Volume 19, Issue 3 - Proceedings of the 13th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference / Edited by Tobias Böhmelt and Petros G. Sekeris

Political relevance is frequently used as a sample selection criterion to limit massive data frames in which most dyads have little or no probability of interaction. Because political relevance may introduce bias in both sample composition and empirical findings, several studies have proposed alternative operationalizations. Yet, major power status appears in every definition of political relevance. This practice may be problematic for two reasons. First, authors often use major power status as a proxy for capabilities, while status itself may have an effect separate from capabilities. Second, popular operationalizations of major power status – including the Correlates of War classification – treat all great power states as having equal status and, consequently, as being equally predisposed towards various political behaviors and interactions. We suggest, instead, that the opportunity and willingness for political action vary among great powers as a function of their status consistency. Using the classification developed in [Volgy, Thomas J., Renato Corbetta, Keith A. Grant, Ryan G. Baird, (2011), Major Powers and the Quest for Status in International Politics: Global and Regional Perspectives, Palgrave MacMillan, New York], we propose that (1) major power states differ in their baseline probability for political interaction based on whether they are status consistent, status inconsistent overachievers, or status inconsistent underachievers and, therefore, that (2) politically relevant dyads may differ depending on the status consistency of the major power they contain. Using the 1950–2001 period as our empirical domain, we explore the implications of selecting politically relevant dyads based status (in)consistency for studies on conflict onset, conflict joining, and foreign intervention.

The immediate aftermath of an armed conflict is a key window of opportunity to build sustainable peace and security. Whether and how violence arises during that time has profound effects on a country’s political and economic development. Yet, conceptualizing post-conflict violence has remained elusive. Much of this difficulty arises because post-conflict violence is a liminal phenomenon with a dual nature: it emerges during transitions from war to peace and is a combination of new strategic incentives and wartime organizational legacies. This paper contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of post-conflict violence with a theory-grounded typology, based on two axes: strategic aims (predatory, constructive) and degrees of cooperation (directed, coordinated, spontaneous). The premise of this categorizing effort is that with a more solid grasp of the mechanisms driving post-conflict violence and its variation we can design more suitable policies to lower its incidence.

Much research on protracted intrastate conflict has either centered on internal conditions characterizing an important protagonist (e.g., motivated by grievance and/or greed), or on dyadic interactions between them that frequently employ game theory. Cross-sectional methodologies often are used in empirical testing. Here, we propose to use the dyad as the principal unit of analysis, but examine each of the actor’s diachronically as they interact with each other. Specifically, the ephemeral gain, a theory integral to Origins of Political Extremism (Cambridge 2011), has been employed in this analysis. We hypothesize that whether as rebel or government, when an actor engaged in intrastate conflict experiences an ephemeral gain, it is more likely to prolong the conflict. If both actors have experienced this phenomenon, then the conflict is even more likely to continue. Important here is the risk acceptance by rebels resulting from the anger attendant upon an ephemeral gain. Research in social psychology strongly supports this variable sequence. The case of the Kurds in the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran is offered as an illustration. Ephemeral gains experienced both by the Kurds and by the Republic of Turkey acted to prolong this conflict to the present day.

This note places mass killing in a continuum of actions that a ruling power can take to remove an unwanted group from a society; that is, it views extermination as a means to an end, and it assumes that rulers are rational and will choose the combination of means that can achieve their goal at the minimum cost to themselves. The means are assimilation into the general society, physical removal from view (through either deportation within the country or exile from the country), and extermination. The note develops a simple model of input choice geared to cost minimization and then finds encouraging support from the historical evidence on communist regimes.

The paper examines the educational level of the part of the public in 16 Middle Eastern, Asian and African countries who justify suicide bombing and dislike regional/world powers, and its relationship with the occurrence of terrorism originating from the former countries and directed against the powers. We find that the share of highly educated people in this critical support group (regardless of gender and age) in a country is significantly correlated with the number of international terrorist acts carried out by individuals or groups from that country. The paper confirms that public opinion has an impact on terrorism and suggests that increasing education is not by itself a sufficient means of counter-terrorist policy.

This paper investigates the relationship between economic development and domestic terrorism. We argue states at intermediate levels of development go through socioeconomic changes that result when traditional economies are replaced by modern economic relations, which may lead to grievances and social mobilizations conducive to terrorism. The effects of economic development should have a curvilinear effect on domestic terrorism. We test our theory using the GTD dataset and find support for our theory. We show that states at intermediate levels of economic development are more prone to domestic terror attacks than the poorest and richest states. Terror events would appear more likely where states fail to provide, or reduce, an economic safety net to mitigate the transformative effects of economic development. Moreover, the results show that states that are highly democratic, and long-enduring, are less prone to domestic terrorism than less democratic states.

This paper argues for a sub-regional approach to Somali piracy and militant Islamism, departing from prevailing state-centric mindsets and practices. The first section presents an anthropology that explains why piracy and Islamism emerged where they did when they did. It elaborates the geographically distinct cultures of law and livelihood that enabled each phenomenon to emerge only in particular sub-regions. Drawing on diverse factors including xeer (clan-based law), sharia (Islamic law), and practices of nomadic pastoralism (e.g., livestock raiding), the paper proposes a regional lens for the analysis of Somali crime and governance. The next section takes up this regional lens and specifies a statistical model for the incidence of piracy by sub-state region from 1993 to 2011, identifying the effect of Islamist rule on piracy. In all, the paper contends (a) that Somali political and criminal phenomena be disaggregated by region; and (b) that pirates and Islamists, contrary to mainstream discourse, are antagonists.

Climate change is often related to various adverse effects, among those endangering food security and raising the risk of conflict. But empirical evidence is rather inconclusive so far, particularly about its relationship to (mass) violence. In this letter, we provide a brief review of studies explaining connections between climate change and mass violence and discuss strategies how to properly address the issue in the future, focussing on sub-Sahara Africa (SSA) and climate effects on agricultural production. We conclude that we need better explanations of indirect effects, especially those moderated by the socio-economic systems, and a better understanding of endogeneity issues, especially of shifts in transmission. Hence, a particularly promising direction of research especially for SSA is addressing a combination of agricultural and institutional vulnerabilities.

The CDCM project explores whether and how constitutional reform could reduce political instability and violence in Africa, by addressing the question in three steps. First, case studies of seven African countries identify how at key turning points the domestic political institutions either mitigated – or exacerbated – violent outcomes. Second, an unprecedented database of constitutional design in all of Africa reveals that most countries on the continent have highly centralized political institutions, which many experts believe foster conflict. Third, these lessons are combined to develop policy recommendations for foreign aid to promote democracy and good governance in Africa. Counter-intuitively, the CDCM project does not recommend promoting radical constitutional reform to “accommodate” groups based on their identity, as favored by many academics, on grounds that it is too different from what currently exists and therefore could result in half-measures that risk exacerbating political violence. Instead, the project recommends promoting gradual reform of Africa’s existing, centralized constitutional designs by counter-balancing them with liberal institutions, especially the separation of powers, which could foster both peace and democracy on the continent.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a formal model of the effects of domestic constraints upon crisis initiation and crisis termination. The model treated here is distilled from an extension of the two-sided incomplete information version of the traditional deterrence game. We employ a two-stage analysis of the decision problem faced by Challenger that formally links the onset of a crisis to the decision over whether to escalate or to back down in a crisis should the Challenger face resistance from the Defender. The results have interesting implications for the empirical analysis of international and domestic interactions, and crisis initiation in particular, in that it provides a foundation for displaying the mechanism of interdependence of crisis initiation and crisis termination.

The Lebanese economy faced many difficulties since the civil war in 1975. In fact, the country has been frequently hit by civil clashes, civil war and terrorist attacks. This paper analyzes, in a SUR model, the pre and post conflict impacts of such events on the Lebanese economy between 1977 and 2011. Hence, we estimate in this paper the consequences of terrorism on the trend and business cycle of the Lebanese economy. Mainly, the consequences on real GDP per capita, balance of trade, real investment per capita, and real consumption per capita. Since these variables exhibit a structural break in 1987, two dummies that account for structural shifts in the mean and the slope will be included in the model as exogenous variables along with a dummy variable that accounts for the Lebanese civil war. In order to control for the intensity of the civil war we include the battle deaths as another exogenous variable. Moreover, the index for terrorism is treated as an endogenous variable depending on some socio-economic variables. Our results show that war and terrorism have a negative effect on the economy, and that an increase in RGDP per capita would decrease terrorism. In order to compare the economic situation in the presence and the absence of terrorism; three scenarios are forecast. The first one forecasts the economy between 2012 and 2018 under the assumption of the absence of terrorist attacks. The second and the third one analyze the economy under the assumption of the presence of terrorist attacks (with different intensities) between 2012 and 2018.

We examine the effect of war on state fiscal capacity in developing countries, measured by tax revenue to GDP ratios. In divided or factionalised societies, patronage may substitute for common interest public goods, with the possibility of violent contestation over a rent. Our dynamic panel empirical estimates of the determinants of fiscal capacity are applied to 79 developing countries, during 1980–2010. Results indicate that war, especially civil war, retards fiscal capacity, along with poor governance, oil dependence and macroeconomic mismanagement.

This paper aims at contributing a literature update by assessing the impact of policies focusing on defence-procurement spending on the growth rate of the Greek economy with special reference to the recent crisis environment using artificial neural networks. The main conclusion drawn in the case of the Greek economy in general and during austerity times in particular, is that defence-procurement policy is considerably inflexible concerning both increases and reductions. In fact any further decreases will have a direct impact on the security of the country given the dramatic reduction of the defence budget and the arms race against Turkey. By contrast, any increases will only burden the balance of payments without adding to the GDP, once the bulk of the defence equipment is imported due to the inefficiency of the domestic defence industrial base. A compromise, therefore, between security and austerity would call for a gradual shift towards domestic sources procurement, assuming, of course, considerable upgrading of the Hellenic defence industrial base.

In this paper I apply the model of dictatorship, developed in my 1998 book, The Political Economy of Dictatorship , and elsewhere, to understand the workings of the North Korean regime. I argue that initially, under Kim Il Sung it was a Soviet-style regime but the shocks of the 1990s – the fall of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, the capitalist turn of China, the economic takeoff of South Korea and the succession crisis caused by Kim Il Sung’s death threatened the stability of that regime. Kim Jong Il shored up the regime by marrying it to the military. However, military rule is typically unstable. Kim Jong Il resolved this paradox essentially by militarizing the entire society. This is the distinctive feature of the regime. I analyze the stability of that regime, and ask whether engagement or isolation is the best way for the rest of the world to deal with North Korea.