Volume 18, Issue 3 - Proceedings of the 12th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Index – edited by Guest Editors Vincenzo Bove & Andrea Ruggeri

In post-colonial Africa many rulers relied on so called ‘divide-and-rule’ politics to survive in office. The concept of divide-and-rule describes a strategy for rulers to sustain power by exploiting coordination problems among potential rivals. Rulers can break up rival concentrations of power by making discriminatory offers/sanctions or simply destroying communication channels among potential rivals. In this paper I will study the consequences of ‘divide-and-rule’ politics using original data on cabinet changes. In the empirical analysis I focus on the question whether cabinet shuffles affect the probability that a ruler is deposed in a coup d’etat and the probability of a coup attempt respectively. The analysis reveals that the incidence of a cabinet shuffle decreases the probability of a successful coup. This result proved to be robust even when accounting for endogeneity using an instrumental variable approach. The results also showed that if rulers excessively reshuffle their ministers they risk a higher probability of coup attempts. Cabinet volatility, measured as the frequency of cabinet shuffles within six month is positively related to the probability of a coup attempt.

Do the citizens have a role in constraining policies in autocratic governments? Usually the political and economic literature model autocracy as if the citizens have no role in constraining leader’s behavior, but actually autocratic government are afraid of possible citizens’ revolts. In this paper we focus on contemporary China to analyze how citizens might induce an autocratic government to adopt congruent policies. Although there is no party or electoral competition, the leader fears deposition by coup d’etat of the selectorate and revolutionary threats from citizens. We build a three player political agency model to study the role of both these constraints and we show that the effectiveness of the selectorate and of revolutionary threats are crucial factors in determining the policy outcomes. In particular, we show that the citizens can effectively discipline the leader because of the revolution threat notwithstanding the selectorate size, but this may result in a failed state when the costs of revolting and the selectorate size are small. As the size of the selectorate and the costs of revolution vary dramatically across countries, our result explain why different types of autocracies arise. In particular our model and results provide a useful framework to interpret China policy in the last twenty years.

There is considerable evidence that authoritarian regimes have tended to spend more on the military than democracies. However, the direction of causality of this relationship has not been seriously investigated. The literature tends to assume that causality runs from regime type to military expenditure, but one might also expect military expenditure to influence regime type: history yields numerous examples of countries whose democratisation process was reversed by a powerful military unwilling to give up its privileged position in society. Successful democratisation, amongst other things, requires the reform of civil-military relations. In this paper, I build on the empirical literature on democratic transitions and examine whether lowering military expenditure in a democratising country increases the chances of successful democracy consolidation. I use a number of techniques, including two-way fixed effects model and a panel VAR to examine the linkages and pattern of Granger causality between measures of regime type, GDP and military expenditures.

This paper tests Huntington’s the Clash of Civilizations hypothesis evaluating the impact of civilizations on militarized interstate disputes. In particular, we investigate whether countries that belong to different civilizations tend to be more involved in conflict than countries that belong to the same civilization. We show that over the period of 1816-2001, dissimilarity in civilization in a dyad has no effect on conflict involvement. However, even after controlling for temporal dependence, and for geographic, political, military and economic factors, being part of different civilizations in the post-Cold War period brings about 63.6% higher probability of conflict than belonging to the same civilization, whereas this effect is insignificant during the Cold War.

This article examines the conditions that influence citizens’ satisfaction with democracy in Africa. In the analysis, individual, ethnic group, and national context determinants are combined in a multilevel model allowing a comparative analysis over time, countries, ethnic groups, and individuals. Using Afrobarometer survey data along with ethnic group-level and national-level data, I show that factors shaping citizens’ satisfaction can be found on each contextual level. To a large extent, perceived economic and political inequalities between ethnic groups explain variations in citizens’ satisfaction.

A range of theories have attempted to explain the variation in civilian abuse of warring parties. Most of these theories have been focused on the strategic environment in which these acts take place. Less attention is devoted to the perpetrators of these human right abuses themselves: the armed groups. This study tries to fill this niche by using the organizational process theory in which it is assumed that armed groups, like every organization, struggles for survival. The leader tries to ensure the maintenance of her armed group by increasing her control over her troops. The relationship between the level of control and the perpetrated civilian abuse is examined with a new dataset on the internal structure of more than 70 different armed groups around the world. With the help of a Bayesian Ordered Probit model, this new dataset on civilian abuse is analyzed. The results show that especially particular incentives play an important role.

The purpose of this paper is to apply economic analysis to the opportunities and choices of single individual ‘lone wolf’ terrorists whose attacks are characterised by ‘sprees’ of violence, usually shooting sprees in public places, that last only for a relatively short period of time. The spree lone wolf also emerges suddenly. Having previously allocated no resources to terrorism, he suddenly and all at once allocates all of his resources, including time, to terrorism. The first step to providing guidance to governments and their law enforcement agencies is to encompass some important elements of the spree lone wolf’s opportunities and choices within an economic analytical framework. The first steps towards this are undertaken in this paper by exploring the opportunities and choices of the spree lone wolf from a risk-reward perspective and a treatment of the spree lone wolf as an individual who, while attempting to maximise his expected utility, shuns the risk-reduction benefits of ‘time diversification’ and suddenly plunges all of his resources into terrorism within a single time period. The analysis shows that such behaviour can be explained within an economic model of choice and clears the way for further theoretical analysis and empirical analysis.

This contribution finds that urban (but not rural) poverty fuels domestic and anti-U.S. terrorism in 43 developing countries. It argues that urban poverty aids non-state groups which use terrorism as a means to capture rents and consolidate popular support.

The aim of this PEPS Letter is to clarify the effects of human rights “Naming and Shaming” by international actors, such as IOs, NGOs and the international media, on the intensity of violence in domestic conflict. The note carries out, evaluates and proposes empirical strategies to study such effects. We find that a classic panel-year data structure is insufficient to disentangle and assess possible mechanisms. Though the UN-labeled attempts to “name and shame” seem to decrease the level of violence, this and other results cannot be defended as robust and coherent in light of likely endogeneity bias. Results based on just lagged explanatory variables differ in the sign and significance of relationships with results based on instrumented-variable estimation. We highlight the value and necessity of collecting and analyzing data that is more disaggregated with respect to time and target levels. Only such further steps will allow full study the role of “naming and shaming” on domestic conflict dynamics.

Clark and Konrad (2007) introduce the weakest link against the best shot property to the Colonel Blotto game where the defendant has to win all the battle fields while the attacker only needs to win at least one battlefield. They characterize the Nash equilibrium assuming that the attacker attacks all the battlefields simultaneously. We construct a two stage model and endogenize the attacker’s attack pattern. We show that the attacker chooses a sequential attack pattern in the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium. Therefore, the game analyzed by Clark and Konrad (2007) is never realized. We also conducted experiments and found that the subjects’ behavior was inconsistent to theoretical predictions. Both players overinvested and the variances were large. In the simultaneous game, the attackers took a guerrira strategy at 30% of the time in which they invested only in one battlefield and the defenders took a surrender strategy at 11% of the time in which they invested nothing in the simultaneous game. Both players invested more in period 1 than in period 2 in the sequential game. Although all of these are inconsistent to the theoretical predictions, the winning probability of a game was consistent to the theoretical prediction in the simultaneous games, but it was lower than the theoretical prediction in the sequential games. We conclude that the subjects’ irrational behavior is mainly a rational response to his/ her opponent’s irrational behavior. Our model can explain terrorism, cyber terrorism, lobbying, and patent trolls and the huge gap between the theory and the experiments are important considering the significance of the problems.

A group of agents must defend their individual income from an external threat by pooling their efforts against it. The winner of this confrontation is determined by a contest success function where members’ efforts display a varying degree of complementarity. Individual effort is costly and its cost follows a convex isoelastic function. We investigate how the success of the group in the conflict and its members’ utilities vary with the degree of within-group inequality. We show that there is a natural relationship between the group’s probability of victory and the Atkinson index of inequality. If members’ efforts are complementary or the cost function convex enough, more egalitarianism within the group increases the likelihood of victory against the external threat. The opposite holds when members’ efforts are substitutes and the cost linear enough.

This brief article argues for a narrow definition of cyberwar and a technology-centric approach to understanding its strategic implications. Based on a review of the underlying technologies, approaches to facilitating peace in this rather new form of confrontation will be derived. This brief discussion already shows that Cold War era strategies such as credible deterrence through retaliation are ill-suited to serve peace in the digital domain. Generally, building offensive capabilities for cyberwar does not increase an actor’s security. Instead, geographically unrestricted security communities (Deutsch et al., 1957) of nationstates that employ similar technologies seem to serve individual security best.

We analyze socioeconomic differences in adult mortality in four African countries-the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone-using the adult mortality module in the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS), calculating mortality based on the sibling mortality reports collected from female respondents aged 15-49. We discuss the advantages and potential issues associated with this data source. While mortality events precipitated by those civil conflicts tend to affect all groups, we conclude that they appear to affect men, and in particular urban and more educated men to a greater extent than the other groups.

Mozambique’s post-conflict development has recently focused on the promise of biofuels production, and the Government of Mozambique has accordingly made hundreds of agricultural concessions to foreign and domestic corporations since 2006. In response, local groups have sought community land grants to protect livelihoods. We seek to understand whether the magnitude and recentness of violent events during Mozambique’s 16-year civil war determined the success of communities’ efforts to secure lands. We hypothesize that violence weakens the ability of communities to protect their traditional land uses from concessions by lobbying for community land grants. This hypothesis - dubbed the “weak institutions hypothesis” - is contrasted with the idea that violence galvanizes political participation. We test the hypothesis using GIS-generated data at the district level on recognized community landholdings and civil war events. Controlling for factors such as market access, road distance to grain warehouses, and spatial auto-correlation, we find that more intense violence is possibly (but not significantly) associated with more land grants, and that districts experiencing more recent violence are actually more likely to lobby successfully for land grants - lending support to the idea that violence boosts community use of riskpooling institutions.

This research is aimed at investigating whether the presence of available extractive resources, in particular gold, interacts with civil conflict intensity, accounting for sub-country level data through the use of Geographic Information System (GIS) techniques. By a spatially disaggregated and specific resource analysis, I found that gold, gemstones and hydrocarbons productions within the conflict areas tend to increase conflict intensity. The analysis is carried out by applying a Zero-Truncated Negative Binomial model. Data for gold resource are extracted from an original dataset - GOLDATA - which provides a comprehensive list of gold deposits throughout the world completed of geographic coordinates, temporal information and characteristics. The overall finding is that the presence of exploitable gold resource tends to increase conflict intensity and that resources’ lootability and accessibility in wartime can largely determine to what extent revenues can be appropriated and misused during conflict events.