Born Weak, Growing Strong: Anti-Government Protests as a Signal of Rebel Strength in the Context of Civil Wars

All rebel organizations start weak, but how do they grow and achieve favorable conflict outcomes? We present a theoretical model that allows for rebel organizations to gain support beyond their "core" and build their bargaining power during fighting. We highlight that rebel organizations need to win over crucial parts of society to generate the necessary support that allows them to attain favorable civil conflict outcomes. We find empirical support for the argument that low-income individuals who initially fight the government (rebel organizations) have to convince middle-class individuals to turn out against the government to gain government concessions. Empirically, we demonstrate that government concessions in the form of peace agreements and the onset of negotiations become more likely when protest occurs in the context of civil conflicts

Firewall? or Wall on Fire? A Unified Framework of Conflict Contagion and the Role of Ethnic Exclusion

While some borders are real firewalls against conflicts, others appear like tinder just waiting for the smallest spark. Only recently has research focused on the transnational perspective of conflict and current research has focused mostly on isolated aspects of this phenomenon. In this article, we provide a unified framework for conflict contagion that takes into account receiver, sender, dyad, and network effects. This is a novel perspective on conflict contagion, and our empirical results suggest that distinguishing between sender and receiver effects allows for a better understanding of spillover effects. We provide insights that especially excluded ethnic groups impact the risk of countries sending and receiving conflicts from its neighbors

Introduction: Forecasting in peace research

Prediction and forecasting have now fully reached peace and conflict research. We define forecasting as predictions about unrealized outcomes given model estimates from realized data, and predictions more generally as the assignment of probability distributions to realized or unrealized outcomes. Increasingly, scholars present within- and out-of-sample prediction results in their publications and sometimes even forecasts for unrealized, future outcomes. The articles in this special issue demonstrate the ability of current approaches to forecast events of interest and contributes to the formulation of best practices for forecasting within peace research. We highlight the role of forecasting for theory evaluation and as a bridge between academics and policymakers, summarize the contributions in the special issue, and provide some thoughts on how research on forecasting in peace research should proceed. We suggest some best practices, noting the importance of theory development, interpretability of models, replicability of results, and data collection

Splitting It Up: The spduration Split-Population Duration Regression Package for Time-Varying Covariates

We present an implementation of split-population duration regression in the spduration (Beger et al., 2017) package for R that allows for time-varying covariates. The statistical model accounts for units that are immune to a certain outcome and are not part of the duration process the researcher is primarily interested in. We provide insights for when immune units exist, that can significantly increase the predictive performance compared to standard duration models. The package includes estimation and several post-estimation methods for split-populationWeibull and log-logistic models. We provide an empirical application to data on military coups

International dimensions of internal conflict

Civil wars are by definition violent conflicts between a state and some form of non-state actors (Sambanis 2004b). Perhaps not surprisingly, most scholars have looked for features within countries to account for why such conflicts break out and how they evolve (Blattman and Miguel 2010). However, it is misleading to simply equate civil wars with domestic conflict and look exclusively within countries to understand civil war. Transnational factors can play an important role for the initial outbreak of civil wars and the escalation and dynamics of conflict once underway. But transnational factors also can contribute to the resolution and mitigation of such conflicts. Indeed, since civil conflicts are not necessarily limited to an individual state and often involve participation by other states in various forms, a strict dichotomy between civil and inter-state wars is often untenable and inappropriate. Failing to theoretically and empirically account for the transnational dimension of civil wars is likely to lead to biased conclusions about the onset, duration and intensity of such conflicts. Moreover, many policy prescriptions based exclusively on a domestic understanding of civil war can be highly misleading and potentially counterproductive