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...

We introduce a new Bayesian nonparametric method for estimating the size of a closed population from multiple-recapture data. Our method, based on Dirichlet process mixtures, can accommodate complex patterns of heterogeneity of capture, and can transparently modulate its complexity without a separate model selection step. Additionally, it can handle the massively sparse contingency tables gener...

Stressful life events experienced by pregnant women may lead to adverse obstetric outcomes. This study in Benghazi compared the rates of preterm, low-birth-weight and caesarean-section births at Al-Jamhouria hospital in the months before and during the armed conflict in Libya in 2011. Data were collected on all women admitted to the delivery ward during February to May 2011 (the months of the m...

This paper explores the evolution of international stabilisation agendas and their significance for humanitarian action. Stabilisation includes a combination of military, humanitarian, political and economic activities to control, contain and manage areas affected by armed conflict and complex emergencies. Encompassing narrow security objectives and broader peace-building efforts, stabilisation...

Law enforcement is a challenging and necessary social undertaking. Moreover, the political language of the western world has become increasingly polarized. As “us against them” becomes prevalent in public discourse, it reintroduces the west to phrases such as; ‘the war on...’ President Richard Nixon used war language in June 1971 when he introduced the ‘war on drugs’ [1]. Nevertheless, policing...

This paper develops a quantitative model of trade, military conflicts, and defense spending. Trade liberalization between two countries reduces probability of an armed conflict between them, causing both to cut defense spending. This in turn causes a domino effect on defense spending by other countries. As a result, both countries and the rest of the world are better off. We estimate the model ...

The problems of weak state structures, including state territoriality, in the South Caucasus has highly influenced political developments and the building of a democratic state. This paper explains the difficulty of recovering statehood in the cases of Armenia and Georgia, both in the context of post–Soviet state transformation and post–conflict state-rebuilding. It argues that recovering state...

Research on the Holocaust introduced the concept of bystander in order to describe the civilian population passively tolerating atrocities committed against the Jewish population, which was actively encouraged by the German national socialist propaganda. Subsequently, a more general approach to this concept has been employed to integrate it in a wider range of armed conflicts. This article disc...