The Algerian civil war that began in 1992 has gained notoriety for several reasons. It originated in a democratic process that came to an abrupt halt and had massacres of civilians that were shocking in their scale and atrocity. The government received significant amounts of external support despite accusations of widespread abuses relating to its prosecution of the conflict, and many recognize...

The paper investigates the effect of child malnutrition on the risk of mortality in Burundi, a very poor country heavily affected by civil war. We use anthropometric data from a longitudinal survey (1998-2007). We find that undernourished children, as measured by the height-for-age z-scores (HAZ) in 1998 had a higher probability to die during subsequent years. In order to address the problem of...

This paper investigates the impact of the latest civil war and the subsequent economic embargo in Burundi on the health status of the Burundese children. We find that the civil war and the economic embargo had a particularly detrimental impact on the nutritional status of rural populations, due to a direct effect of the civil war and to the soaring of food prices during the embargo. A rural Bur...

Recent research demonstrated a relation between traumatic brain injury (TBI), health symptoms and diagnosis of Gulf War Illness (GWI) in Gulf War Veterans, but no study has examined the impact of multiple mild TBIs (mTBIs). A total of 229 male Gulf War Veterans from the Ft Devens Cohort were categorized by a number of mTBIs reported. One-way ANOVA and chi-square test of independence were used t...

T hree months after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the New York Times asked, “Is the Devil in the Demographics?” (Sciolino, 2001). The article examined the vulnerability of large cohorts of unemployed youth to extremist ideology and political recruitment, and speculated about the hazards created by future youth cohorts in the Middle East. In the post-9/11 era, however, there has been very l...

1 ABSTRACT Civil war is fought between two political organizations, the state and a rebel group. Myriad theories of civil war have examined the role of state institutions and state strength, but little attention has been devoted to theorizing about rebel organizations themselves. This paper focuses on the organizational structure of rebel groups to understand patterns of recruitment and allegia...

To learn more about the effect of economic conditions on civil war, we examine whether Sub-Saharan civil wars are more likely to start following downturns in the international price of countries’ main export commodities. The data show a robust effect of commodity price downturns on the outbreak of civil wars. We also find that Sub-Saharan countries are more likely to see civil wars following ec...

We build a model for predicting civil wars where the government bargains with an opposition group using concessions and repression. The equilibrium is either a state of perpetual peace where there are only concessions and no repression, or the equilibrium leads to civil wars, where the concessions are lower and repression higher as compared to the peace equilibrium. An initial movement towards ...