Fighting Conflict: Violent Splits or Healthy Divides?

Democracy, Violent Conflict and National Development in Nigeria

There seems to be a debate on the validity of democratic peace theory. Whilst, some scholars and schools of thought have argued that democracy engenders peace, others have argued exactly the opposite. In the Nigerian context, democracy appears to have been characterized by violence, this paper examines democracy and violent conflicts and in origins and its implications for development with a pa...

Violent Conflict, Poverty and Chronic Poverty

Conflict-driven ASP Solving with External Sources and Program Splits

Answer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-known problem solving approach based on nonmonotonic reasoning. HEX-programs extend ASP with external atoms for access to arbitrary external sources, which can also introduce constants that do not appear in the program (value invention). In order to determine the relevant constants during (pre-)grounding, external atoms must in general be evaluated under u...

'Fighting' or 'Conflict'? An Approach to Revealing Concepts of Terms in Political Discourse

Previous work on the epistemology of fact-checking indicated the dilemma between the needs of binary answers for the public and ambiguity of political discussion. Determining concepts represented by terms in political discourse can be considered as a Word-Sense Disambiguation (WSD) task. The analysis of political discourse, however, requires identifying precise concepts of terms from relatively...

Women ’ s participation in terrorism , conflict and violent extremism : Gender equality or pure pragmatism ?

Modern warfare disproportionally affects the lives of women and girls. Females experience armed conflict differently to men due to the gendered division of roles and responsibilities. Historically, direct combat involved participation exclusively by men, with civilians, comprising mainly of women and children, suffering due to displacement and direct targeting. As a result, women are frequently...