Carlo Koos

University of Bergen | UiB · Department of Government

This article examines the long-term impact of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) on prosocial behavior in Sierra Leone. Two theoretical arguments are developed and tested. The first draws on the feminist literature and suggests the presence of a decay mechanism: victims and their families are stigmatized by their community and excluded from so...

Studies have found that politically deprived groups are more likely to rebel. However, does rebellion increase the likelihood of achieving political rights? This article proposes that rebellion helps ethnic groups to overcome deprivation. I illustrate this by using a ‘‘typical’’ case (the Ijaw’s struggle against the Nigerian government) to demonstr...

Research on conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) has grown rapidly over the last decade. This article consolidates existing social science research on CSRV according to two lines of inquiry: its causes and its consequences. Overall, research has considerably advanced our knowledge of the causes of CRSV, particularly in four aspects: purpose, con...

Ash (2022, "Ash" hereafter), in this journal, re-assesses our 2020 article “Polygynous Neighbors, Excess Men, and Intergroup Conflict in Africa.” The article analyzed the relationship between polygyny (one man marrying several wives) and intergroup conflict events in Africa. Ash includes assessments that support our original results, though others...

Can wars breed nationalism? We argue that civilians’ indirect exposure to war fatalities can trigger psychological processes that increase identification with their nation and ultimately strengthen support for nationalist parties. We test this argument in the context of the rise of the Nazi Party after World War 1 (WW1). To measure localized war ex...

Postconflict reconstruction programmes often aim to improve state–society relations but fail to spell out the underlying process. We specify a mechanism that links aid programmes through (1) short‐term and (2) medium‐term improvements in basic services and (3) subjective progress to (4) perceptions of the state and spell four conditions (quality, s...

Sexual violence by armed groups is common in civil wars. Qualitative studies have shown that victims and their families experience social stigmatization. Stigmatization is viewed as a central mechanism to social exclusion and disintegration impeding post-conflict social, political, and economic recovery. We provide new theory on the social conditio...

Wartime sexual violence is widespread across conflict zones and thought to leave a disastrous legacy for survivors, communities, and nations. Yet, systematic studies on i) the prevalence and ii) the social and political consequences of wartime sexual violence are fraught with severe data limitations. Based on individual-level survey evidence from t...

Populations in war-torn regions are exposed to a wide array of traumatic events that can cause an enormous psychological burden. Individual characteristics influence the likelihood of being exposed to certain events, pointing to systematic interindividual differences in trauma exposure. However, there is a dearth of studies examining potential patt...

Do survey participants in conflict zones respond differently if they have been interviewed before? Academic and policy interest in post-war political opinion has increased tremendously. One unexpected consequence of this surge of survey research is a growing probability that individuals will be interviewed multiple times. However, if participating...

Did indirect community-level exposure to WW1 casualties facilitate the rise of the Nazi party in Weimar Germany? Mass warfare can promote nationalist attitudes outside of active combat zones by amplifying in-group preferences of returning veterans and relatives affected by traumatic loss. We investigate such localized effects of WW1 on interwar Ger...

This report provides data on household wellbeing in countries in sub-Saharan Africa following the Covid-19 pandemic. The focus is on employment and income, food security, and coping mechanisms, and on access to education and health care.

Governments of low-income countries often rely on development agencies to implement programs aiming at improving health, education and economic outcomes. Apart from these intended effects, development programs can have powerful unintended side-effects. In this study, we explore one such side-effect: democratization. Specifically, we assess whether...

We study the empowerment of women in post-conflict Liberia using a cluster-randomized, placebo-controlled trial. Our research question is whether women are more effectively empowered by improving their economic livelihoods or by changing institutions and norms to be more accepting of gender equality. Using a factorial design, we randomly assign 120...

We argue that polygyny creates a social imbalance where few, economically well-off men marry many wives and many poor men marry late or never. By definition, polygyny produces what we refer to as "excess men." In order to gain material wealth, excess men are likely to raid, plunder, and rob neighboring ethnic groups. We test this hypothesis with ge...

Sexual violence by armed groups is common in civil wars. Qualitative studies have shown that victims and their families experience social stigmatization. Stigmatization is viewed as a central mechanism to social exclusion and disintegration impeding post-conflict social, political and economic recovery. We provide new theory on the social condition...

Cooperative norms and behavior are considered to be essential requirements for sustainable stabilization and development in conflict-affected states. It is therefore particularly important to understand what factors explain their salience in contexts of war, violence and displacement. In this paper, we assess the role of historical political legaci...

Cooperative norms and behavior are considered to be essential requirements for sustainable stabilization and development in conflict-affected states. It is therefore particularly important to understand what factors explain their salience in contexts of war, violence and displacement. In this paper, we assess the role of historical political legaci...

Previous research has established a link between oil production and armed conflict in low- and middle-income countries. Oil-related grievances are viewed as a key variable driving resentment and anti-state attitudes. However, the off-the-shelf measures of existing studies (oil exports, oil revenues per capita, etc.) measure dependence and richness,...

This article has been published in World Politics. Copy/paste this link to access the published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0043887117000351

Religion has increasingly become important in conflicts worldwide. Religious leaders may play a key role in mobilizing believers as they can call for peace or instigate violence. But what makes religious leaders support peace or promote violence? Drawing on a survey poll of 102 religious leaders in Juba, South Sudan, this paper represents virtually...

A large qualitative literature on violent conflict in Nigeria has identified the importance of oil production and ethnicity as salient factors in understanding violence, especially in the oil-rich Niger Delta. This resonates with the broader literature on natural resources, ethnic exclusion, and conflict. This article advances existing research by...

Since the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, sexual violence in conflict has received increasing scholarly attention. While earlier research focused on documenting cases of sexual violence and investigating the topic from a meta-perspective, in the last decade an increasing number of empirical, largely qualitative st...

This article uses a collective-action framework to study the mobilization of the Arrow Boys (AB), a community defense militia in South Sudan. Drawing on general collective-action explanations, this article argues that the mobilization of the AB was facilitated by two factors: (1) a strong overlap of the fighter's private and the community's public...

Previous research on the resource-conflict-nexus argues that grievances are central in explaining political violence. However, there have been few attempts to conceptualize and systematically test which kind of grievances are linked to support of violence in resource-based societies. This paper contributes to fill this gap. The theoretical framewor...

We employ a two‐tier spatiotemporal analysis to investigate whether uranium operations cause armed conflict in Africa. The macrolevel analysis suggests that – compared to the baseline conflict risk – uranium ventures increase the risk of intrastate conflict by 10 percent. However, we find ethnic exclusion to be a much better predictor of armed conf...

Die Rebellengruppe South Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SSLM/A) meldete nach schweren Kämpfen mit der südsudanesischen Armee am 29. Oktober 2011 die Erobe-rung der Stadt Mayom im Bundesstaat Unity (Sudan Tribune 29.10.2011). Analyse Seit dem Friedensabkommen von 2005 (Comprehensive Peace Agreement, CPA) steht im Südsudan der Aufbau einer Staatsver...