The War on Terror

Presents comments (from the EPIIC Symposium at Tufts University, February 2004) concerning the war on terror; concern on the problem about terrorism; elaboration on the claim that the world is not in a global war on terror; and problems of the use and abuse of the word terrorism

The Patterns of Ethnic Settlement and Violence. A Local-Level Quantitative Analysis of the Bosnian War

International audienceThe debate on the link between ethnicity and violence has been raging in the political science literature focusing on the causes and dynamics of the 'new wars' emerging after the end of the Cold War. Often, cross-country quantitative studies dismissed the importance of ethnic heterogeneity as a source of violent conflict. How the patterns of ethnic settlement within a country affect the severity of violence, though, has not yet been studied through similar techniques. In this essay, we build and analyze a dataset of major violence-related variables collected at the local level during the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia-Herzegovina. What emerges is that the local distribution of the population, in terms of the number and relative size of the groups, in more than a hundred municipalities is a key factor in explaining the intensity of violence