Perhaps the crowning achievement of mature democracies is the peaceful acceptance of the ballot box as the primary instrument for deciding who should hold power in society. We do not have to go far back in the history of most democratic states, however, to find a distinct role for political violence. Moreover, many inhabitants of the globe still remain at risk of falling prey to widespread viol...

A booming quantitative literature on large-scale political violence has identified important economic and political determinants of civil war. That literature has treated civil war as an aggregate category and has not considered if identity (ethnic/religious) wars have different causes than nonidentity wars. The author argues that this is an important distinction and that identity wars are due ...

Quantitative studies of civil war have focused either on war initiation (onset) or war termination and have produced important insights into these processes. In this paper, we complement these studies by noting that equally important to finding out how wars start and how they end is to identify how much war we are likely to observe in any given period? To answer this question, we combine recent...

We argue that the duration of the peace after civil wars is mainly a function of the extent to which the outcome of the previous civil war preserved a condition of multiple sovereignty and the extent to which the post-civil war environment creates incentives for dissident groups to resort to violence rather than sustain the peace. Hazard models suggest that the outcome of the previous conflict ...

Somalia has suffered a massive internal population displacement and exodus that began in 1988 and is still ongoing during the prolonged and intermittent civil war. This review looks at the burden of HIV infection in Somali and the impact of civil war on its epidemiology. Serosurveys have indicated that HIV was not present in Somalia before the civil war and to date Somalia has had an HIV preval...

this paper intends to explore the causes of the civil war in tajikistan which erupted after its independence in 1992. the civil war went on for nearly four years inflicting thousands of injuries, loss of lives and damages to the country. the paper shows the more social and ethnical roots of the civil war and finally demonstrates the positive role whish the islamic republic of iran played n impo...

PURPOSE We compiled all cases of urethral injury received in battle during the Civil War to detail their management and determine the outcome of treatment. MATERIALS AND METHODS Surgeon medical reports of individual cases of urethral injury listed in the Medical and Surgical History of the Civil War, and pension records available in the National Archives and Records Administration were review...

This paper explores the causes of displacement during civil wars. Recent scholarship has shown that conventional civil wars – those in which forces are relatively balanced – and irregular civil wars – those in which one side is substantially stronger than the other – exhibit different patterns of violence. We hypothesize that, while the mode of violence differs, the form of displacement should ...

Djankov and Reynal Querol (2010, RESTAT) show that the level of GDP per capita has no significant effects on the risk of civil war once country fixed effects are accounted for. Therefore, they argue that the relationship between income and civil war is spurious. This paper shows that when focus is on the change, rather than on the level, of GDP per capita that the significant negative relations...

The purpose of the paper is to synthesize available knowledge on the topic of organized political violence, focusing on the World Bank's work in the area of conflict analysis and conflict prevention and linking that work with the literature on secession, decentralization, and international intervention in civil wars. Several topics addressed in this paper are the subject of the author's ongoing...