Gender Equality and State Aggression: The Impact of Domestic Gender Equality on State First Use of Force

I examine the role of domestic gender equality in predicting whether or not a state is more aggressive in international disputes. This research adds to a growing body of feminist research in international relations, which demonstrates that states with higher levels of gender equality exhibit lower levels of violence during international disputes and during international crises. Many scholars have argued that a domestic environment of inequality and violence results in a greater likelihood of state use of violence internationally. This argument is most fully developed within feminist literature; however, research in the field of ethno-nationalism has also highlighted the negative impact of domestic discrimination and violence on state behavior at the international level. Using the MID data set and new data on first use of force, I test, using logistic regression, whether states with higher levels of gender equality are less likely to be aggressive when involved in international disputes, controlling for other possible causes of state use of force. Beyond this project's contribution to the conflict literature, this research expands feminist theory by further incorporating it into traditional international relations theory to deepen our understanding of the impact of domestic gender equality on state behavior internationally.     

Religion and Conflict: Explaining the Puzzling Case of “Islamic Violence”

Despite considerable interest in the relationship between Islam and political violence, there is little systematic empirical research that explores the intrastate conflict proneness of Muslim countries, and existing studies provide mixed results. This article examines the causal factors that explain the prevalence of intrastate conflict in Muslim-plurality states and the conditions under which Islam may influence civil war onset. Further, following Ward, Greenhill, and Bakke’s (2010) suggestion, the effects of Islam and other socioeconomic and political factors in actually predicting civil wars are examined by utilizing ROC curves and cross-validation exercises. Utilizing the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s data for the 1981–2009 period, the findings indicate that Muslim-plurality countries are indeed disproportionately involved in intrastate conflicts, but these countries are also characterized by lower GDP per capita, oil dependency, state repression, autocracy, and youth bulges, all of which correlate strongly with intrastate conflict onset. The significance of Islam disappears when controls for such factors are included in the statistical model. The variable of Islam does not make any significant contribution to either the in-sample or out-of-sample predictive power of models. Among the factors that increase the risk of intrastate conflict, the presence of a youth bulge has the greatest impact in Muslim-plurality countries.     

Civil war mediation and integration into global value chains

How does the globalization of production affect interstate behavior? While scholars have paid significant attention to the effect of global value chains on trade and political economy, there has been substantially less focus on the interaction between globalized production and conflict behavior. However, the changing economic landscape has the potential to alter the decision calculus of leaders on a variety of issues, including conflict mediation. In this research note, I argue that when deciding how to allocate scarce mediation resources, major powers pay attention to the position of potential beneficiaries in the global production network. In particular, among states involved in intrastate conflicts, those that are more heavily involved in the production and sale of intermediate inputs are more likely to receive mediation from major powers. I test this argument using data on intermediate trade and civil war mediation between 1991 and 2011. The results of the analysis are consistent with the theory, suggesting that major powers are more likely to provide mediation for producers of intermediate goods, but not for consumers.     

Microlevel Dynamics of Violence: Explaining Variation in Violence among Rural Districts during Northern Ireland's Troubles

Violence varies in intensity across intrastate political conflicts. This study suggests that interactions between local state agents and nonstate radicals affect the intensity of violence. When contention develops in a community and nonstate actors radicalize, whether or not some local state agents deviate from their institutional role as providers of law and order to support radicals is a crucial feature that explains how some communities experience more violence than others. This argument explains the different trajectories of violence in two neighboring rural districts during the 1971–76 period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The major implication of the study is that these interactions affect not only the intensity of violence in particular communities but also the breadth, length, and end of violence in the overall intrastate conflict.     

Gender Equality and Intrastate Armed Conflict

In this article, I examine to what extent gender equality is associated with lower levels of intrastate armed conflict. I use three measures of gender equality: (1) a dichotomous indicator of whether the highest leader of a state is a woman; (2) the percentage of women in parliament; and (3) the female-to-male higher education attainment ratio. I argue that the first two measures in particular capture the extent to which women hold positions that allow them to influence matters of war and peace within a state. I further argue that all three measures, but especially the last two, capture how women are valued relative to men in a society, that is, the relative degree of subordination of women. Whereas female state leadership has no statistically significant effect, more equal societies, measured either in terms of female representation in parliament or the ratio of female-to-male higher education attainment, are associated with lower levels of intrastate armed conflict. The pacifying impact of gender equality is not only statistically significant in the presence of a comprehensive set of controls but also is strong in substantive terms.     

Domestic politics and interstate disputes: Examining US mid involvement and reciprocation, 1870–1992

Increasingly scholars have become interested in conflict behavior that falls short of war. Chan (1997), for example, has insisted that a concern for less intense engagements is crucial for fully understanding the conflict‐proneness of different regimes. Chan (1997) furthermore noted that scholars have generally failed to account for whether a state was the initiator or target of a dispute. Such a distinction, however, is crucial for discriminating the pacific effects of democratic culture and institutions. In this paper, I investigate the domestic determinants of US MID involvement and reciprocation from 1870 to 1992. I find that politics does not stop at the water's edge. Unlike Gowa (1998) who found no relationship between the use of force and dissatisfaction with the status quo, I uncover an association between US domestic conditions and whether the US was an initiator or target of a MID. Not only is the US more likely to be targeted during periods of domestic political weakness, but Democratic administrations also appear to be challenged to a greater extent than their Republican counterparts. Furthermore, when targeted, the US is much more likely to reciprocate when the initiating state is a non‐democracy suggesting that regime type continues to play an important role in conflict propensity even after a demand has been made.     

The Homegrown Threat: State Strength,Grievance, and Domestic Terrorism

Scholars maintain that, similar to insurgency, terrorist violence is precipitated by both relative deprivation and state weakness. Yet aggrieved minority groups within a country should turn to terrorism when they are weak relative to the state rather than strong. Empirical evidence shows minority group discrimination and fragile political institutions to independently increase domestic terror attacks. But it remains unclear whether grievances drive domestic terrorism in both strong and weak states. Using data from 172 countries between 1998 and 2007, we find that for strong states the presence of minority discrimination leads to increased domestic terrorism, while for weak states the presence of minority discrimination actually leads to less domestic terrorism. Consequently, increasing state capacity may not be a panacea for antistate violence, as nonstate actors may simply change their strategy from insurgency or guerrilla warfare to terrorism. Efforts to reduce terrorist violence must focus on reducing grievance by eliminating discriminatory policies at the same time that measures to improve state capacity are enacted.     

Fuel to the Fire: Natural Disasters and the Duration of Civil Conflict

Do natural disasters prolong civil conflict? Or are disasters more likely to encourage peace as hostilities diminish when confronting shared hardship or as shifts in the balance of power between insurgents and the state hasten cessation? To address these questions, this study performs an event history analysis of disasters’ impact on the duration of 224 armed intrastate conflicts occurring in 86 states between 1946 and 2005. I contend that natural disasters increase conflict duration by decreasing the state’s capacity to suppress insurgency, while reinforcing insurgent groups’ ability to evade capture and avoid defeat. First, disasters’ economic impact coupled with state financial outlays for disaster relief and reconstruction, reduce resources available for counterinsurgency and nation building in conflict zones. Second, the military’s role in administering humanitarian assistance can reduce the availability of troops and military hardware for counterinsurgency, prompt temporary ceasefires with insurgents, or both. Third, natural disasters can cause infrastructural damages that disproportionately hinder the state’s capacity to execute counterinsurgency missions, thereby making insurgent forces more difficult to capture and overcome. The combination of these dynamics should encourage longer conflicts in states with higher incidence of disaster. Empirical evidence strongly supports this contention, indicating that states with greater disaster vulnerability fight longer wars.     

Illiberal democracy and violent conflict in contemporary Indonesia

When Indonesia's President Suharto was forced to resign in 1998, the accompanying uncertainty triggered serious communal violence in five regions. As the nation's politics and economy stabilized from 2002, so did those provinces. Identity-based conflict is now the rare exception rather than the rule in democratic Indonesia. Yet puzzlingly, despite the consolidation of democracy, ethnic clashes and mob violence against religious minorities continue to occur. While such events are now far smaller than those in the first years of democratization and occur only occasionally, their persistence requires analysis given the potential for escalation and what it tells us about Indonesia's reform process. In this article I compare recent incidents with that of the initial post-authoritarian era, and find that identity-based collective violence persists because many important causes of conflict have not been removed by democratic consolidation. As found by numerous scholars, many illiberal characteristics of the authoritarian state have segued neatly into democratic Indonesia. I assert that this has left several main causes of group violence firmly in place. I further contend that the failure to remove these phenomena partly has its origins in the order of democratic reforms chosen in the years after Suharto's resignation.     

Discrimination and ethnic conflict: a dyadic analysis of politically-excluded groups in sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT

The literature on political exclusion and conflict tends to treat grievance-based mechanisms with broad-brush strokes and does not differentiate between types of political exclusion. This study disaggregates politically-excluded groups into two subgroups: groups that experience political discrimination from the state, and groups without political power that are not explicitly discriminated against. We posit that discriminated groups are more likely to experience grievances and therefore are more prone to conflict than excluded groups that are not actively discriminated against. We further posit that the effect of discrimination on conflict is moderated by interactions with economic inequalities and the share of elites. Using dyadic data for 155 ethnic groups in 28 Sub-Saharan African countries, we find that among politically-excluded groups it is indeed discriminated groups that are responsible for most of the association between political exclusion and conflict. Groups that face active, intentional, and targeted discrimination by the state are significantly more likely to be involved in conflict than excluded groups who do not face this explicit form of discrimination. Additionally, we find that discriminated groups who also experience economic inequalities are less likely to engage in conflict, whilst an increased presence of elites within discriminated groups can precipitate the chances of conflict.     

Oil,Natural Gas,and Intrastate Conflict: Does Ownership Matter?

The impact of natural resources on intrastate violence has been increasingly analyzed in the peace and conflict literature. Surprisingly, little quantitative evidence has been gathered on the effects of the resource-ownership structure on internal violence. This article uses a novel data set on oil and natural gas property rights, covering 40 countries during the period 1989–2010. The results of regression analyses employing logit models reveal that the curvilinear effect between hydrocarbon production and civil conflict onset—often found in previous studies—only applies to countries in which oil and gas is extracted by state-owned companies. The findings suggest that only state-controlled hydrocarbon production might entail peace-buying mechanisms such as specific clientelistic practices, patronage networks, welfare policies, and/or coercion. At the same time, it seems that greed and grievance are more pronounced whenever resources lie in the hands of the state. Exploring the within-country variation, further analyses reveal that divergent welfare spending patterns are likely to be one causal channel driving the relationship between resource ownership and internal violence.     

Deciding to Intervene: An Analysis of International and Domestic Influences on United States Interventions in Intrastate Disputes

Although the United States has been the most prolific intervener in the international system since the end of World War II, there has been little consensus among scholars regarding the motivations of U.S. interventions in domestic political disputes abroad. In addition, scholars do not agree on the relative effects of international factors and domestic factors on intervention decisions by the U.S. Previous research on the motivations of U.S. interventions has occurred within at least two distinctive “streams” of literature: (1) studies of state interventions; and (2) studies of the use of military force by the U.S. Hypotheses regarding U.S. interventions in intrastate disputes are derived from the previous literature, and the hypotheses are tested using recently-compiled data on intrastate disputes and U.S. interventions in intrastate disputes occurring between 1945 and 2002. The results suggest a combination of international factors, including geographic proximity and ideological linkage, significantly influence the decisions of the U.S. to intervene in intrastate disputes. The results also suggest international factors are generally more important than domestic factors, and the effects of both domestic factors and international factors on U.S. intervention decisions may differ depending on the specific type of intervention and the time period.     

Willingness and Opportunity: A Study of Domestic Terrorism in Post-Cold War South Asia

Domestic terrorism, as a form of intrastate violence, has varied widely in South Asia along with the post-Cold War period of global economic integration and political openness. How are these two phenomena—economic integration and emergence of democracies—related to domestic terrorism in South Asia? I argue that resorting to terrorism is a rational choice when individuals'/groups' cost of heterogeneity—deprivation from public goods due to geographical and ideological distance—increases; opportunity is provided by democratization and integration into the global economy. The testable hypotheses derived from the theory are empirically tested on a dataset of five South Asian countries for the time period between 1990 and 2007. The results show that both minority discrimination and presence of unconsolidated democratic institutions increase terrorism in the highly heterogeneous South Asian countries. International trade in the presence of minority discrimination increases homegrown terrorism, but foreign direct investment neither increases nor decreases such incidents.     

Fighting for a name on the ballot: constituency-level analysis of nomination violence in Zambia

ABSTRACT

What factors increase the likelihood of nomination violence? Nomination violence can be an expression of both horizontal conflict, between local political elites, and vertical conflict, between national and local elites. We theorize about factors that may increase the risks of vertical and horizontal conflict and leverage a unique dataset of constituency-level nomination violence obtained from surveys with 464 domestic election observers active in the 2016 Zambian general election. Our statistical analyses show constituencies with an incumbent standing for re-election were more likely to experience nomination violence. Also, contrary to previous research on general election violence, we theorize and find that more rural constituencies had a higher propensity for nomination violence than urban constituencies. Our findings highlight the importance of intra-party power relations and the bargaining relationship between the centre and periphery.     

The Chicken or the Egg?: A Coevolutionary Approach to Disputed Issues and Militarized Conflict

Is state behavior influenced by the context in which it occurs, or does context arise because of the way in which states behave? I investigate these questions in the context of international disputes over issues and states’ militarized behavior. The prevalent assumption in interstate conflict research is that disputed issues are exogenous to militarization patterns. I question the validity of this assumption, arguing there are reasons to suspect certain states self-select into disputes. I use a coevolution modeling strategy to allow the existence of disputes and states’ behavior to mutually affect one another. I find disputes are not exogenous to states’ militarized behavior. States that resort to militarized behavior are more likely to dispute an issue than peaceful states. I also find evidence of behavioral contagion among states engaged in disputes: Militarized behavior begets militarized behavior.     

“So,the Killings Continued”: Wartime Mobilization and Post-War Violence in KwaZulu-Natal,South Africa

ABSTRACT

Many post-war states experience continuous low-intensity violence for years after the formal end of the conflict. Existing theories often focus on country-level explanations of post-war violence, such as the presence of spoilers or the nature of the peace agreement. Yet, post-war violence does not affect all communities equally; whereas some remain entrenched in violence, others escape the perpetuation of violent conflict. We argue that communities where wartime mobilization at the local level is based on the formation of alliances between armed groups and local elites are more likely to experience post-war violence, than communities where armed groups generate civilian support based on grassroots backing of the group’s political objectives. We explore this argument in a comparison of three communities in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, which have experienced different levels of post-war violence. The analysis supports the main argument and contributes to the research on the microdynamics of civil war by outlining the implications of certain strategies of wartime mobilization and how these may generate localized legacies.     

联合国全民教育和教育可持续发展目标视角下拉美教育性别平等

由于贫困、社会偏见和传统教育体制的局限性,拉美教育存在较为严重的性别不平等,未达到联合国“2000—2015年全民教育”性别均等和平等目标的要求,主要表现为中学阶段男性失学现象严重,女性面临学习环境不包容、学业中存在障碍和就业竞争力弱等问题。要解决这些问题,需要运用新的思路打开局面。联合国“2015—2030年教育可持续发展目标”的17项具体目标均提及性别平等。该目标强调包容公平和终身学习两个要点,把全民教育关于教育普及和机会均等的各个分散目标整合到上述两个主题之下,这为解决拉美教育性别不平等问题提供了一个综合的解决思路和行为框架。按照该目标的思路,拉美国家应继续实施有条件现金转移支付等公共政策,促进教育机会公平,减少男性失学现象;应努力消除校园暴力和性别歧视,实现优质包容的教育;应重视职业技术教育,为所有男性和女性在学习和工作多个阶段提供灵活的、个性化的、以就业为导向的职业教育,帮助其实现终身学习和可持续发展,促进教育质量的性别平等。     

The Dearth of Jointly Dyadic Democratic Interventions

The Democratic Peace Proposition, which states that no two democracies have ever gone to war with each other, has been questioned by scholars who claim that such pacific behavior among free states does not apply to lower forms of conflict. In particular, Kegley and Hermann contend that democracies intervene in the affairs of other liberal states via overt military acts or covert machinations. In many cases, they argue that dyadic democratic interventions (DDIs) occur more frequently than would be expected given the number of jointly democratic dyads in the international system. I examine their research design and suggest changes to their concepts of states, interventions, and regime type, as well as their sample size and definition of dyads in the international system. I implement these changes and retest such arguments on a sample of interventions from 1945 to 1991. I find 11 cases where a democracy intervenes against another democracy, but these cases are rare in comparison to interventions conducted by democratic and/or autocratic states in undemocratic states, or by autocratic states against democratic states. Furthermore, these DDIs are less likely to occur than the presence of democracy in the international system would suggest.     

Electoral Competition,the State,and Communal Violence: A Reply

In a review of my 2004 book Votes and Violence,Ashutosh Varshney and Joshua Gubler criticize various aspects of the book and its electoral incentives theory. The implication is that Varshney's own local civic engagement theory provides a superior explanation for communal violence. This article responds to the specific criticisms of my arguments about the role of electoral incentives and state action, or inaction, in leading to communal violence, showing why these are wrong or unimportant. I cite three important recent studies, by scholars working independently of me, who come to the same conclusions I do about the key role of electoral incentives and the importance of the state. I also cite the work of other scholars, based on careful fieldwork, who have questioned Varshney's characterization of the causes of conflict and peace in the cities he discusses in his own 2002 book Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life.     

Strong State,Smothered Society: Explaining Terrorist Violence in Thailand's Deep South

Why have militants in southern Thailand utilized anonymous and at times indiscriminate terrorist violence against civilians? This article gauges three explanations: resource wealth, weak states, and strong states. I argue that terrorist violence against civilians in southern Thailand is partially sustained and largely structured by the considerable institutional strength of the Thai state. This helps sustain the conflict by providing an additional grievance and it structures the form of violence by forcing militants underground and severing their links to civilians. A potential response would be to trim state agencies and scale back the presence of the state in Patani.