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August 2015 - present
August 2002 - present
August 2002 - present
Publications
Publications (86)
Background: We ask when and why Russia has targeted civilian infrastructure in Ukraine, with a specific focus on attacks against healthcare.Methods: We use public geocoded event data on violent incidents targeting healthcare facilities from two different sources: Insecurity Insight and Violent Incident Information from News Articles (VIINA). We com...
The COVID-19 pandemic increased pressure on the relationship between governments and the public, making cooperation between both actors more critical than ever. Surprisingly, there is significant variation in public compliance with health policies, especially regarding vaccine uptake across different countries. Based on this finding, we seek to und...
The articles in this special issue address such questions as: How do states approach global health issues? How have they utilized health diplomacy and for what purposes? What are the principal challenges? How do pandemics affect conflict, and vice versa? Has health diplomacy effectively addressed global health concerns particularly in conflict-torn...
Unidimensional measures of democracy fail to account for the complex and varied nature of political systems. This article disaggregates the concept of democracy and proposes a multidimensional conceptualization to account for this variation in institutional configurations. Three theoretically informed dimensions are featured: participation, elector...
Populist parties and actors now govern various countries around the world. Often elected by the public in times of crises and over the perceived failure of ‘the elites’, the question stands as to how populist governments actually perform once elected, especially in times of crisis. Using the pandemic shock in the form of the COVID-19 crises, our pa...
Populist parties and actors now govern various countries around the world. Often elected by the public in times of crises and over the perceived failure of ‘the elites’, the question stands as to how populist governments actually perform once elected, especially in times of crisis. Using the pandemic shock in the form of the COVID-19 crises, our pa...
How does armed conflict affect accountability and political trust in democratic governments? To answer this question, we present quasi-experimental evidence based on survey data which, coincidentally, were collected in the days surrounding an unanticipated violent attack by a rebel group in Mali. The chance occurrence of the attack five days into t...
Unidimensional measures of democracy fail to account for the complex and varied nature of political systems. This article disaggregates the concept of democracy and proposes a multidimensional conceptualization to account for this variation in institutional cofingurations. Three theoretically informed dimensions are featured: participation, elector...
The escalation of conflict in the Middle East coincides with an emerging trend of attacks on healthcare. Protection of health personnel, health services and humanitarian workers is no longer respected. This compromises the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals 3 – towards health for all, and 16 – towards justice and peace....
The award committee has chosen Jean-Paul Azam as the winner of the 2019 Lewis Fry Richardson Award in particular in recognition of his contributions to the study of violent conflict and its prevention. The jury highlighted the key role of Jean-Paul Azam’s works on applying rational choice theory to understand armed conflicts, providing a consistent...
Grievances that derive from the unequal treatment of ethnic groups are a key motivation for civil war. Ethnic power sharing should therefore reduce the risk of internal conflict. Yet conflict researchers disagree on whether formal power‐sharing institutions effectively prevent large‐scale violence. We can improve our understanding of the effect of...
Investigation of whether, how, and why inequality influences the dynamics of violent conflict has a long intellectual history. Inequality between individuals and households (vertical inequality) has dominated the literature, but recently attention has shifted to the role of group-based inequalities in triggering violence. Our review of research on...
Unable to attract enough voluntary recruits, many rebel groups rely on force to fill their ranks. Given that the group used force to compel individuals to join, a coerced conscript would be presumed unlikely to be loyal and would be expected to desert at the first opportunity. Yet, groups that have relied on coerced recruitment retain their members...
How does armed conflict affect accountability and political trust in democratic governments? To answer this question we present quasi-experimental evidence based on survey data which, coincidentally, were collected in the days surrounding an unanticipated violent attack by a rebel group in Mali. The chance occurrence of the attack five days into th...
Power sharing is often purported to lead to civil peace, though its effects are disputed. We identify three types of power sharing-inclusive, dispersive, and constraining-and analyze their mechanisms of power allocation. We argue that constraining arrangements, which limit the power of a party or social group, are most likely to protect vulnerable...
This paper conducts the first analysis of the effect of armed conflict on progress in meeting the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals. We also examine the effect of conflict on economic growth. Conflict has clear detrimental effects on the reduction of poverty and hunger, on primary education, on the reduction of child mortality, and on ac...
Arrangements for sharing political power serve three purposes: to give all relevant groups access to important political decisions; to partition the policy process, thereby granting groups relevant autonomy; and to constrain holders of political power from abusing authority. A new global dataset of political power sharing institutions, 1975–2010, i...
Does the rise of China inexorably anticipate the onset of global instability or even a great power war? Today, routine comparisons are made between a rising China with that of Germany over 100 years ago. Organski, in his original explication of power transition theory, however, was far more cautious. Despite predicting the remarkable rise of China...
Powersharing is often purported to lead to civil peace. We identify three types of powersharing: inclusive, dispersive and constraining. Centering on the credible commitment problem, we analyze the mechanisms of power allocation activated by powersharing. We focus on constraining arrangements, which limit the power of any party or social group, and...
We contrast two archetypal modes of research in principal-agency theory and in public administration: an aggregated mode which
regards the agency as a unified whole, and a disaggregated mode attending to individuals. We argue for the virtues of the
latter approach in that mechanisms are clear, verifiable, and specific. The aggregated approach may a...
A key motivation for civil war are grievances that derive from the unequal treatment or outright discrimination of ethnic groups. Preventing violence thus requires ethnic equality, e.g., in the form of power-sharing. Yet whether or not formal power-sharing rules are effective in preventing large-scale violence is a controversial question. We add to...
Soft power is the power to persuade whereby one actor in a non-coercive manner convinces another to want the same things he/she wants. Sport can be used as tool of soft power both internationally and domestically. Peace-building and nation-building can be achieved through four mechanisms of sport diplomacy and politics: image-building; building a p...
This paper conducts the first analysis of the effect of armed conflict on progress in meeting the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals. We also examine the effect of conflict on economic growth. Conflict has clear detrimental effects on the reduction of poverty and hunger, on primary education, on the reduction of child mortality, and on ac...
This article introduces a new dataset on post-conflict justice (PCJ) that provides an overview of if, where, and how post-conflict countries address the wrongdoings committed in association with previous armed conflict. Motivated by the literature on post-conflict peacebuilding, we study justice processes during post-conflict transitions. We examin...
This article examines the effect of climate change on a type of armed conflict that pits pastoralists (cattle herders) against each other (range wars). Such conflicts are typically fought over water rights and/or grazing rights to unfenced/unowned land. The state is rarely involved directly. The rangeland of East Africa is a region particularly vul...
Most quantitative assessments of civil conflict draw on annual country-level data to determine a baseline hazard of conflict onset. The first problem with such analyses is that they ignore factors associated with the precipitation of violence, such as elections and natural disasters and other trigger mechanisms. Given that baseline hazards are rela...
Several studies indicate that internal armed conflict breeds conflict. Armed conflict creates conditions that increase the chances of war breaking out again. This 'conflict trap' works through several channels: Conflicts (1) polarize populations and create deep resentments and build up the organizational capacity for future warfare, (2) undermine d...
Executive Summary This paper reviews the literature on the development consequences of internal armed conflict and state fragility and analyzes the relationship using data from World Development Indicators, UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Data, and World Bank state fragility assessments. Our main focus is on a set of development indicators that capture se...
Recruitment and retention are essential for any group. To be viable, a group must have members, whether a labour union, a political party, a football club or a rebel army. A group must convince people to join and to persuade them to continue participating in the group. For a violent organization engaged in military conflict, failing to retain membe...
A major aim of our paper is to explore how the treatment and behavior of children may shed light on the recruitment and organizational patterns of military groups in general. Drawing primarily from the economics of child labor, but with considerable insight from child psychology and conflict studies, we ascertain the reasons why some violent groups...
Current global estimates of children engaged in warfare range from 200,000 to 300,000. Children's roles in conflict range from armed and active participants to spies, cooks, messengers, and sex slaves.This volume examines the factors that contribute to the use of children in war, the effects of war upon children, and the perpetual cycle of warfare...
Children have always been part of war, yet they constitute an understudied dimension of human security. In this regard, our volume contributes to the shift in focus away from traditional notions of national defense toward what former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan described as "the protection of communities and individuals from internal violence"...
Why do some armed civil conflicts last longer than others? Drawing on a contest success function model, we show that geographic factors (such as location, terrain, and natural resources) interact with rebel fighting capacity and together play a crucial role in determining the duration of conflict. Using precisely dated duration data in event histor...
The Lewis Fry Richardson Lifetime Achievement Award is a triennial prize to honour scholars, who have made exemplary contributions to the scientific study of militarised conflict. This essay presents the third winner of the award – Nils Petter Gleditsch – and commemorates on his scholarly achievements over the last four decades.
To comprehend why a group would intentionally target civilians, we need to understand why other groups do not. In this chapter, we argue that disgruntled groups face three main choices when addressing their dissatisfaction: suffering a disadvantageous peace, engaging in unconventional warfare, or engaging in conventional warfare. We further disaggr...
In this paper, we examine the argument that power-sharing arrangements may reduce the risk of civil conflict by lessening the stakes of democratic political contestation by guaranteeing a role in the post-conflict government. As such, power-sharing implies the pursuit of one conception of democracy, ex post fairness, at the expense of others, such...
The mere word "bureaucracy" brings to mind images of endless lines, piles of paperwork, and frustrating battles over rules and red tape. But some bureaucracies are clearly more efficient and responsive than others. Why? In Teaching, Tasks, and Trust, distinguished political scientists John Brehm and Scott Gates show that a good part of the answer m...
This paper estimates the risk preferences of cotton farmers in Southern Peru, using the results from a multiple-price-list lottery game. Assuming that preferences conform to two of the leading models of decision under risk--Expected Utility Theory (EUT) and Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT)--we find strong evidence of moderate risk aversion. Once we...
In this examination of communal violence (intrastate armed conflict between two non-state groups), we examine the relationship between one aspect of state institutional strength—property rights protection (PRP) - and inequality between social groups. Using a contest success function model, we build in an assumption that increasing PRP reduces the e...
This article examines how political institutional structures affect political instability. It classifies polities as autocracies or democracies based on three institutional dimensions: election of the executive, constraints on executive decision-making authority, and extent of political participation. It hypothesizes that strongly autocratic and de...
This paper makes two empirical contributions to the literature, based on predictions generated by a lobby group model. First, we investigate how environmental lobby groups affect the determination of environmental policy in rich and developing countries. Second, we explore the interaction between democratic participation and political (electoral) c...
The Maoist insurgency in Nepal is one of the highest intensity internal conflicts in recent times. Investigation into the causes of the conflict would suggest that grievance rather than greed is the main motivating force. The concept of horizontal or intergroup inequality, with both an ethnic and caste dimension, is highly relevant in explaining th...
In addition to the problem of simply defining civil war, conflict researchers who are interested in studying the duration of civil war must address a number of measurement problems, which can lead to selection bias. Moreover, the characteristics of the data on civil war complicate duration analysis, including: repeated events, competing risks, non-...
Recent cases of military intervention in Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia, and Haiti have ignited a policy debate as to whether democratic government can be imposed externally. The results of panel (cross-temporal, cross- national) analyses indicate that military interventions have a positive effect on democratization in target states (Gleditsch, Christi...
Trust constitutes a central aspect of human relations, and within the context of organizations it plays a particularly strong role. The success of hierarchical relationships between supervisors and subordinates may hinge on mutual trust, and trust also permeates professional-client relationships. Public bureaucracies, especially those characterized...
The Nordic development assistance programs have earned a reputation for commitment to human rights and democracy. Is the reputation deserved? We address this question by comparing how much aid donors give and to which recipient countries. Using a global panel data set, spanning the period 1980-99 and 91 recipient countries, we find that individual...
Samuel Huntington's (1991) thesis of democratic waves has come under strong criticism from scholars such as Renske Doorenspleet (2000) and Adam Przeworski and his colleagues (2000). We take issue with all of these authors' (including Huntington's) use of a blunt dichotomous measure of democracy, which we believe creates the potential for inaccurate...
This paper tests the hypothesis that democracies exhibit stronger environmental commitment than non-democracies using a variety of econometric techniques (single equation and three-stage least squares estimations). A number of proxy variables are used in lieu of environmental commitment, a non-observable variable. Strong evidence is found that demo...
Geographical factors play a critical role in determining how a civil war is fought and who will prevail. Drawing on the PRIO/Uppsala Armed Conflict dataset covering the period 1946-2000, the authors have determined the location of all battle-zones for all civil wars in this time period, thereby identifying the geographic extent and the center point...
Civil war is fought between two political organizations, the state and a rebel group. Myriad theories of civil war have examined the role of state institutions and state strength, but little attention has been devoted to theorizing about rebel organizations themselves. This paper focuses on the organizational structure of rebel groups to understand...
Symbolism is evident in the handshake between the leaders
of two countries, the carefully chosen words of an official
apology (or nonapology), the yellow ribbons of the Gulf War,
and the rise and fall of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, international
relations are rife with symbolism. Yet, despite their ubiquity,
symbols have largely been dismissed as peri...
Coherent democracies and harshly authoritarian states have few civil wars, and intermediate regimes are the most conflict-prone. Domestic violence also seems to be associated with political change, whether toward greater democracy or greater autocracy. Is the greater violence of intermediate regimes equivalent to the finding that states in politica...
This article explores the evolutionary and endogenous relationship between democracy and war at the system level. Building on Kant, the authors argue that the rules and norms of behavior within and between democracies become more prevalent in international relations as the number of democracies in the system increases. The authors use Kalman filter...
Bureaucrats perform most of the tasks of government, profoundly influencing the daily lives of Americans. But who, or what, controls what bureaucrats do? John Brehm and Scott Gates examine who influences whether federal, state, and local bureaucrats work, shirk, or sabotage policy. The authors combine deductive models and computer simulations of bu...
This article introduces the Polity IIId ("d" is for dates) data set. The Polity IIId project codes the precise dates of changes in political structure identified by Polity III for all independent countries in the international system from 1800 to 1994. By moving from annual measurements of authority and polity characteristics, the Polity IIId data...
The AIDS Risk Reduction Model (ARRM) is a conceptual model designed to explain the influence of knowledge and attitudes about AIDS/HIV on risk-related behaviors. This article measures the influence of the primary concepts associated with the ARRM (labeling, commitment, and enactment) on high-risk adolescent's knowledge, attitudes, and self-reported...
As nonprofit organizations perform many of the duties formerly discharged by government, the issue of democratic accountability becomes relevant. This article shows that governments are unwilling and, in some ways, unable to control such organizations completely. Moreover, we demonstrate how the innovative features of nonprofit organizations can di...
Numerous scholars continue to search for explanations to account for the rise of protectionist trade practices by some nation‐states. Recent work has sought to formally link the notion of economic risk with the rise in barriers to free trade. This class of models examine what trade policies are optimal under different conditions arising from change...
Supervision and compliance play a central role across a wide variety of human activities. To understand the nature of interactions between supervisors and subordinates, the interests and capabilities of both need to be examined. The problems with most studies of supervision stem from overemphasizing the supervisor and paying too little attention to...
Several recent articles outline the formal logic of supervision and compliance (e.g., Bianco and Bates 1990; Holmstrom 1982; Kreps 1990; and Miller 1992). These models lead to widely varying conclusions about what makes for effective supervision, indeed, whether supervision can induce compliance among subordinates at all. Our paper evaluates these...
Separatist movements typically share a basis of legitimacy rooted in nationalism and common ancestral roots. However, a considerable subset of separatists bases their claims on religious difference as well. For instance, separatist conflicts such as the conflict in Mindanao in the Philippines, the Ogaden conflict in Ethiopia, the Karen’s struggle i...
Recruitment and retention constitute fundamental requirements for any organization. For a rebel group engaged in armed conflict with the state, recruitment and retention of personnel can constitute the difference between life and death for the leadership of such organizations and the organizations themselves. Utilizing a principal-agent analysis of...
Both the control of territory possessing natural resources used to finance armed conflict and the distances an army must travel to project force affect how a civil war is fought and who will prevail. In this paper, a model based on a contest success function designed to explicitly account for distances is employed to model the ability to project fo...
Abstract will be provided by author.
This is a draft only - Please do not cite without checking with the authors. Abstract: This paper proposes to investigate the relationship between the production and trafficking of illicit narcotics, the stability of political institutions, and the incidence of internal military conflict. The linkages between drugs, governance and civil conflict ha...
Armed conflict increases human rights abuses, inhibits democratization and exacerbates social fragility. The mechanism causing this is state securitization. Given the lack of open legitimate channels for the expression of grievances, protest and riots offer the only means of political expression. Protest, in turn, induces insecurity for leaders and...
Existing models of political transitions tend to treat either civil society or the incumbent as a unitary actor. Although useful in specific settings, both these assumptions are unrealistic in most cases and miss important dynamics, especially in cases of revolution. We develop a model of transitions in which two collective action games are nested...
This paper tests the hypothesis that democracies exhibit stronger environmental commitment than non-democracies using a variety of econometric techniques (single equation and three-stage least squares estimations). A number of proxy variables are used in lieu of environmental commitment, a non-observable variable. Strong evidence is found that demo...
