Duration of Intrastate Wars of Attrition: The Causal Impact of Military Build-Ups

Scientific knowledge on the effectiveness of governmental military build-ups to terminate intrastate conflicts is sparse and inconclusive. Developing a war-of-attrition framework, we derive the impact of governments' armaments on the duration of these conflicts: military build-ups, as reflected in inflows of major conventional weapons, enable the government to inflict costs onto its adversaries, forcing them to withdraw earlier from the conflict. This type of weapons is required in particular to project military power over larger distances and to fight rebels in remote areas. Using SIPRI arms transfer data for the first time in a disaggregated dyadic design, covering 418 government-rebel group dyads in 134 conflicts, we empirically corroborate the formal model's predictions. As endogeneity issues might arise when governments procure arms in anticipation of a protracted conflict, we ensure causal identification with an instrumental variable survival approach based on the Aalen additive hazards model.

History of the Tendency of the People of Basra to the Osman Empire

The history of the tendency of the people of Basra to the Ottoman Empire and the situation of Basra and the people of Basra and their beliefs, from the time of the founding of the city of Basra to the Battle of Jamal, is one of the important historical issues that no one has addressed so far. The purpose of this issue is to provide a general understanding of the Ottoman thought and beliefs and the people of Basra. This study seeks to answer the question of how and when the people of Basra became Ottoman. The present article has been written in a descriptive historical method, using historical sources with the method of collecting library information. The Ottomans were originally a political sect that, after the assassination of the Ottomans under the pretext of bloodshed, waged a war of attrition around Basra led by Talha, Zubair and Aisha. According to historians, most of the people of Basra broke their allegiance to Imam Ali (as) and collaborated with him. The Ottoman ideology, which was hidden from most of the people of Basra before the Battle of Jamal, emerged after that. As a result, the majority of the people of Basra turned to the Ottoman Empire from the time of the Camel War, which is the finding of this article.

Reputation Concerns in Risky Experimentation

High-ability agents are more likely to achieve early success in risky experimentation, but learn faster that their project is not promising. These counteracting effects give rise to a signaling model with double-crossing property. This property tends to induce homogenization of quitting times between types, which in turn leads to some pooling in equilibrium. Low-ability agents may hold out to continue their project for the prospect of pooling with the high type, despite having a negative instantaneous net payoff. A war-of-attrition mechanism causes low-ability agents to quit only gradually over time, and to stop quitting for a period immediately before all agents exit.

Agricultural Fire or Arson?

This article focuses on fire management practices in Algeria during the colonial period. Focusing on environmental usages of fires in Algerian rural society, this article shows that these practices were submitted to varied and opposite interpretations resulting in significant and durable conflicts. These conflicts exploded under the French colonial forestry administration, which forcefully imposed new legislation to criminalize existing agricultural practices, including fires. Despite this ban, these practices continued. The administration interpreted this persistence as rebellion and responded with severe sanctions. This only aggravated the situation, resulting in a real war of attrition. On the one hand, this situation does not diverge from the rural violence typical of the nineteenth century. On the other, the responses of the administration in colonial Algeria represent specific digressions compared to the policies carried out in metropolitan areas.