An increasing amount of development aid is targeted to areas affected by civil conflict; some of it in the hope that aid will reduce conflict by weakening popular support for insurgent movements. But if insurgents know that development projects will weaken their position, they have an incentive to derail them, which may exacerbate conflict. To formalize this intuition, we develop a theoretical ...

Mental health care for trauma-exposed populations in conflict-affected developing countries often is provided by primary healthcare providers (PHPs), including doctors, nurses, and lay health workers. The Task Force on International Trauma Training, through an initiative sponsored by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and the RAND Corporation, has developed evidence- and con...

This paper reviews the seminal theories of social psychology which have guided scholarship on inter-group conflicts and describes how these theories have been used by conflict resolution practitioners to design Track Two diplomacy initiatives among citizens in conflict zones. The authors hope that such a review will provide scholars of conflict resolution and international politics with a bette...

What can be done to resolve the seemingly endless conflict in Sudan ? A nation of 36 million people, wracked by conflict for 34 of the last 45 years, it has generated some 4 million displaced people during the course of its war. It is estimated that over two million Sudanese people have died as a result of fighting and related starvation and disease. According to the International Crisis Group,...

Peace studies seeks to understand the negation of violence through conflict transformation, cooperation and harmony by drawing from many disciplines, including psychology, sociology and anthropology, political science, economics, international relations, international law and history. This raises the problem of the complementarity, coexistence and integration of different systems of knowledge. ...

The current consensus objective of development aid in the international community is to reduce poverty in general and to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in particular. In addition, the dominant view identifies economic growth as the principal means to this end. But the policy objective of aid can be defined in many ways, and has in fact varied over time with shifting priorities ...

Nepal has witnessed serious human rights violations including arbitrary arrests, detentions, "disappearances", extra judicial executions, abductions and torture carried out by both the Royal Nepalese Army and the Maoist rebels in the 10 years of the "peoples war". Women and children have borne the brunt of the conflict. Massive displacement has led to adverse social and psychological consequenc...