Protection or predation? Understanding the behavior of community-created self-defense militias during civil wars

Insect Predation, Prey Defense, and Community Structure

W. Wyatt Hoback received a B.A. in Biology from Randolph-Macon College in 1990, a M.S. degree in Biology from Southwest Missouri State University in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Entomology from the University of NebraskaLincoln. For his doctoral degree, Wyatt investigated the physiological ecology of a group of tiger beetles that inhabit Nebraska's eastern salt marshes. Wyatt meshes entomology, physiol...

The Economic Costs of Civil Wars*

This article assess empirical studies of the economic costs of internal armed conflicts. The reviewed works are divided into accounting and modelling methods. Cost is seen as the difference between the counterfactual production without conflict and the actual production. The average economic cost of internal armed conflict is a 3.7% yearly reduction of GDP. There are large differences between t...

[Catastrophe protection and civil defense in public health].

When Civil Wars Recur: Conditions for Durable Peace after Civil Wars

We argue that the duration of the peace after civil wars is mainly a function of the extent to which the outcome of the previous civil war preserved a condition of multiple sovereignty and the extent to which the post-civil war environment creates incentives for dissident groups to resort to violence rather than sustain the peace. Hazard models suggest that the outcome of the previous conflict ...

Evolutionary Psychological Foundations of Civil Wars

I propose an evolutionary psychological perspective on wars and suggest that the ultimate cause of intergroup conflict may be the relative availability of reproductive women. Polygyny, which allows some men to monopolize all reproductive opportunities and exclude others, may increase the prevalence of civil wars, but not interstate wars, which did not exist in the ancestral environment. The ana...