Does the sequence of land reform and political reform matter? Evidence from state-building in Afghanistan

Property insecurity is associated with terrorism, insurgency and economic underdevelopment. For this reason, land reform is often implemented alongside political reform in post-conflict settings. In contrast, this article argues that political reform should be sequenced prior to land reform during state-building. Evidence from Afghanistan shows how land redistribution, legal titling, decentralisation of state-owned land and provision of legal services to resolve land disputes are unlikely to alleviate political violence or facilitate economic development without establishing or substantially improving political capacity, political constraints and inclusive political institutions at the local level. These findings suggest the importance of sequence in the process of land reform and political reform. More generally, political reform is a prerequisite for land reform to reduce violence and improve development prospects in post-conflict settings.     

In the shadows of war and peace: making sense of violence after peace accords

This article addresses an urgent but largely sidelined issue in the study of peace processes: that high levels of violence—usually framed as ‘crime’—are often ubiquitous in societies experiencing peace processes, even after the signing of peace accords. From South Africa to El Salvador, Guatemala to Northern Ireland, rising interpersonal violence has come to characterise the ‘peace’. This violence often takes place in the context of ambitious post-conflict development efforts. The article argues that even the seemingly non-political violence after peace accords is intimately linked to war, as well as the peace process—in both the causes of violence and in the types of violence that perpetrators use. In order to conceptualise post-peace accord violence, the article presents a framework of violence based on the perpetrators of violence and the types of violence (social, economic or political) that occur. This unpacking of post-peace accord violence emphasises the interconnectedness of political and non-political violence, and stresses the importance of security for development.     

Ideological Motives in Spoiler Violence: Postconflict Assam,Northeast India

Spoilers of peace agreements are normally seen as motivated by utility maximization, their actions intended to gain a larger proportion of postconflict political power or economic wealth. In this article, I examine this perspective via a comparative analysis of two cases of spoiler violence in Assam, India, one involving a spoiler excluded from the agreement and the other a spoiler central to the peace process and the postconflict political and economic milieu. Both cases suggest that some spoiling action following peace agreements is less instrumental and driven more by emotional and ideological phenomena than this leading understanding suggests.     

Political settlements as a violent process: deconstructing the relationship between political settlements and intrinsic,instrumental and resultant forms of violence

Abstract

This article explores the opportunities and conundrums of understanding violence at critical junctures following ruptures in political orders through the prism of political settlements. While there is an emerging body of scholarship on political settlements, we specifically examine its relationship to violence, which we argue has been under-theorised. Through comparative country case studies (Bangladesh, Egypt, Kenya, Sierra Leone), we examine in a historicised manner how these types of settlements interact with various forms of violence at various scales. The article reconceptualises political settlements in relation to three forms of violence, intrinsic, instrumental and resultant, and shows how multi-scale dynamics and formal/informal interactions shape the violent nature of political settlements in different contexts.     

Safe Territories and Violent Political Organizations

This article assesses how the concept of safe territory can expand our understanding of the persistence of, and eventual disengagement from, violence by violent political organizations. The explanatory utility of this concept is demonstrated through an analysis of the cycles of political violence perpetrated by the Red Brigades in Italy and the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. This work offers two main illustrative hypotheses. First, the opportunities provided by safe territories are not necessarily conducive to the continuation of political violence, although they facilitate its persistence over a long period of time. Second, the presence of safe territories, regardless of the ideology of the violent political organization, tends to enforce disengagement from political violence at the group, rather than the individual, level. Finally, the analytical intent in introducing the concept of safe territory is to contribute to spatial understandings of political violence.     

Terrorist Assassination and Institutional Change in Repressive Regimes

ABSTRACT

Missing from the political violence literature is an in-depth and systematic examination of the effects of terrorist assassination on state political institutions in repressive regimes. By broadening the scope and depth of empirical research into terrorist assassinations, the potential exists to enhance our understanding of the outcomes of assassination by terrorist actors as well as our overall understanding of political violence in repressive regimes. Utilizing survival analysis and data from the Global Terrorism Database, the Polity IV Project, and the Political Terror Scale, this project focuses on the post-terrorist assassination institutional outcomes in repressive regimes. While the effects are long-term, the most repressive regimes are the most likely to experience political institutional shifts in the wake of terrorist assassinations. The direction of the institutional shifts is mixed, but results indicate that the level of state repression in existence prior to a terrorist assassination matters to post-terrorist assassination outcomes.     

Globalization and Political Violence, 1970–2008

The question of globalization's effect on social harmony continues to be fiercely debated. We use a comprehensive measure of globalization (the KOF index) designed to capture the intensity of connectivity among countries along economic, social, and political dimensions. Our results suggest that globalization, particularly economic and social globalization, predicts a lower risk of civil war and political repression, but economic globalization predicts lower repression even after unit heterogeneity is accounted. When country fixed effects are accounted, political globalization's effect is problematic for human rights, suggesting that politically influential states escape the constraining effects of globalization on political repression. Indeed, globalization generally shows up as more important than per capita income, a variable often found to be one of the most robust determinants of political violence. The results taken together support those who argue that increased globalization may enhance prospects for social progress, not social resistance and political violence as skeptics claim.     

Violence,politics and the state in Bangladesh

The politics and ideology of South Asia has been characterised by violence for a considerable time. Bangladesh is no exception, where violence is both widespread and multifaceted. It arises for political, economic, and socio-cultural reasons and is evidenced not only in the incidence of violence but also in the availability of small arms, in the evident political ties with violent organisations and criminal activities, in the prevalence of corruption and the effect which all this has on the forces of law and order. This poses enormous challenges for the state which urgently needs to introduce measures of reform in the judicial and police administration system. De-linking politics from the activities of criminals and terrorists is an important first step toward this goal.     

Leaders,Tenure, and the Politics of Sovereign Credit

Sovereign creditworthiness is as much a function of politics as economic fundamentals. Previous research has focused on the relationship between creditworthiness and political factors such as regime type, regional effects, and international organization membership. These factors, while important, often change slowly and do not always capture the more dynamic political determinants of creditworthiness. As an alternative, this study focuses on the role of leaders. We argue that leaders’ tenure reduces uncertainty in the sovereign credit market. Time in power allows leaders to better manage expectations related to sovereign credit policy of both domestic supporters and market actors. As a result, we expect that creditworthiness improves as a leader’s tenure increases. We find supporting evidence for our argument using two distinct empirical approaches: panel data analysis and a natural experiment. Our findings provide a better understanding of the relationship between leaders, politics, and sovereign credit.     

Youth employment and post-war development in Jaffna,northern Sri Lanka

Jaffna District in northern Sri Lanka has recently emerged from three decades of violence and isolation, leading to a diverse array of political, social and economic issues. This article critically analyses the links between youth employment and the post-war reconstruction and development of this region. Unemployment among youth is regarded as a potential threat to the stability of the country during the post-war period, and it is argued that only through the active engagement of Sri Lanka’s youth population can the threat of a resurgence in violence be fully eliminated. The article, which is based on recent field research, examines the extent of youth unemployment within Jaffna District, and considers how government, non-government and community-based actors are working together to solve related problems.     

War, Economic Development, and Political Development in the Contemporary International System

The European state-building experience has led many scholars to argue that war forces states to increase their fiscal-administrative capacity, or what we might refer to as political development, in order to compete in the international system. War also requires states to generate wealth to support such competition, which should lead to progressively increased levels of economic development. Yet, in contemporary empirical studies, war is often studied as a dependent variable, with economic and political development modeled as affecting its origination. This reading of theory and empirical work suggests that war, economic development, and political development constitute an endogenous system. In this paper, we develop expectations about how these three processes interact and test them using a three-stage least squares regression model. The results show significant simultaneous relationships between the three processes. We conclude that war, economic development, and political development are mutually constitutive processes in the contemporary international system.     

Bosnia on the Border? Republican Violence in Northern Ireland During the 1920s and 1970s

Unionist politicians have argued that Republican political violence on the Irish border, during both the partition of Ireland and more recent Northern Ireland conflict, constituted ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Protestant/Unionist community in those areas. These views have been bolstered by an increasingly ambivalent scholarly literature that has failed to adequately question the accuracy of these claims. This article interrogates the ethnic cleansing/genocide narrative by analysing Republican violence during the 1920s and the 1970s. Drawing from a wide range of theoretical literature and archival sources, it demonstrates that Republican violence fell far short of either ethnic cleansing or genocide, (in part) as a result of the perpetrators’ self-imposed ideological constraints. It also defines a new interpretive concept for the study of violence: functional sectarianism. This concept is designed to move scholarly discussion of political and sectarian violence beyond the highly politicised and moral cul-de-sacs that have heretofore characterised the debate, and has implications for our understanding of political violence beyond Ireland.     

Revenge and reprisal violence in Kosovo

One of the most often reported but under-studied phenomenon in post-conflict states is that of revenge violence. While such violence is widely acknowledged to occur after wars, it is often dismissed as epiphenomenal to the central problem of restoring order and good governance in the state. This paper seeks to refocus attention on this phenomenon and challenge the way that it is normally portrayed as a normal, almost incidental consequence of armed conflict. It develops an ideal-type distinction between revenge violence and its strategic mirror, reprisal violence. While revenge violence is premised on a judgement of individual responsibility for a prior act of harm, reprisal violence is driven by an assumption of collective guilt. This paper argues that these two types of violent activity—one expressive and the other strategic—are often intermixed in post-conflict states. Moreover, the interplay between them provides political cover for those who would employ violence to achieve strategic or political goals, while lowering the risks involved when doing so by attributing it to revenge for wartime atrocities. In effect, the fact that revenge and reprisal violence are mirror images of one another can serve to explain and subtly justify the use of organised violence against disadvantaged groups in post-conflict states. This paper examines the validity of this heuristic distinction through a within-case analysis of violence in Kosovo from 1999 to 2001 and identifies the policy consequences of this distinction.     

Evidence-Informed Prevention of Civil Wars and Mass Atrocities

Abstract

The prevention discourse in all its forms has tended to ignore or at least downplay the epistemic problems with prevention. Forecasting political violence is not as easy as the debate on early warning often assumes. Effectively forestalling political violence and mass atrocities is much more difficult than the often used rhetoric of a ‘tool box’ implies, which creates the impression that one knows what works. An evidence-informed prevention policy needs to be aware of the limits of our knowledge, but at the same time knowledgeable of what social science research can provide – even if the results are provisional, often controversial and fraught with methodological problems.     

Too many enemies: Mobilization,marginalization, and political violence

Over the past decades, a pattern has emerged across the Islamic world of secular actors struggling to build sustainable social movements while Islamists show a higher success rate in doing so—a dynamic often accompanied by high levels of violence and little space for dialogue between actors from across the political spectrum. In this article, we illustrate the utility of social movement theory (SMT) in explaining the ability of some movements to mobilize en masse, while others become marginalized. Furthermore, we suggest that SMT is useful in understanding the processes that produce socio-political dynamics conducive to violent rather than non-violent tactics. Through a case study of Bangladesh, where in 2013 the secular Shahbag mobilization was derailed by a massive Islamist counter-mobilization, this article shows how movements not only capitalize on, but actually contribute to, shifts in cultural discourse through political maneuvering and long-term socialization. By anchoring their ideology in pre-existing religio-cultural imagery, Islamists have been successful in casting themselves as “authentic” defenders of Islam and their secular opponents as “atheists.” In such a socio-political context, the space for dialogue among the various political actors is severely limited and the impetus to employ violent tactics strong.     

Ethnic Elites and Rituals of Provocation: Politicians,Pastors, and Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT

Prominent theories of ethnic conflict argue that instrumental ethnic elites incite violence in order to promote their own power. Yet this approach focuses primarily on political leaders and ignores other ethnic elites, meaning that we know little about how other influential actors think about provocation. In this paper, I present novel data from Northern Ireland on diverse elite attitudes toward polarising Protestant parades with a long history of sparking ethnic violence. Using original surveys of Protestant elected officials and clergy as well as interviews with ex-paramilitaries, this paper demonstrates that these elite groups have different, often competing, interests and opinions regarding contested parades: while politicians tend to support provocative parades, the others do not. By addressing elite actors that are often ignored, I present a more nuanced picture of elite-mass relations and ethnic mobilisation in conflict.     

Global Credit Markets,Political Violence,and Politically Sustainable Risk Premia

How do international financial conditions affect civil unrest? Existing studies examine the domestic economic roots of political violence but say little about the role of external financial conditions. We explore the interactions between international lending, government policy, and domestic unrest. In particular, we note that because of sovereign risk and defensive lending dynamics, credit ratings and interest rate premia are endogenous to expectations about civil violence. We test these claims using instrumental variables techniques and daily data on sovereign bond yield spreads, credit ratings, and episodes of civil violence in 59 developing countries from 1990 through 2004. After correcting for endogeneity, we find that exogenous increases in the price of foreign capital are robustly associated with increased odds of civil conflict. Primary commodity dependence, low economic growth, and poverty can also increase the odds of civil conflict by reducing access to foreign capital.     

Peace-building and the predatory political economy of insecurity: evidence from Cambodia,East Timor and Afghanistan

International peace-building interventions in post-conflict countries are intended to transform the socio-political context that led to violence and thereby build a stable and lasting peace. Yet the UN's transitional governance approach to peace-building is ill-suited to the challenge of dealing with the predatory political economy of insecurity that often emerges in post-conflict societies. Evidence from peace-building attempts in Cambodia, East Timor and Afghanistan illustrates that the political economy incentives facing domestic elites in an environment of low credibility and weak institutionalisation lead to a cycle of patronage generation and distribution that undermine legitimate and effective governance. As a result, post-conflict countries are left vulnerable to renewed conflict and persistent insecurity. International interventions can only craft lasting peace by understanding the political economy of conflict persistence and the potential policy levers for altering, rather than perpetuating, those dynamics.     

Displaced children's participation in political violence: Towards greater understanding of mobilisation

Within the burgeoning literature, children's participation in political violence is overwhelmingly considered in terms of coercion. Displacement camps are seen as locations in which the young are particularly vulnerable to the predations of recruiters. This article questions assumptions of incompetence that underwrite much of the discourse on child recruitment. As I argue, the experience of growing up in situations where profoundly asymmetrical power relations give rise to systematic oppression may lead to the early development of ‘political’ understanding. Three specific dimensions of displaced children's experience that may account for their engagement in political violence are discussed: life in the socio-historical space of a displacement camp; frustrated transition to adult status; the embeddedness of ‘politics’ within everyday life. Discussion draws particularly on fieldwork amongst young Palestinian refugees. In conclusion, I argue that curtailing children's involvement in political violence may require consideration of this phenomenon far less through the lens of humanitarian policy, as is the tendency at present, and far more in relation to the political-economic processes that shape and constrain the lives of young displacees.