On the incentives of violence: Greed and pride in Sri Lanka's civil war

This paper revisits the rationalist conceptions of warlordism in civil wars, which has amounted to the greed hypothesis as opposed to grievance. This argument states that rebels are not motivated to generate public goods-the betterment of society-but seek private gain. While initial studies focused on explaining why civil war breaks out in the first instance, there is now increasing interest in modelling violence and warlordism in an ongoing civil war. In this paper, a contextual model is suggested to explain the dynamics of violence in the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict. We conceptualize a game theoretical model, which distinguishes extrinsic C greed') and intrinsic motivations ('pride'). We utilize narratives from the civil war of Sri Lanka and model a game that involves two layers of actors: combatants (rebels and army) and civilians (farmers of different ethnicities). In order to understand the causal linkages between greed, pride and grievance, we analyze local conflicts over resources situated in the civil war zones and ask how these localized conflicts are intertwined with the broader political struggles

Peasants and plantations in the Sri Lankan tea sector: causes of the change in their relative viability *

In contrast to the increasing trend in farm size found in most agricultural sectors, the absolute number of producers and relative share of total production from small farms growing green leaf tea in Sri Lanka have increased significantly over time. The boom in peasant production and the corresponding decline in plantations are due to the same general drivers explaining the increase in farm size elsewhere. Government programs and price effects that reduced revenue uncertainty and relative costs of production have enhanced the competitive position of small farmers relative to large estates. Copyright 2007 The Authors Journal compilation 2007 Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society Inc. and Blackwell Publishing Ltd .

Characterization of the LIGO detectors during their sixth science run

In 2009-2010, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) operated together with international partners Virgo and GEO600 as a network to search for gravitational waves (GWs) of astrophysical origin. The sensitivity of these detectors was limited by a combination of noise sources inherent to the instrumental design and its environment, often localized in time or frequency, that couple into the GW readout. Here we review the performance of the LIGO instruments during this epoch, the work done to characterize the detectors and their data, and the effect that transient and continuous noise artefacts have on the sensitivity of LIGO to a variety of astrophysical sources