The political economy of the peace dividend

We develop a model of the peace dividend and use it to predict the fiscal consequences of a reduction in the demand for military spending. The model is based on the assumption that the political process responds to political demands and costs in a way that maximizes net political benefits. The predictions of our model on how a peace dividend will be allocated over nonmilitary spending, tax relief, and deficit reduction is tested against the experience of eight major wars in United States history.     

Violence,voting & peace: Explaining public support for the peace referendum in Colombia

How does political violence affect popular support for peace? We answer this question by examining Colombia, where in 2016 the people narrowly and unexpectedly voted against a peace agreement designed to end a half century of civil war. Building on research on the impact of political violence on elections as well as research on referendum/initiative voting in the United States, we argue that local experiences with violence and the political context will lead to heightened support for peace. We test these expectations using spatial modeling and a municipal-level data on voting in the 2016 Colombian peace referendum, and find that municipal-level support for the referendum increases with greater exposure to violence and increasing support for President Santos. These results are spatially distributed, so that exposure to violence in one municipality is associated with greater support for the peace referendum in that municipality and also in surrounding areas. Our findings have implications not only for Colombia, but for all post-war votes and other contexts in which referenda and elections have major and/or unexpected results.     

Negotiated settlements and peace referendums

Institutional innovations in conflict management have received considerable academic attention in the past decades. Yet few studies have considered the design of referendums in peace processes and the role of popular mandates in catalysing negotiated settlements. Drawing evidence from divided societies, particularly the contrasting cases of South Africa and Cyprus, the article points to the importance of ratification sequence and early mandate referendums. Specifically, it demonstrates how mandate referendums focusing initially on domestic constituencies enable leaders to pre‐empt ethnic outbidding challenges while concluding a peace agreement. An early ratification process could safeguard the peace process from unavoidable reversals in public opinion, increase flexibility as to the timing of critical decisions and maximise the credibility of leaders aiming for a negotiated settlement. The study of mandate referendums has important implications for broader research on international mediations since it suggests mechanisms by which political actors could ensure the ratification of significant treaties in global or regional politics.     

The political opportunity structure of the Dutch peace movement

This article analyses the political opportunity structure of the Dutch political system with respect to new social movements in general, and the Dutch peace movement in particular. It is shown that the prevailing strategy of the Dutch political system is one of integration, and that the dominant party on the left (the Social Democratic Party) went through a process of transformation which opened it up to the new challengers at precisely the moment when the cycle of protest of the new social movements took off. The consequences of the high degree of openness of the Dutch system are then documented on the basis of a detailed analysis of the alliance structure of the Dutch peace movement.     

Thinking 'globally' about peace in Northern Ireland

Though many in Britain and Northern Ireland remain highly sceptical about the longer term intentions of the Provisional IRA, it is clear that its ceasefire of August 1994 represented a major turning-point in Irish history. The nature of the IRA decision however remains shrouded in controversy – made all the more controversial of course by its resumption of military activities followed eighteen months later by the announcement of another ceasefire. This article seeks to throw light on the original IRA decision by exploring some of the international pressures which led the organization to take the decision it did in 1994. While in no way seeking to downplay the importance of 'internal' factors such as war weariness and the Anglo-Irish agreement, it is suggested here that the decision itself makes little sense unless it is situated within a wider global context. It is also implied that if analysts had been more sensitive to the influence of the 'global' upon the 'local' conflict in Northern Ireland, they may have been less surprised than they were by the IRA announcement.     

War and peace—cyclical phenomena?

This paper demonstrates how the analysis can differ dramatically between two common static modeling approaches to conflict. The first approach uses a one-period setup and associates positive arms investments with conflict. The second approach has two periods, where arming decisions are taken in the first period, and the decision on whether to go to war is taken separately in the second. Building on the latter approach, I introduce a repeated game protocol with myopic players. Under these circumstances countries may end up in cycles of war and peace. This result offers a novel explanation for a common pattern in history.     

浅论劳务派遣用工的扩大化及相关问题

<劳动合同法>第六十六条规定:"劳务派遣一般在临时性、辅助性或者替代性的工作岗位上实施."从法律的规定的题中之义可以清晰揭示劳务派遣的本质属性,就是灵活性的用工形式、补充性的就业方式.但目前没有实施办法进一步细化何为"临时性、辅助性、替代性"的岗位规定.因此,大量的用工企业在使用劳务派遣时出现了扩大化、无序化的趋势.当...     

Tweeting for peace: Experimental evidence from the 2016 Colombian Plebiscite

The decades-long Colombian civil war nearly came to an official end with the 2016 Peace Plebiscite, which was ultimately defeated in a narrow vote. This conflict has deeply divided Colombian civil society, and non-political public figures have played a crucial role in structuring debate on the topic. To understand the mechanisms underlying the influence of members of civil society on political discussion, we performed a randomized experiment on Colombian Twitter users shortly before this election. Sampling from a pool of subjects who had been frequently tweeting about the Plebiscite, we tweeted messages that encouraged subjects to consider different aspects of the decision. We varied the identity (a general, a scientist, and a priest) of the accounts we used and the content of the messages we sent. We found little evidence that any of our interventions were successful in persuading subjects to change their attitudes. However, we show that our pro-Peace messages encouraged liberal Colombians to engage in significantly more public deliberation on the subject.     

Constraining war: Human security and the Human right to peace

Conclusion The explicit articulation of a cosmopolitan conception of human security and a corresponding right to peace is a positive development in global politics, inasmuch as it decenters the state in our understanding of the human community and delegitimizes organized violence as the generally accepted means for the “continuation” of realist politics. I have argued that just war theory, when defined in suitably narrow fashion, helps to contribute to our thinking on issues of human security in several ways. First, it provides a stringent normative framework for a reasonable humanitarian justification of the resort to force. Second, it enables us to conceptualize significant moral and legal constraints on war and thus on the powers of states to wage war, thereby displacing the use of force from the statist paradigm of security. Third, it contributes to the delegitimation of unjust wars, that is, military actions undertaken for any purposes other than human security. Fourth, insofar as it provides a justificatory basis for the increasing demilitarization of society, it may influence the progressive and just pacification of global politics. As long as the types of human wrongs that present the gravest threats to human security continue to haunt the global community, there remains a need to be able to respond effectively so as to protect the rights and well-being of individuals. This need poses a genuine dilemma for humanitarian morality and politics, insofar as many of the military capabilities required to defend and to aid vulnerable persons can also be the source of threats to human life and welfare. Yet the existence of this dilemma need not lead us either to apathy or to cynicism. The nexus of human security, the right to peace, and just war theory offers a resolution to the traditional security dilemma by challenging the realist rationale for aggressive militarism, and by supporting the emergence of global security structures and processes guided by the humanitarian norms of just peace. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A28BB021 00002