Armed conflict actors frequently target civilian populations. Thus, an improved understanding of such behaviour could pave the way to reducing it. We use Civilian Targeting Index (CTI) and a broad array geo-referenced data investigate spatio-temporal economic dynamics targeting by in Africa. Two main insights are generated. First, African non-state is strongly influenced other proximate actors....

Due to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the unmet medical and psychological needs of military personnel are creating major challenges. Increasingly, active duty military personnel are seeking physical and mental health services from civilian professionals. The Civilian Medical Resources Network attempts to address these unmet needs. Participants in the Network include primary care and mental h...

Mass violence, armed conflict, genocide, and complex humanitarian emergencies continue to create major social and public health disasters at the dawn of the 21st Century. Transitional justice, a set of policies designed to address the effects of war on traumatized communities and bring justice, lies at the nexus of public health, conflict, and social reconstruction. Despite the paucity of empir...

BACKGROUND Domestic violence is a serious threat to the physical and mental health of women. The aim of the present study was to find and compare the frequency of domestic violence between methamphetamine users, patients with psychiatric disorders, and healthy people. METHODS In this analytical cross-sectional study, methamphetamine users (n=30) and patients with psychiatric disorders (n=30) ...

As petroleum extraction and consumption has steadily increased in recent decades, economists and development researchers have been puzzled by discrepancies in the growth, development, and governance of oil-dependent countries around the world. The divergent development outcomes of oil states beg the following question: what are the political and economic conditions that determine the consequenc...

Humanitarian aid has been present in some form throughout human history, yet the modern concept of humanitarian aid has only truly emerged since the later half of the 20th century. Through a complex progression of world events and largely brought about in response to armed conflict, modern humanitarian aid is provided by a multitude of organizations and actors. The purpose of this chapter is to...

BACKGROUND The concept of Reconciliation as applied to inter-group conflict has come into use only recently. Throughout the history of Psychology, Reconciliation was mostly understood at the individual and inter-personal level. METHOD In the present study we shall analyse the roles played by trust, negotiating attitude, legitimacy and ethnocentric attitude over the attitude towards social rec...

Cities are fast becoming new territories of violence. The humanitarian consequences of many criminally violent urban settings are comparable to those of more traditional wars, yet despite the intensity of the needs, humanitarian aid to such settings is limited. The way in which humanitarian needs are typically defined, fails to address the problems of these contexts, the suffering they produce ...

I was disappointed and saddened by the carelessness of the title ‘Going to war does not have to hurt’ in the June issue of the Journal (Hacker Hughes et al, 2005). One does not even have to mention the considerable number of British casualties in Iraq to realise that this headline is completely ill thought out and a particularly misplaced euphemism that fails to appreciate that war in modern ti...

Substantive progress has been achieved in advancing emergency response interventions during disasters including assistance of internally displaced persons (IDPs). Explicit operational technical guidelines and management strategies have been successfully applied through the "cluster approach". In 2008-09 armed conflict in several districts of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province and the Federall...