Predicting the decline of ethnic civil war: Was gurr right and for the right reasons?

© The Author(s) 2017. Many scholars have detected a decrease of political violence, but the causes of this decline remain unclear. As a contribution to this debate, we revisit the controversy over trends in conflict after the end of the Cold War. While many made ominous predictions of surging ethnic warfare, Gurr presented evidence of a pacifying trend since the mid-1990s and predicted a further decline in ethnic conflict in an article on ‘the waning of ethnic war’. Leveraging more recent data on ethnic groups and their participation in ethnic civil wars, this study evaluates if Gurr was right about the decline of ethnic conflict, and if he was right for the right reasons. We assess whether an increase in governments’ accommodative policies toward ethnic groups can plausibly account for a decline in ethnic civil war. Our findings lend considerable support to an account of the pacifying trend that stresses the granting of group rights, regional autonomy, and inclusion in power-sharing, as well as democratization and peacekeeping

Political hierarchies and landscapes of conflict across Africa

Almost all African states experience substantial and widespread political insecurity in a variety of forms. This analysis explains how relationships between groups and governments create incentives and disincentives for distinct forms of political violence to emerge. It argues that ethno-regional communities across Africa are situated within a power hierarchy that determines their relative importance to, and inclusion in, regimes. A dynamic power landscape emerges from relative group positions. Various positions within a hierarchy are associated with particular dominant forms of organized political violence as groups challenge political elites, but are bounded by their goals and characteristics. A failure to consider the political hierarchies and landscapes operating within African states has led to an under specification of the causal mechanisms driving different forms of violence, and an overstatement of benefits from declining civil war rates and inclusive governing coalitions

Polarization of coalitions in an agent-based model of political discourse

Political discourse is the verbal interaction between political actors in a policy domain. This article explains the formation of polarized advocacy or discourse coalitions in this complex phenomenon by presenting a dynamic, stochastic, and discrete agent-based model based on graph theory and local optimization. In a series of thought experiments, actors compute their utility of contributing a specific statement to the discourse by following ideological criteria, preferential attachment, agenda-setting strategies, governmental coherence, or other mechanisms. The evolving macro-level discourse is represented as a dynamic network and evaluated against arguments from the literature on the policy process. A simple combination of four theoretical mechanisms is already able to produce artificial policy debates with theoretically plausible properties. Any sufficiently realistic configuration must entail innovative and path-dependent elements as well as a blend of exogenous preferences and endogenous opinion formation mechanisms

The developmental dynamics of terrorist organizations

We identify robust statistical patterns in the frequency and severity of violent attacks by terrorist organizations as they grow and age. Using group-level static and dynamic analyses of terrorist events worldwide from 1968-2008 and a simulation model of organizational dynamics, we show that the production of violent events tends to accelerate with increasing size and experience. This coupling of frequency, experience and size arises from a fundamental positive feedback loop in which attacks lead to growth which leads to increased production of new attacks. In contrast, event severity is independent of both size and experience. Thus larger, more experienced organizations are more deadly because they attack more frequently, not because their attacks are more deadly, and large events are equally likely to come from large and small organizations. These results hold across political ideologies and time, suggesting that the frequency and severity of terrorism may be constrained by fundamental processes.Comment: 28 pages, 8 figures, 4 tables, supplementary materia

Mathematical model of the dynamics of psychotherapy

The success of psychotherapy depends on the nature of the therapeutic relationship between a therapist and a client. We use dynamical systems theory to model the dynamics of the emotional interaction between a therapist and client. We determine how the therapeutic endpoint and the dynamics of getting there depend on the parameters of the model. Previously Gottman et al. used a very similar approach (physical-sciences paradigm) for modeling and making predictions about husband–wife relationships. Given that this novel approach shed light on the dyadic interaction between couples, we have applied it to the study of the relationship between therapist and client. The results of our computations provide a new perspective on the therapeutic relationship and a number of useful insights. Our goal is to create a model that is capable of making solid predictions about the dynamics of psychotherapy with the ultimate intention of using it to better train therapists

A Tale of Two Governments? Government Responses and Perceived Influence in the 2014 Protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina

© The Author(s) (2018). Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) experienced an unprecedented wave of non-sectarian anti-government protests in 2014. Although the key motivating factors generally highlighted such as economic marginalization and poor governance were common throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina, the protests did not extend to all parts of the country. Notably, despite very similar initial conditions in the two jurisdictions of the country, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FBiH) saw major unrest with a large number of participants in many locations while subsequent protest mobilization was much more limited in the Republic of Srpska (RS). We take advantage of the variation in the responses from the two governments in the same country to evaluate how observed and anticipated government responses can shape the willingness to join dissident activity. We argue that variation in government responses and its impact on perceptions on prospects for successful collective action can help account for the differences in mobilization across the two entities. We test our expectations using a new data set on protest events, participants and government responses in BiH from January to April 2014. Our findings are consistent with the argument that coherent repressive government policies tend to suppress mobilization, while mixes of repressive responses and concessions from the government can encourage further mobilization. The results for FBiH show clear variation in protest following changes in government behavior, and are consistent the claim that repressive responses likely suppressed mobilization in the RS.European Research Council and the Research Council of Norwa

Unsettling the peace? The role of illicit economies in peace processes

The long-term legacies of civil war economies—often characterized by widespread illicit economic activities and the proliferation of criminal and quasi-criminal networks—pose significant challenges to achieving sustainable postwar settlements. This essay surveys predominant strategies to address war economies in peace processes for countries emerging from war. I identify three prevailing approaches—criminalization, co-option, and neglect—and discuss trade-offs associated with each. While there is no clear consensus on which approach is most likely to succeed and most countries will require a balanced combination of all three, it is increasingly clear that peace agreements that fail to sufficiently incorporate the perspectives of communities dependent on illicit economies and to account for how illicit economies shape national and subnational political settlements are more likely to produce unstable postwar regimes in the medium to long-run. I conclude with some reflections on future research agendas and potential policy implications that merit further exploration

Casualties distribution in human and natural hazards

Catastrophic events, such as wars and terrorist attacks, big tornadoes and hurricanes, huge earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, and landslides, are always accompanied by a large number of casualties. The size distribution of these casualties have separately been shown to follow approximate power law (PL) distributions. In this paper, we analyze the number of victims of catastrophic phenomena, in particular, terrorism, and find double PL behavior. This means that the data set is better approximated by two PLs instead of one. We have plotted the two PL parameters corresponding to all terrorist events occurred in every year, from 1980 to 2010. We observe an interesting pattern in the chart, where the lines, that connect each pair of points defining the double PLs, are roughly aligned to each other