researchers may draw different inferences and commit both Type I and Type II errors using different actor aggregations. The results have myriad implications for the study of civil conflict and conflict processes.