Band 21, Heft 1

We present a rational choice model depicting a regime’s incentive to allocate resources to fighting rebels and killing civilians when it perceives an internal threat to its political or territorial control. The model guides our empirical inquiry of risk factors for genocide onset. Based on logit methods applied to a pooled sample of 155 countries over the period 1955–2006, we find that key variables highlighted in the theoretical model elevate genocide risk. Specifically, measures of threat, anocratic Polity scores, new state status, and low income significantly increase genocide risk, which we interpret as consistent with weak state perspectives on mass atrocity. Moreover, the threat measures matter even after controlling for internal war and the anocracy result holds even after removing components of the Polity dataset that are “contaminated” with factional violence, including genocide. Extensions of the empirical analysis to a variety of alternative measures, variables, and estimators show the robustness of weak state risk factors for genocide.

Research in behavioral economics has widely recognized the importance of reciprocity concerns in shaping individual behavior. The literature is however dominated by a focus on direct reciprocity. Motivated by a real life situation in Argentina – the Piqueteros (pickets) conflict — I designed a three-player three-stage game in order to investigate what type of reciprocity prevails in the face of a negative externality in an environment that allows for direct and indirect reciprocity simultaneously. I show that (negative) reciprocity from the directly affected second mover is more frequent than punishment from the indirectly affected third party. However, the third party more frequently punishes the first mover than the second mover, even though he is negatively affected by the latter’s punishment effort while not by the former’s move directly. In oder words, in real life settings featuring the incentives captured by this paper’s experimental design, affected third parties more frequently act in line with indirect rather than direct reciprocity.

The literature on the resource curse suggests that countries with large natural resource rents and weak institutions may experience rent seeking conflicts among different groups, potentially resulting in high inequality and welfare losses. While agricultural land has so far been categorized as a diffuse resource with low economic value, this categorization may no longer be appropriate, because demand for land is currently on the rise, and may continue to increase in the future. This study presents and discusses recent theoretical and empirical approaches to analyzing the effects of high-value agricultural land on rent seeking and rent distribution. Results suggest that the potential for small scale farmers to organize and obtain political power determines the extent of rent seeking and rent distribution, and that while more democratic institutions may increase the share of rents going to the farmers, they may have adverse welfare effects, because they may increase the competition for rents among groups, and hence the amount of resources spent on rent seeking.

Why do governments and rebel groups employ child soldiers in some internal armed conflicts but not in others? This study argues that child soldiers can be viewed as a military innovation that governments and rebel groups have differing costs and incentives in employing. It is hypothesized that longer, bloodier conflicts, disputant capacities, and the presence of democratic institutions significantly influence whether child soldiers are used by one or both parties during internal armed conflicts. The effects of these factors are statistically analyzed, uncovering new insights into global patterns of child soldier usage by governments and rebel groups.

This article represents an innovative perspective on the controversial issue of legitimacy of the “humanitarian military intervention” (HMI), by situating the normative debate into a quantitative perspective. It evaluates legitimacy of HMI by assessing a degree of “humanitarianism” behind the “motives and means” and the “outcomes” of military interventions from the post-WWII era. The “motives and means” of the interveners are evaluated based on the theoretical framework of the Just War Theory (JWT), more particularly based on the quantified “jus ad bellum” JWT criteria; and they are compared with the existence of “humanitarian outcomes” of these interventions in the light of consequentialist ethics. An overall goal is to generate a comprehensive picture of the dynamics and relationships within the HMI concept based on the empirical evidence.