Political violence is an everyday occurence in many weakly institutionalized polities. This paper o¤ers a uni…ed approach for studying political violence whether it emerges as repression or civil con‡ict. We formulate a model where an incumbent or opposition can choose to use violence as a means of acquiring or maintaining power. We study the institutional and economic factors that determine th...

578 www.thelancet.com Vol 383 February 15, 2014 his colleagues argue in the fi nal report of The Lancet– University of Oslo Commission on Global Governance for Health. They are about power. They are about elites. And they are about a rigid consensus among these powerful elites that prevents most attempts to question the norms on which political decisions are made. Yet elites are only as powerfu...

This article proposes a political economy of extraction framework that accounts for political order and state collapse as alternative outcomes in the face of lootable wealth. Different types of institutions of extraction can be built around lootable resources—with divergent effects on political stability. If rulers are able to forge institutions of extraction that give them control over the rev...

Classical bourgeois political theory articulated the political revolution that established possessive individualism as the basis of legitimate government and the foundation of civil society. In this respect, it inaugurated the systematic investigation of the objective rules governing subjective human existence. The work of Thomas Hobbes and of John Locke, like classical political economy and mo...

Sustainable Development Goal Three is rightly ambitious, but achieving it will require doing global health differently. Among other things, progressive civil society organisations will need to be recognised and supported as vital partners in achieving the necessary transformations. We argue, using illustrative examples, that a robust civil society can fulfill eight essential global health funct...

Governance is broader notion than government. It involves governments but also civil society (citizens, civic institutions, etc). In the urban management context, governance refers to all the laws, regulations, frameworks systems and processes that shape the way in which the local government operates. These frameworks, processes and systems may be formal or informal. The formal governance struc...

Societies under similar geographic and economic conditions and subject to similar external influences nonetheless develop very di↵erent types of states. At one extreme are weak states with little capacity and ability to regulate economic or social relations. At the other are despotic states which dominate civil society. Yet there are others which are locked into an ongoing competition with civi...