International System and Technologies of Rebellion: How the End of the Cold War Shaped Internal Conflict

15 páginas, 3 figuras, 3 tablas.Recent research on civil wars finds that the end of the Cold War had no impact on internal conflict. By disaggregating civil wars on the basis of the ways in which civil wars are fought (the technology of rebellion: irregular, conventional, and symmetric non-conventional), we reach a different conclusion: we identify a massive decline of irregular wars or insurgencies following the end of the Cold War, something that amounts to a radical transformation of civil war. This decline is striking and very robust to multivariate analysis. Our theoretical account highlights the effect of shifting superpower support for both states and rebels on the residual capacity of states; it brings the international system into the study of internal conflict, underscores the relevance of warfare for the study of civil wars, and demonstrates that rather than being a universal technology of rebellion, the predominance of insurgency is a historically contingent political phenomenon linked to the structural dynamics of the Cold War

A Loss of Purpose? Sartori and the Current State of Political Science

This article revisits Giovanni Sartori's seminal critique of political science, examining its relevance in the contemporary context. It acknowledges the significant advancements in political science since the early 1990s, particularly in the sophistication of concepts, methods, and data and questions the idea that social sciences can match the 'hard' sciences. Sartori's four identified errors — parochialism, misclassification, degreeism, and conceptual stretching — are critically engaged with, providing a nuanced assessment of their persistence and evolution over time. The article, originally conceived as a lecture for the Annual Congress of the Società Italiana di Scienza Politica, adopts an autobiographical perspective to extend Sartori's critique to broader contemporary issues in political science, advocating for a more constructive approach in addressing these enduring challenges

State-building, war and violence : evidence from Latin America

In European history, war has played a major role in state‐building and the state monopoly on violence. But war is a very specific form of organized political violence, and it is decreasing on a global scale. Other patterns of armed violence now dominate, ones that seem to undermine state‐building, thus preventing the replication of European experiences. As a consequence, the main focus of the current state‐building debate is on fragility and a lack of violence control inside these states. Evidence from Latin American history shows that the specific patterns of the termination of both war and violence are more important than the specific patterns of their organization. Hence these patterns can be conceptualized as a critical juncture for state‐building. While military victories in war, the subordination of competing armed actors and the prosecution of perpetrators are conducive for state‐building, negotiated settlements, coexistence, and impunity produce instability due to competing patterns of authority, legitimacy, and social cohesion