Does the legacy of women’s participation in non-state armed groups impact women’s post-war political representation? Existing research suggests that women’s inclusion in rebel groups is typically a short-term strategy, creating logistical and tactical advantages without commitment to long-term gendered change. Relatedly, after wars, patriarchal backlash can close the space for women, limiting their

Existing models for predicting conflict fatalities frequently produce conservative forecasts that gravitate towards the mean. While these approaches have a low average prediction error, they offer limited insights into temporal variations in conflict-related fatalities. Yet, accounting for variability is particularly relevant for policymakers, providing an indication on when to intervene. In this article

Literature on survivor mobilization in transitional justice contexts has largely overlooked the relevance and dynamics of solidarity-based support by non-victimized groups. This article studies the relation between contentious processes of discursive ‘memory-making’ and public support for reparations in post-conflict Guatemala. Using a nationwide survey-embedded experiment with 300 respondents, we

Since 2001, the United Nations Security Council has increasingly authorized interventions in support of a government. However, the potential impact of this trend on civil war processes is underexamined. I argue that biased peacekeeping interventions can undermine social order when replacing rebel territorial control. Interventions become associated with weak and predatory client governments, fail to

How does war affect social preferences toward people with conflict-related outgroup identities? While the literature often reports prosocial treatment of ingroups, such benevolence is rarely seen toward potential outgroups. We consider the case of Ukraine, where many people with Russian identity markers reside. We ask whether people in Ukraine who identify as Russian by ethnicity or language have become

Economic sanctions could cause substantial harm to target states, forcing them to undertake tough guns-versus-butter trade-offs. Although existing research has argued that sanctioned countries reduce their military spending in absolute terms, it is unclear whether they do trade more guns for butter in relative terms. We argue that in the short run, sanctioned states have an incentive to channel proportionally

Why do armed rebel movements perpetrate intragroup reproductive violence? While extant research predominantly focuses on wartime sexual violence against civilians, the targeting of rebel women with reproductive violence remains underexplored. My research contributes new insights on how women’s idealized roles within armed rebellions shape the likelihood of these groups engaging in various forms of

Climate variability is increasingly gaining recognition as a factor exacerbating risks to peace in Africa, particularly in contexts characterized by weak institutions and fragile agri-food systems. Existing literature has highlighted the intricate indirect pathways that can lead to increasing conflicts following a climatic shock, including reduced agricultural yields, increased food insecurity, and

Rebel leaders can prolong civil wars. Although past research has examined how rebel groups have shaped civil wars, little attention has been paid to rebel leaders. I argue that civil wars last longer and are less likely to be terminated in government-favorable outcomes when rebel leaders with training in a nonstate armed group are in charge, in contrast to leaders with no training or state military

Governmental and nongovernmental organizations have increasingly relied on early-warning systems of conflict to support their decisionmaking. Predictions of war intensity as probability distributions prove closer to what policymakers need than point estimates, as they encompass useful representations of both the most likely outcome and the lower-probability risk that conflicts escalate catastrophically

The risks of child recruitment by non-state armed groups are geographically, temporally and contextually situated. There are multilayered, multivariate arrays of risk factors associated with non-state armed groups, with conflicts, and with contexts. Using Bayesian network modelling with a global dataset of non-state armed group child recruitment practices between 2010 and 2022, we demonstrate the theoretical

This article presents an expansion of the Peace Accords Matrix Implementation Dataset, incorporating data on partial agreements and newly established Comprehensive Peace Agreements. The new Peace Accords Matrix Implementation Dataset now includes coding for 51 provisions across 42 Comprehensive Peace Agreements and 236 partial peace agreements (with 78% of these negotiated prior to the Comprehensive

Conflict scholars commonly employ public opinion surveys to understand the causes and consequences of violence. However, surveying in wartime presents a distinctive set of challenges. We examine two challenges facing polling in countries at war: under-coverage of national samples and response bias. Although these issues are acknowledged in the literature on surveying methods, they become significantly

This study makes three key contributions to the literature on the effect of conflict-induced violence on wartime migration. First, while conflict-induced violence is often treated as a monolithic factor, we consider conflict-induced violence as multidimensional, varying in intensity, type and proximity. Second, by including both movers and stayers, we address the mobility bias prevalent in the literature

Can international sanctions prevent civil war? Despite the increased scholarly and policy focus on conflict prevention, we lack an understanding of the impact of a commonly used tool of the international community – economic sanctions. We examine the impact of sanctions targeted against states with self-determination (SD) disputes. We argue that the threat of sanctions leads states to decrease repression

How does diaspora sponsorship of rebel organizations impact civilian victimization? This article argues that diasporas have an affinity for their kin and therefore, an interest in civilian protection. By applying a principal–agent framework to understand diaspora sponsorship to rebel organizations, it highlights how a diaspora, acting as a principal, can reduce violence against civilians perpetrated

This article focuses on researcher distress and well-being. It presents a survey carried out with scholars engaged in conflict-related sexual violence research from various disciplines. Respondents were asked about how they reacted to the research they engaged in and how their respective academic institutions supported them. Academia’s understanding of and preparedness for research-related distress

Whereas United Nations Special Political Missions are established following UN Peacekeeping Operations or as substitute measures to enhance peace and security, studies have paid little attention to what United Nations Special Political Missions do and whether they are effective. The UN Special Political Mission Mandated Tasks Dataset provides new data on United Nations Special Political Mission-mandated

While United Nations Security Council (UNSC) resolutions are widely studied, there is only limited information about their authors. Previous studies have argued that the states that draft resolutions exert sizeable influence over their content, but the lack of comprehensive data has hindered any systematic investigations into their agency, role and motivation when authoring resolutions. This article

This study examines how the public views the use of artificial intelligence (AI) on the battlefield. We conduct three survey experiments on a representative sample of the US public to examine how variation in the level of human-machine autonomy affects the public’s support for the use of military force, the public’s trust in such systems (both in their reliability and interpersonal trust), and the

We examine whether harvest-time transitory shifts in employment and income lead to changes in political violence and social unrest in rice-producing croplands of Southeast Asia. Using monthly data from 2010 to 2023 on over 86,000 incidents covering 376 one-degree cells across eight Southeast Asian countries, we estimate a general increase in political violence and a decrease in social unrest in croplands

One of the most shocking aspects of civil war is the prevalence of sexual violence committed by armed groups. Recent research identifies many of the factors driving this horrific phenomenon. What is generally lacking, however, is an understanding of the factors that can prevent conflict-related sexual violence. We argue that women’s economic rights are key. Women’s economic rights provide women with

What drives host community preferences towards the reintegration of former Islamist militants? While recognizing the importance of host communities in the reintegration process, empirical evidence on the factors influencing community support for reintegrating former Islamist militants remains limited. We hypothesized that community preferences are shaped along the perceived threat level influenced

Research on the relationship between repression and dissent has mostly ignored the mechanisms through which repression affects dissent. I distinguish two distinct channels through which repression can deter dissidents. First, preemptive repression works through a functional channel by directly reducing the opposition’s capabilities. Second, the severity of preemptive repression provides information

How do observers abroad assess the intentions of rising powers? Influential research in international relations suggests that rising powers can reassure others by using both behavior and rhetoric, but there is scarce rigorous evidence on the relative effectiveness of these strategies. In this article, we study whether and to what extent variation in behavioral and rhetorical foreign economic policies

I introduce a new dataset of all United Nations Security Council and United Nations General Assembly resolutions passed from 1946–2018, as well as machine-learning-based measures of their references to other resolutions, textual alignment, and topics. I suggest applications of this data for a variety of questions in international relations from the development of international law to the influence

Armed conflicts expose states to extraordinary fiscal stress and leave poverty and inequality in their wake. Yet, the fiscal policy responses in contemporary conflict-affected states appear feeble, in striking contrast to historical antecedents, having led to radical and distinctly progressive tax reforms. Whereas extant literature cautions against generalising Western wartime experiences, emphasising

There is substantial evidence that various aspects of violent civil conflict are tied to natural resources, of which diamonds are perhaps the most notorious. While the presence of resources themselves have been given substantial attention, existing works have overlooked a key issue: substitute resources. This article focuses on the geographic distribution of violent conflict relative to natural resource

Disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) provisions in peace agreements (PAs) are critical pillars of global peacebuilding efforts. Leading theories suggest that different DDR components address different peacebuilding challenges. Yet existing datasets conceptualize DDR as a binary variable, hindering our ability to observe which DDR components and in what combination are agreed upon by

Sanctions episodes, like those imposed by the United States against Cuba and North Korea, can persist for decades. What are the consequences of lifting sanctions? Do the harmful consequences of economic sanctions outlast the sanctions? How do target states adjust after these coercive policies end? A growing literature identifies a range of adverse effects of economic sanctions for targeted states including

In the last decade, international relations scholarship on shaming by non-governmental organizations has grown dramatically, providing us with many insights into how country-level improvement occurs in the areas of human rights and the environment, among other issues. Using machine learning techniques, this project built an updated dataset on NGO shaming from almost 1.5 million articles in the media

Fairness of domestic war crimes trials matters for promoting justice and peace. Scholars have studied public perceptions of war crimes trials to assess their fairness, but little is known about whether post-conflict states conduct them fairly. Bias, as a matter of procedural fairness, can manifest as a tendency to favour certain groups over others. Leveraging the theories of judicial decisionmaking

Creating a stable peace is now the key puzzle to resolve in ending civil wars. To date, research has focused on ‘hard’ political and military reforms included in peace agreements, and the impact of ‘soft’ concessions such as language rights, cultural rights or the right to religion have been largely ignored. When do states give these concessions and do they make a difference to peace outcomes? The

Great powers frequently signal their alliance commitments during peacetime. While scholars see this peacetime practice as an integral part of great powers’ alliance maintenance, there is significant variation in the intensity of signals that junior allies receive. This article suggests that the choices made by great powers in signalling alliance commitments can be explained by the motivation to encourage

Recent research highlights how the same vulnerabilities that lead to disasters also condition the impact of hazards on violent conflict. Yet it is common practice in the literature to proxy rapid-onset hazards with disaster impacts when studying political violence. This can bias upward estimates of hazard–conflict relationships and obscure heterogeneous effects, with implications for forecasting as

Do variations in local incomes influence peace and conflict in low- and middle-income countries? The present meta-regression analysis contributes to answering this question by delving into the narratives that researchers use to qualify how various shocks affect conflict risk through channels implicitly linked to income. After examining 2,464 subnational estimates from 64 recent empirical studies, we

The impact of extreme weather events on electoral processes is not well understood, yet as the climate changes, such events are predicted to become more common. This highlights the need for scholars to investigate how natural hazards affect election campaigns and electoral administration. Drawing on data from the Electoral Contention and Violence dataset, this article uses a difference-in-differences

What explains the variation in combatant socialization and resocialization outcomes? Why do some combatants adopt the intended norms of their organization while others resist them? Combatants regularly undergo intensive socialization and ‘resocialization’ processes within total institutions – regimented environments like armed organizations and re-education programs that seek to alter their norms.

Does environmental displacement provoke political instability? Though migration has long been considered an intermediary in the causal path between environmental change and political upheaval, the relationship remains theoretically underdeveloped and evidence has been limited. This article examines the impact of displacement caused by sudden-onset natural hazards on disruptive antigovernment events

Every year since 1946, the General Debate has taken place at the beginning of the United Nations (UN) General Assembly session. Representatives from all UN member states deliver an address, discussing the issues that they consider most important in global politics, revealing their governments’ positions, and seeking to persuade other states of their perspectives. The annual UN General Debate statements

Human rights are a fundamental principle and purpose of the United Nations (UN). Yet, UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) exhibit substantial variation in their ability to engage in human rights activities. While existing research has investigated deployment and mandates, we explain what peacekeepers can actually do on the ground. We argue that the UN Security Council’s permanent member states (the P5)

The notion of affinity among countries is central in studies of international relations: it plays an important role in research as scholars use measures of affinity to study conflict and cooperation in a variety of contexts. To more effectively measure affinity, I argue that it is necessary to utilize multidimensional data and take into account the network context of international relations. In this

Why do protests emerge and endure in some localities but not others? This study focuses on urban protests in the city of Tehran, Iran’s capital and largest city, during the 2022 uprising to explain why protests emerged and endured in some neighbourhoods but not others. Using an original geocoded dataset of 339 protest events at the neighbourhood level, I test two competing sets of demographic and spatial

Powersharing institutions are often prescribed to enhance civil peace, democratic survival, and the equitable provision of public services, and these institutions have become more prevalent over time. Nonetheless, the past decade has seen a rise in democratic backsliding and competitive authoritarianism, raising questions about how the relationship between powersharing, democracy, and civil peace may

Why do countries mutually agree to constraints on their behavior? Why do they comply with such constraints in the absence of enforcement mechanisms? More specifically, why did NATO allies, with disparate geography and perceptions of the international security environment, agree to ‘aim to move towards’ increased defense spending (2% of GDP on defense and 20% of defense budgets on equipment modernization)

OpenAI’s ChatGPT language model has gained popularity as a powerful tool for problem-solving and information retrieval. However, concerns arise about the reproduction of biases present in the language-specific training data. In this study, we address this issue in the context of the Israeli–Palestinian and Turkish–Kurdish conflicts. Using GPT-3.5, we employed an automated query procedure to inquire

This article introduces the Issue Correlates of War Identity Claims Dataset. An identity claim occurs when two states diplomatically contest the treatment of an ethnic group that both states share. A state that advances such a claim (i.e. the challenger) demands that the other state (i.e. the target) either: (i) change its domestic treatment of the group, (ii) grant the group independence, or (iii)

Transnational surveillance is a powerful tool in the arsenal of autocrats the world over. Despite its pervasive use in extraterritorial coercion, the systematic study of surveillance of regime opponents beyond national borders remains underdeveloped in political science, primarily due to limited data availability. To help fill this gap, we constructed the Latin American Transnational Surveillance dataset

Why do contemporary states fortify their borders? Modern military advancements have made such fortifications obsolete for security, yet scholars have offered no satisfactory alternative theory. I propose a theory of fortifications with economic motivations using a game-theoretic model where states compete to extract wealth over a shared population around a border. Such competition generates inefficiency

This article explores who is likely to benefit from Internet propaganda in civil wars. It argues that the global reach of the Internet, its lack of regulation and its filtering tools are more likely to help transnational rebel groups with external support and radical aims than local groups with home-grown support and moderate aims. The paper then introduces a new dataset on rebel propaganda that includes

Transitional justice practices frequently involve public apologies where former combatants confess their wrongdoings and ask for forgiveness, with the underlying assumption that such displays facilitate the reintegration of ex-combatants into society. However, little is known about the public response to ex-combatant apologies. In this article, we investigate the causal effect of an armed group apology

New political issues and opportunities lead new actors into contentious politics. This article studies one such case: transnational migrants making claims and engaging in collective action when traversing state borders. As global migration flows and accompanying political backlash has grown since the mid-2010s, borders have increasingly become sites of contention between groups of migrants seeking

Can armed conflict amplify the societal impacts and humanitarian consequences of natural hazards? Given that these hazards affect millions of people worldwide and that climate change is expected to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, it is paramount that we advance our understanding of what makes societies vulnerable to these hazards. Existing research has focused mainly

Conflicts involving pastoralists have been on the rise in the past two decades in West, Central and East Africa. This article argues that land alienation is a major source of this type of violence. We employ a narrow identification strategy of relevant pastoral conflicts based on the Armed Conflict Location Event Dataset and create a unique indicator of land alienation comprised of three types of land

Relational scholarship is burgeoning across the social sciences and gaining ground in peace and conflict studies. But relationalism is prone to misunderstanding. This article demonstrates that the ‘relational’ is an ontological orientation, with foundational implications for how social scientists know the world, rather than a methodological stance oriented to relationships. It offers a threefold framework

It is often proposed that the young unemployed are more likely to engage in political violence, conflicts, and protests. One problem in studying the unemployed – especially in the Global South – are the blurred lines between the unemployed, the employed, and those working in the informal sector. Further, the employed are a heterogeneous group so employment quality might also play an important role