This paper studies the incidence of civil war over time. We put forward a canonical model of civil war, which relates the incidence of conflict to circumstances, institutions and features of the underlying economy and polity. We use this model to derive testable predictions and to interpret the cross-sectional and times-series variations variations in civil conflict. Our most novel emprical fin...

Through the first millennium BCE, religio-cultural revolutions occurred in China, Greece, Israel, and India. Commonly referred to as the Axial Age, this epoch has been identified by some scholars as period of parallel evolution in which many of the World Religions appeared for the first time and humanity was forever changed. Axial scholarship, however, remains in an early stage as many social s...

This article will consider the current convergence between war and crime by unpacking Foucault’s analysis of power and Agamben’s elaboration on the conjunction between the banning of a life and the constitution of the polity. It will show that these perspectives link together crime and war as mechanisms that contribute to the governance of the population by legitimating authority and their use ...

Political and economic internationalization and globalization, the rise of sub-national self-governing regions and spheres, governance replacing government and many related processes change the role and context of the nation-state, the protector of mass democracy. The concept of (substantive) representation, representation as ‘acting for,’ can help develop answers to the threat that this ‘loss ...

retirement, to contribute to this Society, and so to the profession and the public, the matured results of much thoughtful observation and world-wide experience. During the twenty-three years I have enjoyed the privileges of Associate and office-bearer many changes have occurred in the composition of our Society, and also, to some extent, in its functions and scope of action. In 1862 the scienc...

How do social movements affect decisions within corporations, such as the commercialization of new technologies? We suggest that the effect of movement activism is conditioned by the internal polity and therefore varies across organizations. This article examines how the anti-genetic movement in Germany during the 1980s affected six domestic pharmaceutical firms’ commercialization of biotechnol...

Abstract This introduction presents the theoretical framework, aims, and summary of this special issue. We want to explain European Union’s (EU) response COVID crisis from a ‘polity perspective’ (Kriesi 2021; Ferrera 2005). conceptualize EU as compound ‘experimental’ polity which develops along three dimensions: binding (capacity building sovereignty), bounding (bordering), bonding (solidarity ...

After Independence the policymaking elite in India launched a project of economic development with a heavy involvement of the state and a democratic polity. In the first three decades since then, in the 50's, 60's and 70's, there were many successes and at least as many failures of this developmental project. In terms of economic success, this particular project led to the foundation of a compl...

The evolution of the polity, particularly the transition of chiefdoms to states, has been the subject of considerable debate. In this article, the authors engage the discussion surrounding the meta-theoretical positions on the tempo of change, specifically whether states emerged grad ually from quantitative changes in chiefdom societies—gradualism—or if their appearance was the result of punctu...