The Dynamics of the Colombian Civil Conflict: A New Data Set

We present a detailed, high-frequency data set on the civil conflict in Colombia during the period 1988-2002. We briefly introduce the Colombian case and the methodological issues that hinder data collection in civil wars, before presenting the pattern over time of conflict actions and intensity for all sides involved in the confrontation. We also describe the pattern of victimisation by group and the victimisation of civilians out of clashes

Proposed Colombia Work

We are pursuing three distinct but closely related lines of work on conflict human rights and human security in Colombia: Database development, Trust builing and Analysis

The Dynamics of Repressive Dictatorships

We study the optimal strategy for a dictator hanging onto power by choosing how much repression to apply in every period. State variables are the amount of "hate" and "fear" in society which are both increasing in the amount of repression from the previous period. Hate, fear, and a random shock, determine the quantity of repression required for the dictator to survive period t. We show under certain conditions that in every period there are only two possible optimal choices: the minimal repression necessary to retain power ("No Demonstration") or the maximum possible repression ("Demonstration"). When Demonstration is optimal it will remain optimal after fear is reduced and when No Demonstration is optimal it will remain optimal when fear is increased

From old wars to new wars and global terrorism

Even before 9/11 there were claims that the nature of war had changed fundamentally. The 9/11 attacks created an urgent need to understand contemporary wars and their relationship to older conventional and terrorist wars, both of which exhibit remarkable regularities. The frequency-intensity distribution of fatalities in "old wars", 1816-1980, is a power-law with exponent 1.80. Global terrorist attacks, 1968-present, also follow a power-law with exponent 1.71 for G7 countries and 2.5 for non-G7 countries. Here we analyze two ongoing, high-profile wars on opposite sides of the globe - Colombia and Iraq. Our analysis uses our own unique dataset for killings and injuries in Colombia, plus publicly available data for civilians killed in Iraq. We show strong evidence for power-law behavior within each war. Despite substantial differences in contexts and data coverage, the power-law coefficients for both wars are tending toward 2.5, which is a value characteristic of non-G7 terrorism as opposed to old wars. We propose a plausible yet analytically-solvable model of modern insurgent warfare, which can explain these observations.Comment: For more information, please contact [email protected] or [email protected]

Human Rights Conditions on Foreign Aid can Backfire

A domestic power faces an enemy and commits terrorist atrocities to increase its likelihood of victory. A foreign patron can grant aid tothe power but prefers fewer or no atrocities. To avoid the need to compromise with the foreign patron, the domestic power may create (or stop supressing) independent paramilitaries that commit even more atrocities. Once "atrocity overshooting" is reached, the domestic power shifts gears and tries to restrict the atrocity level that paramilitaries are committing. Case studies of Colombia and Northern Ireland illustrate the model

Structural Uncertainty and Central Bank Conservatism: The Ignorant Should Shut Their Eyes

We study the problem of a central bank whose policy actions simultaneously affect the information flow about its expectations-augmented Phillips curve and its reputation for toughness in fighting inflation. In an environment with an unknown relationship between inflation surprises and output, big inflation surprises yield big short-term output gains and a strong information flow. Yet optimal policy is very conservative because inflation surprises yield information that increases the volatility of both future inflationary expectations and inflation itself. In fact, the more there is that can be learned about the Phillips curve the less does optimal policy aim towards learning

Sampling bias in systems with structural heterogeneity and limited internal diffusion

Complex systems research is becomingly increasingly data-driven, particularly in the social and biological domains. Many of the systems from which sample data are collected feature structural heterogeneity at the mesoscopic scale (i.e. communities) and limited inter-community diffusion. Here we show that the interplay between these two features can yield a significant bias in the global characteristics inferred from the data. We present a general framework to quantify this bias, and derive an explicit corrective factor for a wide class of systems. Applying our analysis to a recent high-profile survey of conflict mortality in Iraq suggests a significant overestimate of deaths