More Inequality,More Killings: The Maoist Insurgency in Nepal

The hypothesis of inequality as the source of violent conflict is investigated empirically in the context of killings by Nepalese Maoists in their People's War against their government during 1996–2003. The dependent variable is the total number of people killed during that period by Maoist rebels in each of 3,857 villages. Inequality is measured by the Gini, the Esteban‐Ray polarization index, and four other between‐groups indexes. Using models with district fixed effects, and instrumenting for endogeneity of the inequality measures, we find strong evidence that greater inequality escalated killings by Maoists. Poverty did not necessarily increase violence. Education moderated the effect of inequality on killing, while predominance of farmers and of Nepali speakers exacerbated it. We find evidence that more killings occurred in populous villages, lending support to the idea that violence was directed at expanding the Maoist franchise by demonstrating that opposition to the monarchy and elites in power was possible to achieve.     

Ethical issues in pro‐social advertising: the Australian 2006 White Ribbon Day campaign

• The Australian White Ribbon Day 2006 campaign was severely criticized by mental health professionals and those working in the family and domestic violence sector because of depictions of suicide and self‐harm in the television advertisement and accompanying promotional materials. The White Ribbon Day (WRD) National Leadership Group (NLG) rejected all requests by concerned groups to not use these campaign materials. They and their apologists claimed that such violent imagery was necessary to attract men's attention and was being misinterpreted as depicting suicide attempts.
• With preliminary ethics approval we set out to assess reactions to the television advertisement. After 24 interviews, the testing was terminated by the university research ethics officer after two male respondents demonstrated significant distress after viewing the ad. Furthermore, the results by that stage showed that there were perceived messages of suicide in the ad. These results were sent to the WRD NLG with a request to reconsider proceeding with the television advertisement and associated materials. Mental health and domestic violence organizations lodged similar requests. All requests were rejected. The case raises a number of ethical issues for pro‐social organizations when dealing with sensitive issues and using execution techniques that may impact negatively on vulnerable audiences.

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Religious extremism: The good, the bad, and the deadly

This paper challenges conventional views of violent religious extremism, particularly those that emphasize militant theology. We offer an alternative analysis that helps explain the persistent demand for religion, the different types of religions that naturally arise, and the special attributes of the “sectarian” type. Sects are adept at producing club goods – both spiritual and material. Where governments and economies function poorly, sects often become major suppliers of social services, political action, and coercive force. Their success as providers is much more due to the advantages of their organizational structure than it is to their theology. Religious militancy is most effectively controlled through a combination of policies that raise the direct costs of violence, foster religious competition, improve social services, and encourage private enterprise.     

Foreign Aid Shocks as a Cause of Violent Armed Conflict

In this study we resolve part of the confusion over how foreign aid affects armed conflict. We argue that aid shocks—severe decreases in aid revenues—inadvertently shift the domestic balance of power and potentially induce violence. During aid shocks, potential rebels gain bargaining strength vis‐à‐vis the government. To appease the rebels, the government must promise future resource transfers, but the government has no incentive to continue its promised transfers if the aid shock proves to be temporary. With the government unable to credibly commit to future resource transfers, violence breaks out. Using AidData's comprehensive dataset of bilateral and multilateral aid from 1981 to 2005, we evaluate the effects of foreign aid on violent armed conflict. In addition to rare‐event logit analysis, we employ matching methods to account for the possibility that aid donors anticipate conflict. The results show that negative aid shocks significantly increase the probability of armed conflict onset.     

The Dictator Game, Fairness and Ethnicity in Postwar Bosnia

This study considers the effects of ethnic violence on norms of fairness. Once violence is a foregone conclusion, will cooperative norms ever (re‐)emerge beyond ethnic boundaries? We use an experiment that measures how fairly individuals in a postconflict setting treat their own ingroup in comparison to the outgroups—in this case, examining the behavior of 681 Muslims, Croats, and Serbs in postwar Bosnia‐Herzegovina. To assess fairness, we use the dictator game wherein subjects decide how to allocate a sum of money between themselves and an anonymous counterpart of varying ethnicity. We find that the effects of ethnicity on decision making are captured by our experiments. Although results indicate preferential ingroup treatment, the incidence and magnitude of outgroup bias is much less than expected. We conclude that norms of fairness across ethnicity are remarkably strong in Bosnia, and we take this to be a positive sign for reconciliation after violent conflict.     

The Real Winner's Curse

Traditional theories of democracy suggest that political representation of excluded groups can reduce their incentives to engage in conflict and lead to lower violence. However, this argument ignores the response of established elites when (1) their interests are threatened by the policy stance of new political actors and (2) elites have a comparative advantage in the exercise of violence. Using a regression discontinuity approach, we show that the narrow election of previously excluded left‐wing parties to local executive office in Colombia results in a one standard deviation increase in violent events by right‐wing paramilitaries. We interpret this surge in violence as a reaction of traditional elites to offset the increase in outsiders' access to formal political power. Consistent with this interpretation, we find that violence by left‐wing guerrillas and other actors is unaffected and that violence is not influenced by the victory of right‐wing or other new parties in close elections.     

Peacekeepers against Criminal Violence—Unintended Effects of Peacekeeping Operations?

Research shows that peacekeepers reduce conflict intensity; however, effects of deployment on nonpolitical violence are unknown. This article focuses on criminal violence and proposes a twofold mechanism to explain why peacekeeping missions, even when effectively reducing conflict, can inadvertently increase criminal violence. First, less conflict opens up economic opportunities (so‐called peacekeeping economies) and provides operational security for organized crime, thus increasing violent competition among criminal groups. Second, demobilized combatants are vulnerable to turn to crime because of limited legal livelihood opportunities and their training in warfare. While UN troops may exacerbate these dynamics, UN police's peculiar role is likely to successfully contain criminal violence. Cross‐national and subnational empirical analyses show that large UN military deployments result in higher homicide rates, whereas UN police, overall, moderate this collateral effect.     

Alain Badiou's Politics and the Problem of Social History

Abstract

This paper explores the plausibility of Alain Badiou's ahistorical theory of politics. By insisting that the events of egalitarian politics are radically subtracted from social and historical conditions Badiou imagines a form of political action that effectively comes out of nothing. However, in order to establish the very prospect of an event's occurrence Badiou is forced to ground the possibility of political intervention in his theory of "evental recurrence", which effectively enables the subjects of political action to draw on the consequences of a preceding event in order to act in the here and now. The paper argues that by introducing the social dimensions of evental recurrence it is possible to construct an alternative account of political action that resolves a number of inconsistencies in Badiou's otherwise miraculous vision of politics. Consequently, rather than a militant activist that comes out of nowhere, evental recurrence implies that the militants of political action are saturated in their immediate social and political circumstances and in the memory of past struggles.     

Is There More Violence in the Middle?

Is there more violence in the middle? Over 100 studies have analyzed whether violent outcomes such as civil war, terrorism, and repression are more common in regimes that are neither full autocracies nor full democracies, yet findings are inconclusive. While this hypothesis is ultimately about functional form, existing work uses models in which a particular functional form is assumed. Existing work also uses arbitrary operationalizations of “the middle.” This article aims to resolve the empirical uncertainty about this relationship by using a research design that overcomes the limitations of existing work. We use a random forest‐like ensemble of multivariate regression and classification trees to predict multiple forms of conflict. Our results indicate the specific conditions under which there is or is not more violence in the middle. We find the most consistent support for the hypothesis with respect to minor civil conflict and no support with respect to repression.     

Democratization and Violent Conflict: Is There A Scandinavian Exception?

The notion that the paths to democracy in Scandinavia were exceptionally peaceful remains a popular argument, but an equally large number of studies opposes this view. This research note provides the first systematic attempt to compare records of violence during democratization in Scandinavia with other regions and countries. By using Varieties of Democracy data, I construct novel measures of democratization and violent conflict that align with extant propositions on Scandinavian exceptionalism and conflict‐democratization research while appreciating multiple dimensions of democratization for a global sample of countries from 1789 to 2018. The results show stable support for a substantial Scandinavian exception of peaceful democratization, but only evidently so for moves toward greater executive constraints and civil and political liberties. The exception is less clear for democratization considering competitive elections and suffrage. On this basis, I propose that we may improve the understanding of the causes of Scandinavian democratic exceptionalism and democratic sustainability more generally by studying the origins of peaceful democratization in Scandinavia compared with Western Europe in the ‘age of liberalization’ from approx. the mid‐eighteenth to the mid‐nineteenth century.     

Does Good Performance Reduce Bad Behavior? Antecedents of Ethnic Employment Discrimination in Public Organizations

Equal treatment is a key feature of modern bureaucracy. However, several studies have shown that public organizations discriminate against ethnic and racial minorities to different degrees. Which organizational features explain differences in discrimination is largely unknown. This article proposes that organizational performance relates to an organization's likelihood of engaging in employment discrimination and argues that poor‐performing organizations tend to be less open to new ideas and that decision makers in such organizations are more prone to stereotyping behavior. The study combines a field experiment in which applications were sent to real job vacancies in 71 Danish public schools with administrative data on the schools. Bayesian analyses show that minority applicants generally faced discrimination but that they experienced a higher callback rate from better‐performing schools than from poorer‐performing schools. Implications for practice and research are discussed.     

Mission Bogotá: pedagogical governance in a weak state

Wracked by crime and violence, Bogotá, Colombia adopted a unique urban security policy in 1998 called Mission Bogotá (MB). MB identifies the poor as ‘at risk’ of being violent. The program seeks to decrease crime by employing the poor and educating them on entrepreneurial urban citizenship, fomenting their sense of belonging to the city, a good work ethic, conflict resolution skills, and cosmopolitanism. Participants are then employed as citizen ‘guides,’ modeling their citizenship skills in public in order to instill exemplary citizenship in others by example. There is no evidence that MB reduces either crime or poverty. Nevertheless, the program establishes norms for ideal citizenship and structures the relationship between state and society. Based on one year of ethnographic research, I argue that MB uses pedagogy as a technology of governance to transfer responsibility for security provision from the state to society by making citizens responsible for their own security provision.     

Institutional Analysis of Neighborhood Collective Action

Sublocal governance organizations may provide a way for some urban neighborhoods to stabilize and improve property values. Recent advances in collective action theory, spatial statistical methods, and data availability now make it possible to more directly evaluate the effects of these organizations. The analysis combines geocoded assessor's data and data from a survey of neighborhood and homeowner associations to analyze a model of prices of single‐family homes in Little Rock, Arkansas, from 2012 to 2016. The results show that neighborhood and homeowner associations both have significant positive effects on neighborhood property values relative to unorganized neighborhoods and that the effect of neighborhood associations is at least as large as that of homeowner associations. Moreover, the results indicate that neighborhood association structure mediates the effect on property values, although this is not the case for homeowner associations.     

Public–Private Partnerships in Urban Regeneration Projects: Organizational Form or Managerial Capacity?

Urban regeneration companies (URCs) are public‐private entities appearing across Europe. They are created specifically to manage and implement more effectively urban regeneration projects. Core ideas behind the establishment of these newly emerging partnerships aim to tackle the challenging process of restructuring these organizations so as to function at arm’s length from political oversight. However, contemporary literature on governance suggests that organizational form may be less a factor than managerial capability. Using survey data obtained from individuals who are heavily involved in Dutch urban regeneration partnerships, this article points out why twin URC organizational characteristics, i.e., functioning at arm’s length from politics plus its tight organizational format, are not significant to their effective performance. Instead, use of multiple management strategies is ultimately more relevant to their effective performance.     

Who Takes the Blame? The Strategic Effects of Collateral Damage

Can civilians caught in civil wars reward and punish armed actors for their behavior? If so, do armed actors reap strategic benefits from treating civilians well and pay for treating them poorly? Using precise geo‐coded data on violence in Iraq from 2004 through 2009, we show that both sides are punished for the collateral damage they inflict. Coalition killings of civilians predict higher levels of insurgent violence and insurgent killings predict less violence in subsequent periods. This symmetric reaction is tempered by preexisting political preferences; the anti‐insurgent reaction is not present in Sunni areas, where the insurgency was most popular, and the anti‐Coalition reaction is not present in mixed areas. Our findings have strong policy implications, provide support for the argument that information civilians share with government forces and their allies is a key constraint on insurgent violence, and suggest theories of intrastate violence must account for civilian agency.     

How Governments Shape the Risk of Civil Violence: India's Federal Reorganization, 1950–56

Governments are absent from empirical studies of civil violence, except as static sources of grievance. The influence that government policy accommodations and threats of repression have on internal violence is difficult to verify without a means to identify potential militancy that did not happen. I use a within‐country research design to address this problem. During India's reorganization as a linguistic federation, every language group could have sought a state. I show that representation in the ruling party conditioned the likelihood of a violent statehood movement. Prostatehood groups that were politically advantaged over the interests opposed to them were peacefully accommodated. Statehood movements similar in political importance to their opponents used violence. Very politically disadvantaged groups refrained from mobilization, anticipating repression. These results call into question the search for a monotonic relationship between grievances and violence and the omission of domestic politics from prominent theories of civil conflict.     

Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth: Challenges in Managing Philanthropic Support for Public Services

Collaborations between nonprofit and public sector organizations have become an increasingly important phenomenon in state and local public service delivery since the publication of the Winter Commission report in 1993 . This article focuses on one of the less studied types of public–nonprofit collaborations, those in which philanthropic support from nonprofit organizations supplements the resources and activities of public agencies. Drawing on the case of “nonprofit‐as‐supplement collaborations” that support park services in New York City, this article documents the benefits and drawbacks associated with such collaborations. While they can provide increased resources and encourage management innovations, they also can lead to inequities in the availability and quality of services, the preponderance of particularistic goals over the broader public interest, and the politicization of previously bureaucratic decision making. The authors offer two strategies for public managers to realize more effectively the benefits yet mitigate the shortcomings of these collaborations.     

Democratic accountability and central bank independence: A response to Elgie

Empirical evidence is presented on the development of (violent) political conflict in 19 West European countries during the 1970s, the early 1980s and the entire post‐Second World War period. It is possible to identify three types of nation‐groups: ‘noisy‐participatory’ states such as the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and more recently Spain and Portugal ‐ and Greece if taken on a per capita base. The group of rather ‘quiet’ democracies consists of the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland and Luxembourg, with the remaining countries forming the middle, less clearly delineated group. There are two dimensions of political conflict: collective protest, made up of variables such as protest demonstrations, political strikes and riots, and internal war, characterised by the breakdown of the slate monopoly of violence and the organised use of violence by anti‐system groups. A causal model of political protest is presented and confronted with rival explanations. Empirical evidence and theoretical arguments lead to scepticism about accurate predictions of political violence and political instability.     

Violence and Silencing: A Philosophical Investigation of Apartheid

Abstract

With reference to examples of violence during Apartheid, I argue that the socio-political contexts in which violence occurs significantly shape agents' ideas about and responses to violence. As such, philosophers can only make sense of why perpetrators and bystanders alike may have judged violent acts morally justifiable or failed to challenge instances of violence against the backdrop of the particular characteristics of the socio-political context in which it occurs.