Civil War and Religion: Salafi-Jihadist Groups

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emil Aslan Souleimanov
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Recent Decade ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Academic Literature ◽  
Ethnographic Studies ◽  
Foreign Fighters ◽  
And Behavior ◽  
Conflict Intensity

Reflecting on the recent rise of Salafi groups and their impact on civil war, the academic literature on Salafi radicalization, mobilization, and recruitment has burgeoned in the recent decade and a half. Yet little consensus exists as to the relative power of three major causes: grievances, ideology, and radical milieu and support structures as causes of violent radicalization. Even less is known about how jihadist foreign fighters affect civil wars in terms of conflict intensity and resolution. In both fields, key debates are identified in the recent scholarship, explain the major shortcomings and gaps, and suggest avenues of future research. For instance, it is important—and hardly avoidable—that epistemological and ontological obstacles lay in the way of establishing the causes of (violent) radicalization, because the processes relating to the change of human perception and behavior are extremely difficult to trace. Another point is the frequent—deliberate or unintended—distortion of the testimonies of former combatants, not least Salafi-jihadists, which makes the task of establishing the causes of (violent) radicalization and recruitment harder. Identifying avenues of further research, there is a lack of quality first-hand data in the current research on Salafi-inspired radicalization, mobilization, and recruitment. More methodological plurality—particularly in-depth ethnographic studies and quantitative work—is needed, as well as more research on virtual social networks and non-verbal contents.

Transnational Jihadism & Civil Wars

Daedalus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 146 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-70
Author(s):  
Martha Crenshaw
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Domestic Terrorism ◽  
Transnational Activism ◽  
Power Centers ◽  
Soviet Invasion ◽  
Competing Power ◽  
Foreign Fighters ◽  
The Relationship

When rebels also employ terrorism, civil wars can become more intractable. Since the 1980s, jihadism, a form of violent transnational activism, has mobilized civil war rebels, outside entrepreneurs, foreign fighters, and organizers of transnational as well as domestic terrorism. These activities are integral to the jihadist trend, representing overlapping and conjoined strands of the same ideological current, which in turn reflects internal division and dissatisfaction within the Arab world and within Islam. Jihadism, however, is neither unitary nor monolithic. It contains competing power centers and divergent ideological orthodoxies. Different jihadist actors emphasize different priorities and strategies. They disagree, for example, on whether the “near” or the “far” enemy should take precedence. The relationship between jihadist terrorism and civil war is far from uniform or constant. This essay traces the trajectory of this evolution, beginning in the 1980s in the context of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Civil Wars, Scientific Study of

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Idean Salehyan ◽  
Clayton L. Thyne
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Conflict Duration ◽  
Breeding Grounds ◽  
The Government ◽  
Negative Impacts ◽  
External Actors

Civil war is an armed conflict between the state and another organized domestic party over a contested political incompatibility, which results in a number of casualties exceeding a certain threshold for both parties. Attempts to operationalize these criteria have produced many data sets, which conceptualize civil war as distinct from one-sided violence, organized crime, and communal fighting. Civil wars are devastating for states experiencing them, their neighbors, and the entire global community. Combatant and civilian deaths, rape, massive refugee flight, negative impacts on economy and infrastructure, spread of infectious diseases, global spread of illegal narcotics, and the promotion of terrorism are all consequences of civil wars. Theories explaining why civil wars occur focus on objectives of the rebels, ability of rebels to successfully challenge the government, influence of external actors on interactions between the government and the opposition, external financing of potential rebel groups, and impact of a state’s neighbors on the likelihood of civil conflict or how neighboring conflicts and refugee communities serve as breeding grounds for cross-border rebel movements. Conflicts persist until neither side believes that it can achieve unilateral victory and continued fighting is costly. Governments are more likely to win early when they have large armies, but time to government victory increases when they are faced with secessionist rebels and when external parties are involved. Meanwhile, external mediation diminishes informational and credible commitment problems during bargaining and reduces conflict duration. Promising directions for future research on civil war include geographic disaggregation, survey research, and computational/agent-based modeling.

Political life after civil wars: Introducing the Civil War Successor Party dataset

2020 ◽  
pp. 002234332092090
Author(s):  
Sarah Zukerman Daly
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Quality Of Democracy ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Electoral Performance

Around the world, following civil wars, rebel and government belligerents contest and win the founding postwar elections. Despite the prevalence of these elections and their importance in setting post-conflict environments on specific political trajectories, their outcomes have been understudied. Existing scholarship centers on the timing and institutions of the postwar elections, but not on their party and voter participants. This article introduces a dataset which traces the postwar political trajectories of civil war belligerents, identifies their successor parties, charts their electoral performance, and documents their decision to remilitarize or demilitarize. The Civil War Successor Party (CWSP) dataset covers all belligerents that have transitioned from civil conflict in the period 1970–2015. The article describes the contours of the dataset, reveals patterns of political life after wars, and outlines the potential uses of the dataset for future research. In particular, it suggests how the data may be leveraged by scholars and practitioners to understand dynamics of political behavior, patterns of governance and public goods provision, quality of democracy, and recurrence of low- and high-intensity war in the aftermath of mass violence.

Terrorism and Civil War: A Spatial and Temporal Approach to a Conceptual Problem

2012 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-305 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael G. Findley ◽  
Joseph K. Young
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Contentious Politics ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Event Data ◽  
Conceptual Problem ◽  
Temporal And Spatial Patterns ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
High Degree ◽  
The Relationship

What is the relationship between civil war and terrorism? Most current research on these topics either explicitly or implicitly separates the two, in spite of compelling reasons to consider them together. In this paper, we examine the extent to which terrorism and civil war overlap and then unpack various temporal and spatial patterns. To accomplish this, we use newly geo-referenced terror event data to offer a global overview of where and when terrorist events happen and whether they occur inside or outside of civil war zones. Furthermore, we conduct an exploratory analysis of six separate cases that have elements of comparability but also occur in unique contexts, which illustrate some of the patterns in terrorism and civil war. The data show a high degree of overlap between terrorism and ongoing civil war and, further, indicate that a substantial amount of terrorism occurs prior to civil wars in Latin America, but yet follows civil war in other regions of the world. While the study of terrorism and of civil war mostly occurs in separate scholarly communities, we argue for more work that incorporates insights from each research program and we offer a possibility for future research by considering how geo-referenced terror and civil war data may be utilized together. More generally, we expect these results to apply to a wide variety of attitudes and behaviors in contentious politics.

scholarly journals Civil War from a Transnational Perspective

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
International System ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
Post Cold War

Civil war is the dominant form of armed conflict in the contemporary international system, and most severe lethal armed conflicts in the post-Cold War era have been civil/intrastate rather than interstate. Still, it would be misleading to see these conflicts as purely domestic, as many contemporary civil wars such as Syria display clear transnational characteristics, including inspirations from events in other countries, links to actors in other countries, as well as international interventions. Moreover, civil wars often have important implications for other states, including security concerns and economic impacts. There is a need to focus on the growth and core findings in the literature on transnational dimensions of civil war, in particular on how factors outside a particular state can influence the risk of conflict within states as well as some of the central consequences of domestic conflict for other states or relations between states. This line of research has helped expand our understanding of both civil conflict and interstate war, and that a comparative focus on varieties conflict and attention to the possible transnational dimensions of civil war deserve a prominent role in future research.

Civil Wars

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stathis N. Kalyvas
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Causal Mechanisms ◽  
Research Agendas

This article studies civil wars. Kalyvas defines a civil war as armed combat taking place within the boundaries of a recognized sovereign entity between parties that are subject to a common authority at the outset of the hostilities. The article starts by determining why a study of civil war is important. This is followed by a section on the various macro findings and debates on civil war. The issue of the relation between a country's rural dimension and civil war is discussed, in order to help illustrate some of the complexities in figuring and sorting out competing causal mechanisms. The article ends with discussions of the types of civil war and the possible future research agendas.

Through the prism of Spain. Socio-economic causes of different outcomes of Russian and Spanish civil wars

2017 ◽  
pp. 142-155
Author(s):  
I. Rozinskiy ◽  
N. Rozinskaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Statistical Data ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Russian Civil War ◽  
World War ◽  
Common Features ◽  
Economic Well Being

The article examines the socio-economic causes of the outcome of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1936), which, as opposed to the Russian Civil War, resulted in the victory of the “Whites”. Choice of Spain as the object of comparison with Russia is justified not only by similarity of civil wars occurred in the two countries in the XX century, but also by a large number of common features in their history. Based on statistical data on the changes in economic well-being of different strata of Spanish population during several decades before the civil war, the authors formulate the hypothesis according to which the increase of real incomes of Spaniards engaged in agriculture is “responsible” for their conservative political sympathies. As a result, contrary to the situation in Russia, where the peasantry did not support the Whites, in Spain the peasants’ position predetermined the outcome of the confrontation resulting in the victory of the Spanish analogue of the Whites. According to the authors, the possibility of stable increase of Spanish peasants’ incomes was caused by the nation’s non-involvement in World War I and also by more limited, compared to Russia and some other countries, spending on creation of heavy (primarily military-related) industry in Spain.

Bayesian Inference in Human Time Perception

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Darren Rhodes
Keyword(s):  
Time Perception ◽  
Likelihood Function ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Temporal Properties ◽  
History Of Research ◽  
Psychophysical Testing ◽  
History Of ◽  
Fundamental Dimension ◽  
Perception Of Time

Time is a fundamental dimension of human perception, cognition and action, as the perception and cognition of temporal information is essential for everyday activities and survival. Innumerable studies have investigated the perception of time over the last 100 years, but the neural and computational bases for the processing of time remains unknown. First, we present a brief history of research and the methods used in time perception and then discuss the psychophysical approach to time, extant models of time perception, and advancing inconsistencies between each account that this review aims to bridge the gap between. Recent work has advocated a Bayesian approach to time perception. This framework has been applied to both duration and perceived timing, where prior expectations about when a stimulus might occur in the future (prior distribution) are combined with current sensory evidence (likelihood function) in order to generate the perception of temporal properties (posterior distribution). In general, these models predict that the brain uses temporal expectations to bias perception in a way that stimuli are ‘regularized’ i.e. stimuli look more like what has been seen before. Evidence for this framework has been found using human psychophysical testing (experimental methods to quantify behaviour in the perceptual system). Finally, an outlook for how these models can advance future research in temporal perception is discussed.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harald Schoen ◽  
Sigrid Roßteutscher ◽  
Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck ◽  
Bernhard Weßels ◽  
Christof Wolf
Keyword(s):  
Political Behavior ◽  
Voting Behavior ◽  
Contextual Effects ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Voter Behavior ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Opinion Formation ◽  
Context Sensitive ◽  
Contextual Features ◽  
And Behavior

This concluding chapter summarizes the main findings of the preceding chapters in light of the model of contextual effects on voter behavior. Accordingly, the processes of communication and politicization are of key importance for contextual effects. By implication, we cannot take for granted that contextual features exert sizable effects on voters’ opinion formation and behavior in each and every case. Findings about contextual effects are also context-sensitive and thus do not lend themselves to generalization by default. These observations suggest that context plays a nuanced and conditional role in voting behavior. Exploring it further should be a focal topic of future research on political behavior and democratic politics.

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