Recent research highlights social media's potential for collective grievance, but in active conflict online signs of political loyalty can place civilians at great risk. A security-driven theory predicts that civilians will alter their online behavior after major shifts in territorial control: specifically, they should post more positive content and more content favoring the winning side.
This study asks whether foreign direct investment (FDI) entering countries after civil conflict helps economic recovery and, through that recovery, reduces the chance of conflict recurring. Using country-level intrastate conflict data spanning 1970–2019, the authors estimate mediation models that link post-conflict FDI to economic reconstruction and then to subsequent conflict risk, and they provide replication files for their analysis.
A large literature links refugee presence to higher local conflict risk. This study argues that positive local effects of hosting refugees—especially through development—have been overlooked and may reduce, not increase, conflict.
This article asks how two types of large-scale conflict—major interstate wars and major civil wars—relate to children’s health, measured by infant mortality rates. Using country-year analysis across 1950–2007, the author examines both immediate and cumulative associations between time spent at war and infant mortality, and emphasizes what this evidence says about violations of children’s right to health without making causal claims beyond the study’s design.
Governments benefit from a structural advantage in civil wars: the ability to make credible international commitments that shape other states' behavior. These foreign-policy bargains can both attract military support for governments and deter aid to rebels.
Civilian protests can push conflicts toward peace — but not always. This study asks how different types of wartime civilian protest shape violence and the prospects for conflict resolution, and develops a framework to explain why some protests escalate rather than de-escalate violence.
This study asks whether residents of Mosul, Iraq, prefer power-sharing or unilateral power-grabs for local policing after the Islamic State occupation, and how personal wartime victimization shapes those preferences. Using a survey experiment that varies which factions hold policing authority, the authors compare public expectations about security under power-sharing versus power-grabbing and test whether conflict exposure moderates support. The paper documents greater public support for power-grabbing in policing and distinct patterns among victims and nonvictims of conflict.
Key Insight: Elections vary significantly in quality across regions.
Can tax regimes shape incentives to engage in armed conflict? This analysis links a central-government iron-ore tax reform to local violence and illegal extraction in India's Maoist belt.
This article asks whether the International Criminal Court (ICC) deters atrocity crimes during civil wars, and whether its effects differ for government and rebel forces. Using what the author describes as the most extended look yet at the ICC’s record in African civil wars, the study compares competing views that the Court is ineffective, escalatory, or differentially influential across actors. The contribution is a qualified, evidence‑based assessment that the ICC appears to have different effects on rebels than on state forces in the conflicts examined.
This study asks why some rebel winners succeed in creating obedient, state-like militaries after civil war while others experience postwar military defections. Using a new list of winning rebel groups since 1946 and two case studies (Zimbabwe and Côte d’Ivoire), the author argues that intense security threats during the civil war make field commanders more likely to remain obedient by promoting inclusive leadership and by constraining commanders’ capacity to build local power bases during the war-to-peace transition.
This study addresses how governments bring multiparty civil wars to an end by proposing a systems approach. Prior research often focused on either individual conflicts (civil war level) or specific dyadic terminations, overlooking the connections between group-level peace agreements. The analysis examines 264 dyadic terminations and reveals that reducing systemic fighting requires demonstrating Political Will & Capacity for comprehensive reforms while dealing with security issues.
Peace agreements are notoriously fragile in the post-conflict period, but measuring their inherent strength has been elusive. Existing approaches either lack nuance or rely on subjective weighting.
Conventional civil conflict research typically treats all non-violent cases as "at peace." This study separates the process into two distinct stages: first, the presence or absence of contested incompatibilities (conflict origination), and second, whether those incompatibilities escalate into armed violence (militarization). That distinction enables separate analysis of the causes of grievance formation and the causes of violent escalation.
Right-censored cases in political science survival data are often misclassified as failure events because of measurement error. Treating those cases as real failures underestimates event durations and can bias coefficient estimates—especially when misclassification is related to covariates of interest. A new estimator is introduced to correct this source of bias.
When does religion matter more as a social identity? Examining people living across Africa's arbitrary border between Burkina Faso and Côte d'Ivoire, this research demonstrates that political context, particularly the recent civil conflict in Côte d'Ivoire, significantly influenced how respondents perceived their religious identities. While studies of religious demographics might suggest other factors drive identity salience—like denomination proportions or institutional availability—the findings here show these explanations fall short.
Boosted decision trees are widely used in machine learning but remain underused in political science, despite offering many useful properties for prediction. This article explains how one variant—AdaBoosted decision trees (ADTs)—can be applied to social science forecasting and demonstrates its value on several familiar political prediction problems.
Why do existing studies produce conflicting results on whether violence is more prevalent in middle-range regimes? This article examines multiple violent outcomes like civil war, terrorism, and repression across various operationalizations of 'the middle.' Using a novel ensemble method combining random forest and regression/classification trees to predict conflict patterns, we identify specific conditions where the hypothesis holds for minor civil conflicts but fails regarding state repression. Our findings clarify previous ambiguity by pinpointing when regime instability leads to violence.
New democracies often face ethnic violence, but conventional explanations focus on established democracies. This study uses district-level data from Indonesia (1990-2005) to show that ethnic riots occur where elections are uncompetitive and districts are ethnically divided.
This study examines whether environmental scarcity—specifically drought severity—interacts with sociopolitical conditions to affect civil conflict onset across sub-Saharan Africa from 1962–2006. The analysis addresses a gap in cross-national evidence on conditional scarcity–conflict relationships.
This article explains why rates of ethnic violence vary across postcolonial African countries. The central claim is that ethnic groups organized as a precolonial state (PCS) intensified interethnic tensions after independence. In insecure postcolonial regimes, leaders faced a tradeoff: form inclusive coalitions and risk insider coups, or exclude other groups and risk outsider rebellions.
Onsets of binary events—such as regime change, civil war onset, or treaty signing—are central to many political-science questions. A common empirical shortcut is to set ongoing post-onset years to zero to create an onset indicator. That transformation is intuitive but introduces serious inferential problems.
This study reveals that fragmented antigovernment networks increase conflictual behavior.