Volume 25, Issue 4 - Proceedings of the 19th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference

This short paper focuses on econometric issues raised by intentional government interventions aimed at influencing some politically sensitive outcomes. It first presents an example where multiple regression analysis provides quite a misleading diagnosis about foreign aid and immigration that can be rectified by using a causal analysis based on instrumental variables. It then offers a simple theoretical framework to bring out the basic information asymmetries affecting the game between the econometrician and the policy maker and their implications for the choice of instruments in a near-identification strategy. This approach is shown to provide a strong political judgement in the case of the armed violence between local governments and “Maoist” insurgents in eight states of India. Proper econometric analysis shows that the initiative of the insurgency cannot be blamed on the rebels.

The award committee has chosen Jean-Paul Azam as the winner of the 2019 Lewis Fry Richardson Award in particular in recognition of his contributions to the study of violent conflict and its prevention. The jury highlighted the key role of Jean-Paul Azam’s works on applying rational choice theory to understand armed conflicts, providing a consistent conceptual framework. Many of the resulting hypotheses were empirically tested, usually with the help of some co-authors to identify the most relevant causes of violent conflicts and their prevention. His work has provided important insights on diverse topics relating to civil war and terrorism.

Religion has been taking an increasingly contentious character worldwide. Deprivation, grievances and protest by religious groups seems to be on the rise. Previous research has shown that the marginalization of ethnic groups can contribute significantly to violent conflict. However, we know little about religious groups as existing research has lacked the necessary fine-grained data. This paper introduces the “Religious Minorities at Risk” dataset comprising data on 771 religious minorities worldwide for the period between 2000 and 2014. The dataset contains pertinent worldwide information on relevant characteristics of these minorities, especially those that may explain their motivation and capability to mobilize. Such characteristics include objective deprivation in religious, economic and political terms as well as corresponding subjective grievances and intensities. The dataset also includes group-related features and structural variables that arguably influence minorities’ capability to mobilize. Moreover, while previous studies have focussed exclusively on violence, we now have more information available on the exact character of mobilization enabling scholars to distinguish between peaceful and violent forms of mobilization.

This study introduces a new event dataset on the human rights violations in the Kurdish conflict in Turkey perpetrated by both the State and the armed rebel group, the PKK (the Kurdistan Workers Party), from 1990 to 2018. The dataset codes human rights violation events that victimize civilians, including women and children, identifying the perpetrator, type of victim, type of human right violation, and the place of the violation. The categories of human rights violations include the physical and political rights drawn from the laws and treaties adopted by the U.N., such as killings or deaths of civilians, illegal detention and arrests, and freedom of peaceful assembly. The dataset is useful in examining the trends and motives of perpetrators in committing these violations and for seeking to understand the extent to which state and non-state rebel groups abide by international norms in armed conflicts. The framework of this dataset, although developed for the Kurdish conflict, is applicable and can be extended to other armed conflict cases, facilitating cross-conflict research on a more comparative basis.

Almost three decades ago the United Nations (UN) entered an era of multi-dimensional peacekeeping operations, in which civilian and uniformed personnel work together. At the same time, human rights promotion became an integral part of such missions. Due to data limitations, there is little systematic knowledge about how civilian staff impacts human rights standards in the countries UN peacekeeping operations are deployed. I address this lacuna in two ways. First, I briefly outline the importance of civilian staff in UN peacekeeping operations and their roles in promoting human rights. Second, I provide explorative descriptive statistics on the number of civilian personnel in UN peacekeeping operations and the occurrence of violence against civilians committed by state forces.

From the international perspective, the peace process in Liberia has generally been described as a successful model for international peacebuilding interventions. But how do Liberians perceive the peace process in their country? The aim of this paper is to complement an institutionalist approach looking at the security and justice mechanism in Liberia with some insights into local perceptions in order to answer the following question: how do Liberians perceive the peace process in their country and which institutions have been supportive for the establishment of sustaining peace? After briefly introducing the background of the Liberian conflict and the data collection, I present first results, analyzing the mechanism linking two peacebuilding institutions (peacekeeping and transitional justice) with the establishment of sustaining peace in Liberia.

This paper examines the effect of violence, originated from the Mexican Drug War, on avoidance behavior. The analysis uses three different variables to capture avoidance behavior by easiness to do, during the past year: refrained from going out at night (easy-to-avoid), refrained from carrying cash (medium-to-avoid) and refrained from using public transportation (hard-to-avoid). Data comes from different government sources and crime victimization surveys. Results suggest a violence effect of 6.72% on refrained from going out at night, 3.52% on refrained from carrying cash and 1.20% on refrained from using public transportation.

Multiple studies have shown that when advanced-market “contract-intensive” economy is considered in a regression of fatal militarized interstate disputes, crises, or wars, the democratic peace correlation, the observed dearth of militarized conflict between democratic nations, becomes near zero and insignificant. Defenders of the existence of a correlation of democracy with peace claim these studies contain multiple errors. This article examines the state of evidence behind all claims in this debate. Four crucial facts are identified: (1) There is no report in print that shows democracy significant in a regression of fatal disputes controlling for contractualist economy that is unencumbered with controversial practices; (2) Every empirical defense of democracy has been rebutted, and the rebuttals remain uncontested; (3) There is no democratic peace in the nineteenth century, when there were no contractualist dyads but were democratic dyads; and (4) New analyses with revised direct data on contractualist economy covering 94% of observations over the largest-observed 1920–2010 period show that democracy without contractualist economy has a near-zero correlation with peace. Together, these facts inform us that there are no scientific grounds for deeming the democratic peace correlation as existing in the state of knowledge.

According to International Relations scholarship, the main formal motivation for foreign aid is usually the unexpressed expectation for improvement of bilateral relations and overall international support. There is an anticipation that aid recipients will not “forget” their donors on the international stage, in particularly during important sessions at the UNGA. We test this assertion empirically on the case of Israeli foreign aid to African countries, using data on Israeli Official Development Aid provisions between 1997 and 2014, and data on voting patterns of aid recipients in the UN General Assembly (UNGA). Our results testify that Israeli bilateral humanitarian foreign aid not only has not provided its expected diplomatic revenues, but may perhaps even hindered African states’ support in the UN. Concomitantly, our results testify that Israeli Official Development Aid (ODA) does not have the anticipated long term effects on international support towards Israel, but instead only a short-lived influence. The results are informative about the usefulness of foreign aid as a diplomatic tool, with important policy implications for decision makers in Israel and worldwide.

The economic theory on economic sanctions gives strong indications that success depends positively on pre-sanction trade linkage and prior relations and negatively on sanction duration. However, the empirical literature has not arrived at consensus regarding these factors. Our research puzzle is the observation that despite more than three decades of empirical research on economic sanctions no consensus has yet emerged on the sign and significance of the impact of the key variables that theoretically determine the success of economic sanctions. In our research we explore reasons for the heterogeneity of the findings in the literature and the persistence nature of the debate.

In this paper we analyse the effect of multilateral defence alliances in arms trade among allies. We postulate that the access to the frontier technology weaponry enabled only to military allies will intensify arms trade. The benefits of such trade are claimed to be in security and technology diffusion. We execute an empirical analysis for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Results show that being a member or partner of NATO significantly increases arm imports coming from the alliance, and that this increase cannot be attributed to economic and additional country characteristics.

This paper addresses a topic that has taken on increasing urgency since the presidency of Donald Trump: how can the European Union member states insure strategic autonomy in military defense? One answer given by policymakers and academics alike is that an independent industrial-military base is central to achieving autonomy. In particular, the production and procurement of military equipment ought to be EU-internal. However, the US remains the most important provider of military equipment worldwide, and many EU member states continue to procure from the US. In this context, this paper asks why some EU member states procure fighter jets from the US while others procure from European sources. It hypothesizes that those countries with a security or economic dependence on the US are more likely to continue to procure from the US. The paper tests this hypothesis with a statistical analysis that seeks a relationship between indicators of security and economic dependence on the US and procurement decision. The results this analysis yields are mixed, but I find that on average European countries that decide to procure US-made fighter are more subordinate to the US.