Socioeconomic Inequality and Communal Conflict: A Disaggregated Analysis of Sub-Saharan Africa, 1990–2008

This article examines the role of economic inequality in influencing the risk of armed conflict between communal groups in Sub-Saharan Africa. We argue that socioeconomic inequality can generate intergroup grievances, which, due to the exclusionary legitimacy of the African state and elite incentives to engage in competitive mobilization of communal groups, precipitate violent communal conflict. To examine this argument, we rely on a series of household surveys to construct subnational inequality measures. For each region, we calculate measures of inequality in terms of household welfare and education between individuals (vertical inequality) and between ethnic groups (horizontal inequality). Combining the inequality data with new georeferenced data on communal conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa for the period 1990–2008, we find that regions with strong socioeconomic inequalities—both vertical and horizontal—are significantly more exposed to violent communal conflicts. More specifically, regions in which the largest ethnic group is severely disadvantaged compared to other groups are particularly prone to experience communal conflict.     

Violence Against Civilians: A Disaggregated Analysis

Disaggregated approaches to conflict research have led to new insights into the patterns and processes of political violence in developing countries. This article uses the most comprehensive subnational political violence data (ACLED) to observe where and when violence against civilians occurs within civil wars. Several new conclusions are evident from an event-based analysis of civilian violence: retribution or collateral damage are poor explanations for attacks on the unarmed. Instead, civilians are targeted because they are accessible; rebel groups kill more civilians, often in an attempt to create new frontlines for conflict. However, governments are also responsible for high rates of civilian death, yet they often “contract” this violence out to militias. This analysis confirms that there are multiple violent groups within civil war spaces, and small opposition groups commit higher levels of violence against civilians in local spaces. The strength of a violent group compared to its competition shapes how much civilian violence it commits. The results suggest that theories that emphasize civilian support and retribution as a basis for violence against civilians have overlooked the importance of how multiple violent opposition groups compete within civil wars, and how civilians suffer as a result.     

When do people pay attention? Violence and non-violence in political movements and the differential media attention provided

Media can dictate what people see, but an individual’s choice in media consumption can also determine what stories the media report. This paper demonstrates that people show a greater interest in large-scale protests when the use of violence is employed, though this trend does not strongly hold in every case. Google search Trend data are analysed across five recent political movements to determine at which points in a movement media attention peaks. The data are compared to the timelines of these protests with a specific emphasis on when major violent events occurred. The level of violence that occurs in a movement is potentially correlated with how many times the region experiencing the movement is searched. Some movements however do a good job at generating attention without violence, and violence does not guarantee a large audience. The Google Trend data provide valuable information about what causes people to pay attention to world events and can be used to analyse political movements and potentially make predictions about violent and non-violent conflict.     

Fighting your friends? A study of intra-party violence in sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on a less visible and less studied type of political violence, namely violence that occurs within political parties. We use new, district-level data to compare the temporal and spatial dynamics of intra-party violence to those of general election violence across selected sub-Saharan African countries, including both democracies and autocracies, from 1998 to 2016. Relying on cross-national and sub-national analyses, we show that intra-party violence follows a unique pattern. First, unlike general election violence, intra-party violence peaks prior to election day as it is often sparked by individual parties’ candidate nomination processes. Second, low levels of competitiveness – typically theorized to reduce the risk of election violence – increase the risk of intra-party violence on the sub-national level. Thus, dominant party elections do not necessarily see less election-related violence than hotly contested elections. Rather, violence may be pushed from election day to intra-party competitions. If we neglect the study of violence within political parties, we thus risk underestimating the threat of election violence and misdiagnosing its causes.     

Peace amidst development: 1 a conceptual agenda for conflict and peace research

In recent years, the focus of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency/Cybernetics Technology Office (DARPA/CTO) has become increasingly applied in nature. Concurrently, an explicit concern with coordinating and integrating research and analysis has pervaded the DARPA/CTO milieu. These emphases mirror trends in certain segments of political science; both policy‐relevance and cumulativeness have emerged as prominent themes in disciplinary communication and research evaluation processes.¹     

Electoral violence prevention: what works?

Elections are in theory democratic means of resolving disputes and making collective decisions, yet too often force is employed to distort the electoral process. The post-Cold War increase in the number of electoral authoritarian and hybrid states has brought this problem into relief. In recent years the prevention of electoral violence has played an increasingly large role in the democratic assistance activities undertaken by international agencies, following increased awareness within the international community of the specific security challenges that elections entail. However, there has to date been little systematic evaluation of the success of different electoral violence prevention (EVP) strategies in reforming electoral institutions so as to enable them to maintain the peace during the electoral period. This article assesses the effectiveness of two common types of international EVP activity. Using a new global dataset of EVP strategies between 2003 and 2015, this article finds evidence that capacity-building strategies reduce violence by non-state actors, whereas attitude-transforming strategies are associated with a reduction in violence by state actors and their allies. The findings are relevant both for understanding the dynamics of electoral violence, and also for policymakers and electoral assistance providers in the international community who have responsibility for the design of democratic assistance projects in states at risk of electoral violence.     

Arms Transfers beyond the State-to-State Realm

Arms transfers beyond the state-to-state realm can have harmful effects for international security dramatically affecting the relations and behavior of states. This article examines why an emerging international norm on "prohibiting states to transfer arms to nonstate groups" has failed to diffuse at the international level. It discusses the already available international law framework existing at the regional and international levels upon which the potential norm could be built. The failure of the norm to diffuse at the international level can be primarily explained by the existence of a long-consolidated norm: the customary practice of states to transfer weapons to nonstate actors, that is, groups they deem legitimate to, without any interference or constraint. ¹ The unrestrained transfer of weapons is an established foreign-policy practice. It is the way states form, uphold alliances, extend friendships, and build spheres of influence ( Sorokin 1994 ). Clearly, no state willingly wants to give this up. Therefore, the multilateral agreement on a norm barring most or all transfers of weapons to nonstate actors would curtail the freedom of action to build spheres of influence as states please. There are genuine ethical and moral dilemmas in this discussion, a nonstate actor may be a freedom fighter or a terrorist depending on different perspectives. The distinction between the categories "state" and "nonstate" actors may risk classifying actors in two camps: the good and the bad, respectively. This is problematic as a few states are known to be the most brutal perpetrators of egregious violations against their own citizens, whereas certain nonstate actors are legitimately fighting for the protection of vulnerable populations.     

Do Religious Factors Impact Armed Conflict? Empirical Evidence From Sub-Saharan Africa

Theoretically, the “mobilization hypothesis” establishes a link between religion and conflict by arguing that particular religious structures are prone to mobilization; once politicized, escalation to violent conflict becomes more likely. Yet, despite the religious diversity in sub-Saharan Africa and the religious overtones in a number of African conflicts, this assumption has not yet been backed by systematic empirical research on the religion–conflict nexus in the region. The following questions thus remain: Do religious factors significantly impact the onset of (religious) armed conflict? If so, do they follow the logic of the mobilization hypothesis and, if so, in which way? To answer these questions, this article draws on a unique data inventory of all sub-Saharan countries for the period 1990–2008, particularly including data on mobilization-prone religious structures (e.g., demographic changes, parallel ethno-religious identities) as well as religious factors indicating actual politicization of religion (e.g., inter-religious tensions, religious discrimination, incitement by religious leaders). Logit regressions suggest that religion indeed plays a significant role in African armed conflicts. These findings are compatible with the mobilization hypothesis, and stress the impact of conflict-prone religious structures, and particularly, the fact that overlaps of religious and ethnic identities are conflict-prone. Future research should investigate the religion-ethnicity-nexus in more detail.     

A Review of: “Devin R. Springer,James L. Regens,and David N. Edger. Islamic Radicalism and Global Jihad. Stephen Vertigans (with contributions from Donncha Marron and Philip W. Sutton). Militant Islam: A Sociology of Characteristics,Causes, and Consequences. David Aaron. In Their Own Words: Voices of Jihad.”

Chinese arms sales to Africa have increased in recent years. In a region beset by conflict and unstable regimes, and where arms sales are a significant and positive predictor of an increased probability of political violence, this is inherently problematic. The sale of weaponry to a regime in Khartoum caught up in an alleged “genocide” in Darfur, the awkward appearance in 2008 of a Chinese ship loaded with weapons bound for Mugabe's Zimbabwe off the coast of eastern Africa, and the recent exposure in 2011 that Chinese arms companies offered to sell around $200 million worth of arms to Muammar Gaddafi's regime are emblematic of an issue in Africa's political violence that needs analysis. This article seeks to discuss the rationale behind China's arms sales to Africa and the effect that they have had on political violence in recipient countries. It also provides an analysis of the supply-and-demand circumstances of Chinese arms transfers to Africa, Beijing's attempts to control such transfers, and evidence that Chinese policies on proliferation are (slowly) evolving.