scholarly journals Civilianizing Civil Conflict: Civilian Defense Militias and the Logic of Violence in Intrastate Conflict

2016 ◽  
Vol 60 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-510 ◽  
Author(s):  
Govinda Clayton ◽  
Andrew Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Intrastate Conflict ◽  
Civilian Defense

The Arc of Modernization: Economic Structure, Materialism, and the Onset of Civil Conflict

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Tyson Chatagnier ◽  
Emanuele Castelli
Keyword(s):  
World Bank ◽  
Economic Structure ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
The State ◽  
Intrastate Conflict ◽  
State Revenue ◽  
Strategic Model ◽  
Modernization Process ◽  
The Cost

The onset of intrastate conflict has two requisite conditions: that prospective insurgents have an incentive to rebel, and that the state lacks the capacity to deter such a rebellion. We outline a simple rationalist argument grounded in gains from economic growth—to both individual income and state revenue—to argue that modernization has the potential to affect the likelihood of civil conflict through both of these conditions. The shift away from a rent-seeking economy affects opportunity costs for rebellion by increasing the cost of recruitment, broadening the time horizon for gain, and decreasing looting possibilities. On the state side, modernization increases state military, economic, and institutional capacity, allowing governments to deter rebellion. We construct an index of modernization from World Bank data and apply a strategic model to explore the effect of modernization on both states and rebels simultaneously. We find that the modernization process describes an arc that may increase the likelihood of unrest in the early stages, but has long-term stabilizing effects.

Armed politics and the study of intrastate conflict

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 459-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Staniland
Keyword(s):  
South Asia ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Intrastate Conflict ◽  
Group Interactions ◽  
Armed Group ◽  
Rebel Governance ◽  
State Group ◽  
Existing Data

Though the two are often conflated, violence is not identical to conflict. This article makes the case for studying state-armed group interactions across space, time, and levels of violence as part of an ‘armed politics’ approach to conflict. It conceptualizes and measures armed orders of alliance, limited cooperation, and military hostilities, and the termination of these orders in collapse or incorporation. The article applies this framework to four contexts in South Asia. It measures armed orders across five groups and six decades in Nagaland in India, and then offers a briefer overview of state-group armed orders in Karachi in Pakistan, Mizoram in India, and Wa areas of northern Burma/Myanmar. Examining armed politics improves our understanding of ceasefires and peace deals, rebel governance, and group emergence and collapse, among other important topics. This approach complements existing data on civil conflict while identifying a new empirical research agenda and policy implications.

[W]hat Lies Beneath: Using Latent Networks to Improve Spatial Predictions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cassy Dorff ◽  
Max Gallop ◽  
Shahryar Minhas
Keyword(s):  
Predictive Performance ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Connectivity Matrix ◽  
Network Approach ◽  
Intrastate Conflict ◽  
Spatial Lag ◽  
Data Generating Process ◽  
Do So

Abstract Spatial interdependencies commonly drive the spread of violence in civil conflict. To address such interdependence, scholars often use spatial lags to model the diffusion of violence, but this requires an explicit operationalization of the connectivity matrices that represent the spread of conflict. Unfortunately, in many cases, there are multiple competing processes that facilitate the spread of violence making it difficult to identify the true data-generating process. We show how a network-driven methodology can allow us to account for the spread of violence, even in the cases where we cannot directly measure the factors that drive diffusion. To do so, we estimate a latent connectivity matrix that captures a variety of possible diffusion patterns. We use this procedure to study intrastate conflict in eight conflict-prone countries and show how our framework enables substantially better predictive performance than canonical spatial-lag measures. We also investigate the circumstances under which canonical spatial lags suffice and those under which a latent network approach is beneficial.

Natural Resources, Climate Change, and Conflict

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vally Koubi ◽  
Gabriele Spilker
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Renewable Resources ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Weight Ratio ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Resource Scarcity ◽  
Weak Links ◽  
Intrastate Conflict ◽  
The Government

What is the relationship between resource scarcity and abundance, on the one hand, and intrastate conflict, on the other? Under what conditions do natural resources cause conflict? Which types of resources can better predict the onset, intensity, and duration of intrastate conflict? These questions and other related questions are needed to discuss how renewable as well as non-renewable resources influence the onset, intensity, and duration of intrastate conflict. In particular, there are two strands of the literature: the first strand deals with renewable resources, such as water, cropland, forests, fish stocks, etc., and examines how the scarcity of such resources leads to resource completion and subsequently to a greater risk of conflict. In this context, it also discusses the more recent literature on climate change and conflict. The second strand deals with non-renewable resources that tend to have a high value-to-weight ratio, such as fossil fuels and minerals, and evaluates how abundance of such resources affects potential “greed” and “grievance” motives of rebels to take up arms as well as a state’s capacity to put down a rebellion, both of which can lead to civil conflicts. Overall, with the exception of the very recent empirical work on climate change as a “threat multiplier,” the bulk of the empirical evidence provides non-robust and often even contradictory results and thus does not allow for a clear-cut conclusion: while some studies support the link between resource scarcity/abundance and armed conflict, others find no or only weak links. The inconclusiveness of the results might be due to various factors, such as the inability/failure of the extant literature to adequately address the mechanisms via which resource scarcity and abundance could lead to conflict as well as which types of natural resources, including climatic changes, matter most. Moreover, empirical studies differ with regard to the type of conflict under study, ranging from violence against the government (civil wars [1,000 deaths], civil conflict [25 deaths], and low-intensity conflict [protests and riots]) to intercommunal violence (conflict that occurs between competing groups within a state), the operationalization and/or measurement of the types of resource scarcity and abundance, and the appropriate level of analysis (individual, household, subnational, national).

scholarly journals Refugees, ethnic power relations, and civil conflict in the country of asylum

2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seraina Rüegger
Keyword(s):  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Intrastate Conflict ◽  
Power Politics ◽  
Large N ◽  
Transnational Connections ◽  
Governmental Power ◽  
Systematic Understanding ◽  
Regional Clustering ◽  
Political Leverage ◽  
Violent Conflicts

Many countries that face forced migrant inflows refuse to admit these uprooted people premised on negative externalities such as increased insecurity associated with refugee presence. Also, the academic literature on civil conflict identified refugee movements as a factor contributing to the regional clustering of war. Case-based evidence suggests that refugees can disturb the ethnic setup in the country of asylum and thereby trigger instability. To enhance the yet limited systematic understanding of the role of refugees in violent conflicts, this study examines the linkage between forced migrants, transnational connections, and ethnic civil conflict in the country of asylum with a large-N analysis, 1975–2013, arguing that ethnic power politics in the asylum state are determinant for intrastate conflict onset after a refugee influx. Statistical analysis finds that groups are particularly prone to conflict if they are excluded from governmental power and simultaneously host ethnic kin refugees, because a co-ethnic refugee influx enlarges the demographic and political leverage of the kin group, possibly resulting in clashes with other groups in the country. Hence, refugees alone do not consistently influence armed violence – only in combination with political tensions in the receiving country. Therefore, host governments should pursue inclusionary policies towards their population, to prevent dangerous instability, instead of closing borders or blaming refugees for domestic problems.

Metamorphoses of memory of the the Russian-Serbian Brotherhood of War in Modern Serbia

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 142-156
Author(s):  
A. Yu. Timofeev
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Party System ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Stability ◽  
Second World

The article considers the perception of World War II in modern Serbian society. Despite the stability of Serbian-Russian shared historical memory, the attitudes of both countries towards World wars differ. There is a huge contrast in the perception of the First and Second World War in Russian and Serbian societies. For the Serbs the events of World War II are obscured by the memories of the Civil War, which broke out in the country immediately after the occupation in 1941 and continued several years after 1945. Over 70% of Yugoslavs killed during the Second World War were slaughtered by the citizens of former Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The terror unleashed by Tito in the first postwar decade in 1944-1954 was proportionally bloodier than Stalin repressions in the postwar USSR. The number of emigrants from Yugoslavia after the establishment of the Tito's dictatorship was proportionally equal to the number of refugees from Russia after the Civil War (1,5-2% of prewar population). In the post-war years, open manipulations with the obvious facts of World War II took place in Tito's Yugoslavia. In the 1990s the memories repressed during the communist years were set free and publicly debated. After the fall of the one-party system the memory of World War II was devalued. The memory of the Russian-Serbian military fraternity forged during the World War II began to revive in Serbia due to the foreign policy changes in 2008. In October 2008 the President of Russia paid a visit to Serbia which began the process of (re) construction of World War II in Serbian historical memory. According to the public opinion surveys, a positive attitude towards Russia and Russians in Serbia strengthens the memories on general resistance to Nazism with memories of fratricide during the civil conflict events of 1941-1945 still dominating in Serbian society.

The Security Demographic: Population and Civil Conflict After the Cold War

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard P. Cincotta ◽  
Robert Engelman ◽  
Daniele Anastasion
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
The Cold War

The Effect of Civil Conflict on Domestic Violence: The Case of Peru

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Italo A. Gutierrez ◽  
Joss V. Gallegos
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Violence ◽  
Civil Conflict
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