scholarly journals Predatory Government and the Feasibility of Rebellion: A Micro Logic of the Capitalist Peace

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Indra de Soysa
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Conflict Zones ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
Wide Acceptance ◽  
Battle Deaths ◽  
Dominant State ◽  
Specific Capital

The idea that civil war has to be feasible to occur, and that feasibility is largely a function of the availability of lootable income has gained wide acceptance in the specialized literature on civil war. A parallel debate exists on whether or not liberal, capitalist economies produce a lower risk of domestic conflict. A micro logic for why capitalist economies are less likely to break down in armed conflict is offered to bridge these two literatures. It argues that autarchic economic policies often associated with predatory states drive investment in the shadows for capturing rents from market-constraining policies. The survivability of groups is based on infrastructures of violence and escape rather than simply the availability of lootable income. Free-market economies are far less likely to generate investment in this form of rebellion-specific capital that ultimately facilitates an open challenge of predatory states. Such a view of conflict is able to reconcile why internal conflicts last long, how narratives of greed and grievance coexist in conflict zones, why dominant state forces fail to stamp out insurgency, and why autarchic states are highly militarized. Any theory focused on grabbing to explain the onset of conflict should endogenize the causes of survivability, which ultimately determines how many battle deaths get generated to meet the threshold for becoming a civil war.

Noninternational Armed Conflict (“Civil War”)

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faustin Ntoubandi
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
International Criminal Tribunal ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Jus In Bello ◽  
Additional Protocol ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
Geneva Conventions

A noninternational armed conflict (NIAC) or civil war—as it used to be called in the past—is an armed conflict that occurs within the territory of a particular state, between government armed forces and organized armed groups, or between such groups fighting each other. It is also often called “internal armed conflict,” as opposed to an international armed conflict involving at least two states. NIACs constitute the oldest form of armed conflicts and have become, since the end of the Cold War, more pervasive and more lethal than international armed conflicts. Conflicts since the late 20th century in Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda, as well as the ongoing ones in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine, and Syria, are just a few illustrations of the pervasive character of NIACs. International law has, for a long period of time, considered NIAC as a purely intrastate matter despite its external reverberations. However, this stance has evolved following the adoption of the four Geneva Conventions in 1949. The latter codify a corpus of customary rules, commonly known as jus in bello, which regulate the conduct of hostilities in the context of armed conflict by restraining the use by the warring parties of certain means and methods of warfare. Article 3 of each of the four Geneva Conventions introduces NIAC as “armed conflict not of an international character,” the victims of which must be subjected to the minimum standards of protection. In 1977 the Geneva Conventions of 1949 were supplemented by two protocols, which operate a clear distinction between international armed conflict (Additional Protocol I) and NIAC (Additional Protocol II or AP II). AP II defines humanitarian law rules that govern hostilities in internal conflicts. Such rules, together with other relevant treaty provisions and humanitarian principles, constitute the corpus of the jus in bello regulating the conduct of NIACs. A number of internal conflicts that erupted in various countries in the beginning of the 1990s have given ad hoc international tribunals, especially the 1993 International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the 1994 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), the opportunity not only to outline the nature and delimit the frontiers of NIACs, but also to set the conditions under which individual criminal liability may arise as a result of the crimes committed in the context of such conflicts.

Dead Wrong?: Battle Deaths, Military Medicine, and Exaggerated Reports of War's Demise

2014 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanisha M. Fazal
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Military Medicine ◽  
Original Data ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Protective Equipment ◽  
Conflict Zones ◽  
The Past ◽  
Recent Scholarship ◽  
Battle Deaths ◽  
The Military

Is war in decline? Recent scholarship suggests that it is. The empirical basis for this argument is a decline in battle deaths over the past several centuries, a standard metric for counting wars and armed conflicts. Dramatic improvements in medical care in conflict zones—in preventive medicine, battlefield medicine, evacuation, and protective equipment—have raised the likelihood of surviving battle wounds today compared with past eras. Thus the fact that war has become less fatal does not necessarily mean that it has become less frequent. Original data on wounded-to-killed ratios, supplemented by medical research and interviews with physicians from the military and nongovernmental communities, is used to advance this claim. The results show that the decline in war is likely not as dramatic as some scholars have argued. These findings question the foundation of existing datasets on war and armed conflict. They also highlight the growing need for policy focused on the battle wounded.

Part I: Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tilman Rodenhäuser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Basic Principle ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
Laws Of War ◽  
Connected Group ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Contemporary Practice

Analysing the development of the concept of non-state parties to an armed conflict from the writings of philosophers in the eighteenth century through international humanitarian law (IHL) treaty law to contemporary practice, three threads can be identified. First, as pointed out by Rousseau almost two and a half centuries ago, one basic principle underlying the laws of war is that war is not a relation between men but between entities. Accordingly, the lawful objective of parties cannot be to harm opponents as individuals but only to overcome the entity for which the individual fights. This necessitates that any party to an armed conflict is a collective, organized entity and not a loosely connected group of individuals. Second, de Vattel already stressed that civil war is fought between two parties who ‘acknowledge no common judge’ and have no ‘common superior’ on earth....

Indian Muslim(s) After Liberalization

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maidul Islam
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Economic Reforms ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Multiple Forms ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Economic Changes

Close to the turn of the century and almost 45 years after Independence, India opened its doors to free-market liberalization. Although meant as the promise to a better economic tomorrow, three decades later, many feel betrayed by the economic changes ushered in by this new financial era. Here is a book that probes whether India’s economic reforms have aided the development of Indian Muslims who have historically been denied the fruits of economic development. Maidul Islam points out that in current political discourse, the ‘Muslim question’ in India is not articulated in terms of demands for equity. Instead, the political leadership camouflages real issues of backwardness, prejudice, and social exclusion with the rhetoric of identity and security. Historically informed, empirically grounded, and with robust analytical rigour, the book tries to explore connections between multiple forms of Muslim marginalization, the socio-economic realities facing the community, and the formation of modern Muslim identity in the country. At a time when post-liberalization economic policies have created economic inequality and joblessness for significant sections of the population including Muslims, the book proposes working towards a radical democratic deepening in India.

The ECOMOG Initiative in Liberia: A Liberian Perspective

1993 ◽  
Vol 21 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 74-83
Author(s):  
S. Byron Tarr
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
West African ◽  
Security System ◽  
Economic Community ◽  
Internal Conflicts ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Monitoring Group ◽  
Inter State

This is a Liberian perspective on the unique initiative by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) to resolve the Liberian conflict by organizing and deploying a Peace Monitoring Group in Liberia. It considers whether ECOWAS’ initiative can become a self-reliant security system that can end a civil war and institutionalize deterrence to subregional inter-state and internal conflicts. Can this self-generated, West African initiative set the stage for democratization? Is the initiative the start of an inter-African cooperative security system? Is the model of Nigerian leadership a harbinger of a regional hegemony in the making? Is the modest role of the USA constructive in resolving the conflict, in light of the fact that Liberia is a country with which the USA has had an historic relationship?

INTERNATIONAL CONFLICTS IN CAMBODIA AND AFGHANISTAN

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Subira Onwudiwe
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
International Humanitarian Law ◽  
Humanitarian Law ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Civil Conflicts ◽  
Foreign Intervention

A civil war marked by the intervention of foreign military troops is known as an internationalized non-international armed conflict.' This type of armed conflict happens often and presents a number of issues of concern to international lawyers. The scope of this article is confined to the application of international humanitarian law in such circumstances, and it does not address the validity of foreign involvement in a civil war. In civil conflicts involving foreign intervention, the sides seldom agree on the facts or their interpretation. As a result, this article is dependent on certain factual assumptions, assumptions for which evidence cannot always be provided.

scholarly journals The Long-Term Consequences of Civil War for Migration: The Case of Tajikistan

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle O'Brien
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
District Level ◽  
Policy Makers ◽  
Peace Accord ◽  
Logistic Regression Models ◽  
Individual Household ◽  
Level I ◽  
And Migration

Armed conflict is socially transformative. Although migration research has established the proximate relationship between armed conflict and increases in migration, much less attention has been paid to the long-term, or distal relationship. This research leverages the case of the 1992-1997 Tajikistani Civil War to examine the distal relationship between armed conflict and migration decisions nearly a decade after the war had ended. Using a series of logistic regression models and a selection-based endogeneity correction, I estimate the likelihood of migrating in 2006, given the intensity of conflict experience at the district level. I find that, controlling for individual, household, and district-level indicators, the legacy of conflict continues to influence migration – for men and for ‘stayers’ – nearly a decade after the peace accord was signed. Some evidence suggests that certain kinds of development projects can moderate this relationship. In conflict-affected countries, incorporating the legacy of conflict into empirical research can help scholars and policy-makers better understand migration in the aftermath of war.

scholarly journals Terror i represje sowieckie wobec zachodnich Ukraińców w latach 1943–1945 z jugosłowiańskimi kontekstami w tle

2016 ◽  
pp. 109-160
Author(s):  
Mariusz Zajączkowski
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Internal Factors ◽  
Eastern Front ◽  
Western Ukraine ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
The Relationship

The aim of this article is to show the relationship between Soviet partisans and the Ukrainian population in the western regions of Ukraine. It also aims to demonstrate how the attitude toward the armed troops of the Ukrainian national and nationalist underground, which operated in the area between 1942 and 1944, changed under the influence of the war on the Eastern Front and internal factors. All this led to the outbreak of an open armed conflict and terror of the red partisans against the Ukrainian peasants, most of whom supported national and nationalist partisans. These events are presented against the background of political, social and military conditions for the operation and development of the Soviet partisan movement in the area of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. This article also describes how the Soviet security police and army fought the OUN-B and UPA in this area and repressed members of the anti-communist underground and its civilian supporters during the re-establishment of the communist authorities after 1944. It also attempts to show the similarities and differences between the events in Western Ukraine (1943–1945) and the Civil War in Yugoslavia (1941–1945), including the local communists’ fight for power in the country.

Ghana: Part 2

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-211
Author(s):  
Robert L. Tignor
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
Free Market ◽  
Addis Ababa ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
The State ◽  
Development Plan ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Mixed Economy ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Economic Adviser

This chapter looks at how W. Arthur Lewis left Ghana as a member of the Ghanaian delegation to the all-African conference meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. He did not return. In Addis, he announced his intention to take up a new post at the United Nations. He did not, however, sever his ties with Ghana, and he was to return briefly in 1963 to offer advice on the Seven-Year Development Plan. Because he had not had time to train a replacement, his departure left the Ghanaians without a fulltime economic adviser. The responsibility for drafting the budget and overseeing the five-year plan devolved on a variety of outside consultants and Ghanaian ministers themselves. At first Ghana drifted in the direction of more state controls over the economy and greater suspicion of the free market; but by 1960 and 1961 the drift had become a full-scale push as the state began to replace the Lewis programs that had featured a mixed economy with ones that looked exclusively to the state. The early pressures to scrap the Lewis economic policies and move to the left came as much in response to problems that had haunted the Ghanaian economy throughout the late 1950s as to ideology, notably trade and budgetary deficits.

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