Volume 22, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Proceedings of the 16th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference

Is climate change a major security threat? How has research on climate and conflict progressed in recent years? And where should it move forward? This brief essay reflects on some ways in which climatic changes could constitute a threat to peace and stability. Rather than assuming a direct causal link, the essay argues that climate change may exert an indirect and conditional effect on conflict risk, increasing the security gap between affluent societies well able to cope with climate change and societies already suffering from violence and instability, who are unlikely to achieve successful adaptation on their own. For this reason, peace building is quite possibly the most effective climate resilience policy in unstable corners of the world.

The award committee has chosen Paul Collier as the winner of the 2016 Lewis Fry Richardson Award in particular in recognition of his contributions to the study of civil war. His famous paper on “Greed and grievance in civil war” – published with Anke Hoeffler in 2004, but circulating in draft form since the late 1990s – has been cited over 1000 times in the Web of Science as of mid-July 2016, and has over 5000 citations in Google Scholar. The jury also highlighted the key role of Collier’s work reviving academic research on civil war in the late 1990s, the broader impact of the World Bank group led by Collier in spurring advances in the field as well as stimulating important data collection efforts, as well as his central role in popularizing insights of academic research to a broader audience.

There is today a well-established consensus that belligerents must be disarmed in order to reconstruct shattered states and establish a robust and durable peace in the wake of internal armed conflict. Indeed, nearly every UN peacekeeping intervention since the end of the Cold War has included disarmament provisions in its mandate. Disarmament is guided by the arrestingly simple premise that weapons cause conflict and, therefore, must be eradicated for a civil conflict to end. If the means by which combatants fight are eliminated, it is thought, actors will have little choice but to commit to peace. Disarmament is, therefore, considered a necessary condition for establishing the lasting conditions for peace. To date, however, no systematic quantitative analysis has been undertaken of the practice of disarmament and the causal mechanisms remain underspecified. This paper is a preliminary attempt to fill that gap. In it we outline a series of hypotheses with which to run future statistical analyses on the effects of disarmament programs. The success of negotiations and the durability of peace are, perhaps, the single most salient issues concerning those engaged in conflict termination efforts. We therefore focus the bulk of this paper on a review of the supposed effects of disarmament on negotiating outcomes and war recurrence.

The Herostratos syndrome affects some people who perpetrate odious attacks for the sake of infamy. We suggest that this sheds some useful light to explain the wave of mass killing going on in Europe and North America, including school shootings and Jihadist terrorism, within a game-theoretic framework. The analysis points out that policies aimed at countering this type of violence should focus on trivializing these attacks and reducing the publicity that they get in the media.

Building on recently published findings that point to a process of convergence in terms of defence burdens internationally, this paper readdresses the issue for the period 1970–2015 using SIPRI’s new dataset. The new consistent data constructed by SIPRI offers the opportunity to extend the time period of the empirical investigation into the convergence issue, thus allowing for better insights over a longer time horizon that covers both the Cold and post-Cold War periods.

In this note we focus on the particularly long duration of civil armed conflicts. We argue that if conflict parties have extreme ideological beliefs or follow an “irrevocable religious or ideological truth,” there could be three elements in the preference order that may imply a long duration of the conflict. More precise, preference orders of conflict parties are multidimensional. If (1) one dimension is a set of rules that defines an irrevocable ideology and or religious beliefs, and (2) is a necessary element in the preference order, and (3) due to elements of their beliefs – time preference is low, the conflict may have a long duration. For insurgents motivated by such strong beliefs it is essential that their set of rules is established, not when.

This study focuses on the distribution of military capabilities in the aftermath of civil wars and how it affects the recurrence of further fighting. Using survival analysis the empirical tests cover 48 post-conflict episodes in 33 countries and includes novel measurements on military capabilities. We find that peace is more likely to endure following military victories and peace agreements and when conflict parties are able to credibly signal their intentions to commit laying down arms.

We analyze the determinants of left-wing and nationalist-separatist terrorism for 18 Western European countries for the 1970–2007 period. Focusing on the influence of the Cold War, we find that it predicts left-wing but not nationalist-separatist terrorism, suggesting that there is indeed some heterogeneity in the causes of terrorism. However, we also find that a number of factors determine both kinds of terrorism, indicating that there were differences but also commonalities in the causes of left-wing and nationalist-separatist terrorism in Western Europe during our observation period.

This paper illustrates how the rational design of an international agreement can be investigated using software and numerical solutions as preliminary steps to a formal modelling of the agreement. The paper examines the repetition of a Called Bluff game interpreted as representing the stylized incentives of a debtor-creditor relationship.

This paper explores the networks that intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) create in the international system and explore how states relate to each other in such networks. It focuses in particular on the network of IGOs that act as creators of and agents for hard international law. We introduce new data that allows us to investigate which institutional traits and functions are most closely related to IGOs’ contribution to the implementation and enforcement of informal international law. We map out and explore the network of “highly legalized” IGOs for the years 1980–2005 as well as the affiliation networks emerging from states’ membership in such IGOs. Combining international relations theory with network theory, we raise novel hypotheses on the potential impact of highly legalized IGO networks on states’ conflict behavior and peace.

This paper explores the intertwined relationship between democracy and state capacity, i.e. the effectiveness of state sovereignty over its territory and population, in affecting the probability of civil wars’ onset. This work aims at providing a fresh new look on this relationship by exploiting the recent release of a new dataset of institutional indicators (provided within the V-Dem project), that allows to analyse the effect of democracy and state capacity on conflicts’ onset. The analysis is performed through a logit model, investigating 142 countries over the period 1950–2014. The paper shows that once state capacity is fully taken into account, the inverted-U shaped relationship between democracy and civil wars is no longer robust to alternative measures of democracy, and that state capacity is the crucial factor in providing a decrease in the probability of the onset of a civil conflict. Furthermore, by implementing an interactive model, the paper shows that state capacity counterbalances the effect of democracy when incompatibility is over government, by generating an overall decreasing effect on the probability of civil war.

The emergence of civil wars as the predominant type of conflict in the twenty-first century has prompted scholars to reformulate and revisit many of the questions treated in the interstate conflict literature. One of these questions concerns the impact of leadership changes on policy decisions within the realm of war and peace. Studies have suggested that in interstate disputes, the coming to power of new leaders in one or both of the disputing governments increases the prospects of war termination. We argue that within the context of intrastate disputes this relationship is more complex and multilayered due to factors that are characteristic of rebel groups and civil wars. We suggest that leader overturns in rebel groups are likely to lead, under certain conditions to more, rather than less, hardline conflict positions, at least in the short term, thus hindering possible negotiation processes. We test our hypothesis on a dataset of leadership changes and agreements ending civil wars in Africa, 1975–2007.

Does granting regional autonomy to concentrated minorities appease their demand for sovereignty or instead motivate and enable them to engage in secessionist conflicts? To answer this question is difficult as moves towards federalism and decentralization are themselves the results of strategic interactions between the state and the minorities. In this note, I intend to shed some light on this question by looking at how ethnic civil wars and autonomy are dynamically linked. This shows that for locally dominant groups, the risk of war monotonically decreases in the years leading to and following autonomy. For groups that are a minority locally, however, the risk of war sharply increases in the lead-up to autonomy, and quickly falls afterwards, suggesting strategic behavior.