ANVIL Deliverable 5.1: Report on EU added-value for policy stakeholders

This report constitutes Deliverable 5.1 of the FP7 Security Programme Coordination and Support Action ‘Analysis of Civil Security Systems in Europe’ (ANVIL, Grant Agreement no. 284678). Deliverable 5.1 is a report onwork package 5, which is dedicatedto providingpolicy stakeholders with an EU added-valuecontribution in civil security. The definition of EU added-valuefor ANVIL follows a dual rationale. In administrative terms, the concept means the added-valueof the project itself for civil security policy-making communities in Europe. Simply put, it asks how beneficial the results of this EU-funded project are for the end-users in their everyday practice of drafting civil security and civil protection recommendations. A second definition of EU added-valuedraws on the nature of our study and its content, and explores whether additional EU actions related to crisis management can have a positive impact on the delivery of civil protection at national level. In WP5 we have taken both definitions into consideration. WP5’s final evaluation workshop oscillatesbetween both definitions

Do Child Soldiers Influence UN Peacekeeping?

The use of child soldiers in conflicts has received increasing academic attention in recent years. This article examines post-conflict periods to see whether the use of child soldiers mobilizes United Nations peacekeeping operations (UN PKO) in the aftermath of a conflict. Taking into consideration how child soldiers affect conflict and how important their reintegration is to sustainable peace and post-conflict development, we analyse whether the presence of child soldiers in a civil war increases the likelihood of the presence of a PKO. We argue that the UN deems a conflict with child soldiers as a difficult case for conflict resolution, necessitating a response from the international community. This is in line with our empirical results confirming that the use of child soldiers significantly increases the likelihood of peacekeeping

Natural resource wars in the shadow of the future: Explaining spatial dynamics of violence during civil war

Previous studies on natural resources and civil wars find that the presence of natural resources increases both civil conflict risk and duration. At the same time, belligerents often cooperate over resource extraction, suggesting a temporal variation in the contest over this subnational space. This study argues that parties fight over natural resources primarily when they expect that the conflict is about to end, as the importance of controlling them increases in the post-conflict setting. In contrast, belligerents that anticipate a long war have incentives to avoid fighting near natural resources since excessive violence will hurt the extraction, trade, and subsequent taxation that provide conflict actors with income from the resource. We test our argument using yearly and monthly grid-cell-level data on African civil conflicts for the period 1989–2008 and find support for our expected spatial variation. Using whether negotiations are underway as an indicator about warring parties’ expectations on conflict duration, we find that areas with natural resources in general experience less intense fighting than other areas, but during negotiations these very areas witness most of the violence. We further find that the spatial shift in violence occurs immediately when negotiations are opened. A series of difference-in-difference estimations show a visible shift of violence towards areas rich in natural resources in the first three months after parties have initiated talks. Our findings are relevant for scholarship on understanding and predicting the trajectories of micro-level civil conflict violence, and for policymakers seeking to prevent peace processes being derailed

A Comparative Analysis of Homegrown Terrorism

An investigation of parallels between homegrown, international, and domestic terrorism. A comparative method is used to analyze data from two main sources, ITERATE data on international and the TWEED data on domestic terrorism. The similarities are tested in various dimensions – target types, severity, and the method of the attacks. Homegrown terrorism is inherently motivated by domestic issues. Moreover, variables of ethnic heterogeneity, political inclusiveness of fringe groups, and problems in the democratization process are good predictors of the occurrence of other forms of domestic and homegrown terrorism alike. Number of observable cases of homegrown terrorism are low. The two main datasets have potentially overlapping incidents. Provides and operational definition of homegrown terrorism and test empirically the similarity between homegrown and other types of terrorisms

Homegrown terrorism: the known unknown

Homegrown terrorism has attracted significant attention following the 2004 Madrid and the 2005 London bombings. Homegrown terrorism is usually thought to be a new phenomenon, with few observed events, and inherently distinct from transnational terrorism or the old domestic terrorism in Europe. However, little research has so far examined the alleged distinctiveness of homegrown terrorism empirically. I argue that homegrown terrorism shares many similarities with domestic and international terrorism, suggesting that we can learn more about homegrown terrorism from studying these similarities rather than insisting on its inherent distinctiveness. I formulate these claims as testable hypotheses, which I examine using the ITERATE data on international and the TWEED on domestic terrorism, and compare these with information on homegrown terrorism. My findings suggest that homegrown terrorism follows the same logic of other types of domestic terrorisms, hence lessons can be learned through observations on domestic typologies. Homegrown terrorism is a separate strain of domestic terrorism due to ideological character of political Islam, yet, differing from international terrorism in targeting patterns. The implications of the study are that counterterrorism efforts for homegrown terrorism should resemble those of domestic terrorism rather than international terrorism

Making Peace or Preventing It? UN Peacekeeping, Terrorism, and Civil War Negotiations

Previous studies have highlighted that United Nations peacekeeping operations are effective at reducing violence during civil wars. But can these operations also change the incentives of the warring parties and lead them to pursue non-violent alternatives? This article provides the first direct test of UN peacekeeping troops’ effectiveness at inducing non-violent engagements, specifically negotiations during civil wars. Our analysis of disaggregated monthly data on peace operations, negotiations, and violence in African conflicts (1989-2009) reveals that sizable deployments of UN military troops, by themselves, are insufficient to foster negotiations, even when they reduce battlefield violence. Instead, the probability of negotiation instances is conditional on rebel tactics. We posit, when rebels engage in terrorism, peacekeeping troops can inadvertently alter the “power to hurt” of the belligerents in favor of rebel groups and create conditions conducive to negotiations. Our results have important implications for research on the effectiveness of both peacekeeping and terrorism and for policy-making

Civilian Self-Defense Militias in Civil War

To mitigate the costs associated with suppressing rebellion, states may rely on civilian self-defense militias to protect their territory from rebel groups. However, this decision is also costly, given that these self-defense groups may undermine control of its territory. This raises the question: why do governments cultivate self-defense militias when doing so risks that these militias will undermine their territorial control? Using a game theoretic model, we argue that states take this risk in order to prevent rebels from co-opting local populations, which in turn may shift power away from the government and toward the rebels. Governments strategically use civilian militias to raise the price rebels must pay for civilian cooperation, prevent rebels from harnessing a territory’s resources, and/or to deter rebels from challenging government control in key areas. Empirically, the model suggests states are likely to support the formation of self-defense militias in territory that may moderately improve the power of rebel groups, but not in areas that are either less valuable or areas that are critical to the government’s survival. These hypotheses are tested using data from the Colombian civil war from 1996 to 2008

Evidence-informed or value-based? Exploring the scrutiny of legislation in the UK Parliament

This article argues that three types of factor – process, subject and political circumstance – are likely to affect the extent to which claims of evidence are made during legislative scrutiny. It draws upon case studies of the National Minimum Wage Act 1998, the Academies Act 2010 and the Welfare Reform and Work Act 2016, utilising interviews with those involved and information from Hansard. The article concludes that these cases highlight that while there might be potential benefits from a yet more robust legislative scrutiny process, including greater use of pre-legislative scrutiny and the ability of public bill committees to take evidence from a wider range of witnesses and on all bills, subject and political factors would be likely to mean that the use of claims of evidence would continue to vary widely