Political violence and terror: Arendtian reflections

“ The Political Economy of State Terror ”

This paper analyzes factors contributing to terrorism, using its initial meaning from the French Revolution in which the state is the terrorist. The independent economic variables are mineral exports/GDP, military expenditures/GDP, real GDP growth, real per capita GDP, and population density, and the dependent variable is democide, the murder of people by government. Analysis of the data indica...

Reflections on political involvement.

Islam ’ s Bloody Innards ? Religion and Political Terror , 1980 – 2000

Culturalists claim that political outcomes, such as respect for human rights, are deeply rooted in culture. Some have singled out Islam as particularly problematic. We assess whether Muslim societies suffer higher levels of political terror compared with others. Our results show that countries containing larger shares of Catholics, and those dominated by Catholics, fare the worst. The share of ...

The Political Violence Cycle∗

Do elections cause violence? Some scholars point to higher levels of unrest around elections, especially in developing countries, to assert that elections cause political violence. We develop a formal model to demonstrate that this conclusion is unfounded. In our baseline model, violence is more effective in electoral periods, leading to a spike in fighting surrounding elections. However, the p...

Promoting Violence: Terror Management Theory and Campus Safety Campaigns

A new wave of campus safety campaigns have been implemented on high school and college campuses across the nation since the Virginia Tech shootings. Some of these campaigns are trying to increase awareness that violence can happen anywhere by reducing optimistic bias in students and faculty. This study poses that these campaigns have the potential to increase mortality salience and anxiety in i...