Assessing the impact of violent conflict on attitudes toward military rule in Nigeria

The article deals with the concept and signs of state crisis. The classification of state crises according to different criteria is presented. The state, as a political and territorial organization of society, is a complex system of various elements that function in interrelationship and interdependence and must serve the interests of civil society. Of course, if such a state is ideally related to it, society, it functions to meet its needs. The failure of one part of a complex multilevel State mechanism will inevitably have negative and sometimes irreversible consequences for other elements, which in itself will already be an indicator of certain crisis phenomena. What is a crisis of the State and what is its classification, in our view, these very issues are extremely relevant to the theory of the State and are the subject of our consideration. The crisis of the state is a destructive state of the state mechanism, due to the improper functioning of which antagonistic contradictions in the society aggravate, conflicts are formed, which the state can overcome or solve without a positive transformation, which in turn can threaten the state sovereignty and territorial integrity, and eventually can lead to its destruction. The main signs of the state crisis are: – destructive effects on the State itself and society as a whole; – the exacerbation of numerous conflict situations in various areas of society; – the failure of quality public administration; – contradiction between the state and society, between the ruling elite and the people, between different segments of the population; – a real threat to State sovereignty and territorial integrity; – the rebirth, transformation or destruction of statehood. By temporal criterion, a state crisis can be divided into: short-term (acute), prolonged (long-term), permanent (chronic). By the scale of coverage of certain state institutions and spheres of state regulation it is necessary to determine: microcrisis, mesocrisis, macrocrisis, mega-crisis. By subjects of coverage, these are a crisis of the state mechanism, a crisis of the state apparatus, a crisis of individual state organisations, a crisis of state resources, a crisis of individual branches of power. According to the political aspects of coverage, the crisis of the state is divided into: crisis of ruling elites, crisis of opposition forces, which in its turn can be divided into: crisis of radical opposition; crisis of moderate opposition; crisis of legal opposition and crisis of illegal opposition. Such a feature as legitimacy of the state power gives grounds to speak about: crisis of a legitimate state and crisis of an illegitimate state. The question of legal justification of the state power, its compliance with legal norms, which is a sign of its legitimacy, gives the necessity to determine: crisis of the legal state and crisis of the illegal state. A significant indicator of the definition of crisis phenomena in a State is the degree to which they are predictable. According to such criterion it is possible to define: not an assumed crisis of the State, an assumed crisis of the State, a controlled crisis of the State. According to the expected consequences of a crisis phenomenon in the State, emphasis should be placed on a destructive crisis, a potential crisis and a transformational crisis. Special attention should be paid to the study of classification of the crisis of the state according to the social and economic formation: crisis of the slave state, crisis of the feudal state, crisis of the capitalist state, crisis of the socialist state. Conflicts in society and the formation of conflicts in the state may be connected with the pressing need to change the form of state governance: crisis of monarchies and crisis of republics. Depending on the form of the state (territorial) system, the crisis of simple (unitary) states and the crisis of complex states, primarily empires, can be distinguished. Classification of state crises where the criterion is this or that form of state political regime seems quite justified: the crisis of anti-democratic states, the crisis of democratic states. In the areas of dominant coverage (manifestation) of crisis phenomena: economic crisis, social crisis, political crisis, religious crisis of the state, information crisis of the state.

Many scholars consider the military dictatorship a distinct authoritarian regime type, pointing to the singular patterns of domestic and international behaviors displayed by military regimes. Existing studies show that compared with civilian dictatorships, military dictatorships commit more human rights abuses, are more prone to civil war, and engage in more belligerent behaviors against other countries. Despite their coercive capacity, rulers of military dictatorships tend to have shorter tenures than rulers of non-military dictatorships. Additionally, military dictatorships more quickly and peacefully transition to democracy than their non-military counterparts and frequently negotiate their withdrawal from power. Given the distinct natures of military dictatorships, research on military dictatorships and coups has resurged since 2000. A great body of new research utilizing new theories, data, and methods has added to the existing scholarship on military rule and coups, which saw considerable growth in the 1970s. Most studies tend to focus on domestic issues and pay relatively little attention to the relationship between international factors and military rule. However, a growing body of studies investigates how international factors, such as economic globalization, international military assistance, reactions from the international community, and external threat environments, affect military rule. One particularly interesting research topics in this regard is the relationship between external territorial threats and military rule. Territorial issues are more salient to domestic societies than other issues, producing significant ramifications for domestic politics through militarization and state centralization. Militaries play a pivotal role in militarization and state centralization, both of which are by-products of external territorial threats. Thus, external territorial threats produce permissive structural conditions that not only prohibit democratization but also encourage military dictatorships to emerge and persist. Moreover, if territorial threats affect the presence of military dictatorships, they are more likely to affect collegial military rule, characterized by the rule of a military institution, rather than military strongman rule, characterized by the rule by a military personalist dictator. This is because territorial threats make the military more internally unified and cohesive, which helps the military rule as an institution. Existing studies provide a fair amount of empirical evidence consistent with this claim. External territorial threats are found to increase the likelihood of military regimes, particularly collegial military regimes, as well as the likelihood of military coups. The same is not true of non-territorial threats. This indicates that the type of external threat, rather than the mere presence of an external threat, matters.

It is good for people to flourish. But does the state have the authority to promote the flourishing of its citizens? Some political philosophers—perfectionists—hold that it does.1 For perfectionists, the state has the authority to pursue policies meant to promote the flourishing of its citizens, and it is appropriate for the state, or state officials, to take considerations about what will promote flourishing into account when exercising their authority. Traditionally for perfectionists, the fact that a policy will promote the flourishing of the citizens may legitimate the state's using its authority to pursue that policy, even if the policy does not promote any non-perfectionist aims— that is, aims other than flourishing. Other political philosophers—anti-perfectionists—hold that the state acts illegitimately when it tries to promote flourishing.2 These philosophers hold that the state does not have the authority to try to promote flourishing and that flourishing does not legitimate the extension of state authority to pursue a particular policy. One influential anti-perfectionist argument for this conclusion is that, however good it is for people to flourish, considerations about flourishing are not the appropriate grounds for political authority, and so it is an illegitimate extension of authority contrary to people's rights when the state uses its authority to promote flourishing. Let's call this argument the legitimacy objection to perfectionism.3 How should perfectionists answer this argument? After discussing the legitimacy objection in Section II, I explore one common perfectionist response in Section III—that there are natural or political duties to promote people's flourishing that can ground the state's authority to promote flourishing.4 I am skeptical that responses of this kind are dialectically effective. Rather, in Section IV, I suggest that the appropriate space for perfectionist state action lies in using considerations about flourishing to select among courses of state action that the state may legitimately pursue for non-perfectionist reasons. This consideration-based perfectionism allows officials to take considerations about flourishing seriously, without extending the legitimate scope of state authority, thereby avoiding the legitimacy objection. This shows that there are two distinct roles that flourishing could play within political life. On the one hand, flourishing could be something that the state is sensitive to in making its decisions. On the other hand, flourishing could be something that partially grounds the domain of legitimate state authority. The ability of consideration-based perfectionism to avoid the legitimacy objection shows how these roles can come apart—the state can be sensitive to flourishing even if flourishing does not partially ground the domain of legitimate state authority. Proponents of the legitimacy objection collapse together two distinct roles that flourishing can play in politics, and assume that responding to one role, the ability to legitimate state action, is sufficient to reject perfectionism in politics. In Section V, I explore how recognizing these two roles alters the effectiveness of different anti-perfectionist responses to perfectionism, by comparing political liberal and Kantian responses. This puts into relief questions about what anti-perfectionists find to be fundamentally problematic about perfectionism. Before discussing the legitimacy objection, it is important to clarify the targets of the objection and the goals of those proposing the objection—what it means to be a perfectionist and an anti-perfectionist. Here I understand the distinction between perfectionism and anti-perfectionism as those presenting the legitimacy objection understand it: whether the state acts legitimately when it undertakes laws and policies to promote flourishing.5 Legitimacy, in the most general sense, concerns the state's moral authority to issue rules that citizens have an enforceable obligation to comply with. Some particular law or policy, then, is legitimate for the state to adopt if the state, first, has the moral right to create enforceable obligations for the citizens to comply with the law or policy—it has the moral authority to create those rules—and, second, the state exercises this right in a permissible way—for example, by exercising the right using a permissible procedure. States act illegitimately when they exceed their authority or when they exercise their authority in an impermissible way. Traditionally, perfectionists hold that the fact that some law or policy contributes to human flourishing can partially ground the state's right to issue and enforce the law or policy—the state has the authority to promote flourishing—and that the state can permissibly exercise its authority to promote flourishing. Perfectionists hold, then, that a legitimate function of the state is to promote flourishing. This can be held more or less strongly. Some perfectionists claim that the state has a duty to promote flourishing (duty-based perfectionism), while other perfectionists merely claim that it is permissible for the state to promote flourishing (permission-based perfectionism).6 My discussion of the legitimacy objection will not presuppose either form of perfectionism.7 This leads to the question of what is meant by flourishing. As a general concept, flourishing consists in living a life that has intrinsic value. Different perfectionist theories provide different accounts of what it is for a life to have intrinsic value—whether it is in making autonomous choices that guide one's life, developing and exercising certain capacities, possessing various excellences, and so forth.8 One commonality between these views is that claims about intrinsically valuable lives have some objective component—some component that does not depend on an agent's attitude toward their own life and its value.9 Considerations about flourishing within politics, then, are considerations about what will contribute to the intrinsic value of lives and what laws and policies will facilitate citizens having intrinsically valuable lives. To add to the previous paragraph, perfectionists hold that the state may seek to promote its citizens leading intrinsically valuable lives. the power of the state should not be used to promote some ideals or discourage others, but rather should be used to provide a fair framework of rules and institutions within which each citizen can pursue his or her own view of the good life.10 While the state may enact policies that differentially impact people's ability to flourish—the state need not be neutral with respect to the effects of its policies on people's ability to flourish—the state only has the authority to pursue non-perfectionist ends. For example, the Rawlsian conception of justice denies that the state has the authority to promote any particular conception of flourishing, but does hold that the state should promote certain “primary goods,” which citizens can use to pursue their own conception of flourishing.11 These goods are determined based on the conception of the citizen within Rawls's theory of justice, and not in terms of their relation to flourishing.12 Anti-perfectionists may therefore allow that non-perfectionist considerations can identify certain goods to be promoted, but deny that what grounds the legitimacy of promoting these goods is their contribution to flourishing. The dispute between perfectionists and anti-perfectionists, then, concerns the role that flourishing may play in political life. Perfectionists hold that it is legitimate for the state to seek to promote flourishing, while anti-perfectionists hold that undertaking state action to promote flourishing is beyond the legitimate scope of state authority. The basic idea behind the legitimacy objection is that considerations about flourishing are not the right basis to ground the state's moral authority, and the state has the authority to promote only what grounds its moral authority. For the state only has that authority necessary to satisfy the justification for its rule—states do not have the authority to pursue their own independent projects. Since flourishing is not part of the basis on which the state has the right to rule, the state does not have the authority to promote flourishing itself. Correspondingly, the perfectionist claim that the state may legitimately implement policies for the sake of promoting flourishing requires an illegitimate extension of the state's authority.13 Why hold that considerations about flourishing are not the right basis for grounding the state's right to rule? The basic thought is that people—as free beings—have certain natural rights against being subjected to authority for certain kinds of reasons—reasons concerning what will lead to people's lives being better off overall. Anti-perfectionists, such as Jonathan Quong and Japa Pallikkathayil, typically generate this thought through various intuitive cases where it seems inappropriate to hold that one person is subject to the authority of another, even though it might make their life go better overall. For example, the fact that my brother is best suited to manage my finances, and so I have most reason to give him control of my finances, does not justify him taking control of my finances.14 It is a good idea for me to give him control, but the mere fact that it is a good idea does not ground a claim on his part, or anyone else's part, to wrest control from me and give it to him. I have a claim against being subject to another's authority on these kinds of grounds. This claim extends as well to being subject to another's authority to promote the flourishing of others. Just as I have my own life to live, my brother similarly has his own life to live, and so I, and others, lack the authority to make my brother manage my finances to ensure my financial well-being.15 The mere fact that I, and perhaps others, will flourish if my brother provides me services does not ground a claim to wrest control from his life to provide me with that service. My brother is not bound to be subject to anyone's authority for the sake of promoting the flourishing of others; this does not seem like the right kind of reason to subject him to anyone's authority. Let's call people's claim against others having the authority to interfere in their lives for certain reasons their right to live their own life consistent with an equal right of others to live theirs, or, more simply, people's right to live their own life.16 The general thought behind this right is that each person has their own life to live and so has authority in terms of setting their own purposes to pursue with their life, compatible with a similar authority given to others. This is a way of conceptualizing persons as free beings—they are free insofar as they are not subject to anyone's constraints in setting what ends to pursue.17 To subject my brother to an authority to promote my flourishing, then, is inconsistent with this conception of persons. My brother's life is not simply a means for promoting value within the world or ensuring that other people's lives are valuable. Rather, his life is something for him to live. To subject him to an authority on the grounds that it will promote my flourishing or his own flourishing, is to treat his life as subordinate to the promotion of this value. The right to live one's own life, then, is understood, among other things, as a constraint on the kinds of justifications that can be given for authority—justifications premised on benefit, including flourishing, cannot ground claims to authority. The legitimacy objection then proceeds as follows. Perfectionist justifications of state authority hold that the state has authority over people for the sake of promoting human flourishing. That is, the state has the authority to promote human flourishing as a distinctive goal over and above whatever non-perfectionist goals the state may have. Correspondingly, non-perfectionist justifications of state authority will not legitimate perfectionist exercises of state authority—such exercises extend the state's authority without furthering non-perfectionist goals. This extension of authority, then, needs to be grounded on the basis of promoting flourishing itself. But this is incompatible with people's right to live their own life—this right protects against being subject to an authority on the grounds of mere promotion of benefit, such as human flourishing. The fact that some course of action will promote people's flourishing cannot justify the claim that the state has legitimate authority to pursue that course of action, and so the state illegitimately exceeds its authority through implementing laws for purposes that are beyond the scope of state authority.18 Anti-perfectionists do not hold that the legitimacy objection undermines all political authority, only that it undermines perfectionist political authority. For anti-perfectionists still claim that states have the legitimate authority to pursue non-perfectionist ends. Before continuing on to how perfectionists might respond to this objection, it is important to see why anti-perfectionists think that states have the legitimate authority to pursue non-perfectionist ends. This provides a standard for what kinds of arguments anti-perfectionists find acceptable as responses to the legitimacy objection, and so a potential template for perfectionists to follow in responding to the objection. One common account presented by anti-perfectionists focuses on people's enforceable natural duties.19 By “enforceable natural duties” I mean the duties that people have prior to and independent from entering into a political society or other association with people that can ground the use of coercive force on the part of others to generate compliance. I do not assume, though, that all moral duties are enforceable natural duties—some moral duties may fail to ground coercion and some might only arise subsequent to an association with others. The basic argument, then, is that the state's legitimate authority is grounded on people's natural duties. There are two ways that a natural duty account of the state's legitimate authority might proceed. The first, adopted by some liberals such as Quong, is to hold that there are some natural duties that override or limit people's right to live their own life—such as the duty to rescue others in peril.20 The idea, then, is that insofar as I have an enforceable duty to another, I do not have a right to fulfill that duty in whatever way I wish. Rather, I must take the course of action that will do the most to fulfill my natural duties.21 In cases where following the authority of another will greatly increase the likelihood that I and others will fulfill our natural duties, we are obligated to comply with that authority or be subject to coercion to enforce compliance. In these cases, I cannot appeal to the right to live my own life against this authority, because that authority is based on a duty that already limits my right to live my own life. Insofar, then, as the state is able to greatly increase the ability of citizens to comply with their various natural duties, the state correspondingly has legitimate authority over them, at least for those purposes.22 Let's call this the “liberal response” to the legitimacy objection. The second way that a natural duty account of the state's legitimate authority might proceed is by holding that people's right to live their own life itself provides people with enforceable natural duties. This account is favored by Kantians such as Pallikkathayil.23 The basic idea here is that people's right to live their own life gives people an enforceable natural duty to create the conditions for people to live their own lives. But, the argument goes, this duty cannot be discharged absent the state—the state is necessary to secure the conditions for people to live their own lives through setting up systems of property and contract, resolving disputes between persons, and so forth. As with the liberal response, people have no claim on the grounds of their right to live their own lives against the state having this authority, because it is that very same right which licenses the state to have this authority over them. Let's call this the “Kantian response” to the legitimacy objection. This presentation of these anti-perfectionist responses to the legitimacy objection is not meant to show that anti-perfectionists successfully demonstrate that the legitimacy objection allows non-perfectionist state action. Rather, it is meant to show the standard that anti-perfectionists hold themselves to in determining whether the state's authority is legitimate. In this respect, the central claim in the liberal and Kantian responses is similar—the justification of state authority relies on some enforceable natural duty that already constrains a person's right to live their own life. For these views, such duties define the scope of legitimate state authority and ground a range of non-perfectionist ends that the state may pursue. One perfectionist response to the legitimacy objection is to argue for the state's authority to promote flourishing using the same method as anti-perfectionists. That is, some perfectionists argue that the authority to promote flourishing is grounded on a duty to promote the flourishing of others.24 If there are such duties, then it is possible to ground the state's authority to promote flourishing on the basis of fulfilling such a duty, just like the natural duties anti-perfectionists invoke. To this end, some perfectionists hold that there is a natural duty to promote flourishing—a duty that arises prior to any form of political organization—while other perfectionists argue that there is a political duty—a duty that arises within political society—to promote flourishing. In Section III.I, I will discuss the position that the duty to promote flourishing is a natural duty held by individuals, and I will address the second possibility in Section III.II. The idea that people have a natural duty to promote flourishing just holds that, among whatever other natural duties people may have, one duty is to promote the flourishing of both oneself and others. Perfectionists often ground duties to promote flourishing on people's interest in flourishing itself.25 For instance, Joseph Raz argues that “[s]ince autonomy is morally valuable there is reason for everyone to make himself and everyone else autonomous” and so there is a duty to promote the conditions to make people autonomous.26 The value of people's flourishing—living a self-directed, autonomous life for Raz—grounds people's duty to promote flourishing. The assumption here is that people's interest in flourishing is sufficiently weighty to ground an enforceable duty to promote the conditions for flourishing, which can then ground the state's authority to promote flourishing.27 There is something dialectically odd about this argument. Anti-perfectionists appeal to intuitions which deny that people's interest in flourishing can ground claims to authority over people. Perfectionists, then, hold that people's interest in flourishing grounds a natural duty to promote flourishing, which then grounds claims to authority. But the intuitions to which anti-perfectionists appeal should also support denying that people's interest in flourishing can ground the relevant kind of duty that can ground a claim to authority. For basing a natural duty to promote flourishing on people's interest in flourishing seems to just amount to restricting people's right to live their own life for mere benefit. The interest in flourishing plays the same role in both cases in grounding a restriction on people's authority over their own lives; the difference is just whether this restriction subjects people to a duty or an authority. Anti-perfectionists who endorse the legitimacy objection, then, are already committed to denying that there are natural duties to promote flourishing.28 It is therefore not clear why this alternative conceptualization of how flourishing might ground the state's authority should undermine the general intuition that anti-perfectionists have. Perfectionists might respond to this by giving intuitions that support the duty to promote the flourishing of both oneself and others. But rarely are such intuitions actually given. Take, for instance, Steven Wall's argument that the right to live one's own life may be constrained by perfectionist considerations. He argues that, intuitively, “we do not have a right, grounded in autonomy [that is, our right to live our own lives], to form and execute plans designed to harm others, even if we take care not to contravene their equal right to autonomy,” where this “harm” is understood to be a failure to satisfy our duties to promote the flourishing of others.29 While Wall finds this claim intuitive, he provides no concrete, intuitive cases to support it, no instance where a person has a natural duty to promote flourishing that might ground another's authority without also including the violation of some other natural duty.30 It is unclear, then, why anti-perfectionists should accept such arguments as dialectically effective—it seems to be just a bare rejection of the anti-perfectionists' claims, without the appeal to a common set of shared judgments that might support the controversial principle. This, of course, does not show that there are no such perfectionist natural duties. But it does make it unlikely that appeals to such duties can make effective headway against the legitimacy objection. Such a response seems doomed to a dialectical stalemate, with perfectionists and anti-perfectionists each appealing to a competing set of intuitions. To make progress against the legitimacy objection, some alternative argument is needed. One alternative is for perfectionists to argue that political societies—that is, the state—have a duty to promote flourishing. What might the argument for the state's duty to promote people's flourishing look like? Collis Tahzib has recently proposed such a duty within a broader Rawlsian political framework.31 He argues that people in an “original position” scenario, selecting principles of justice to govern the state's conduct, would include a right against the state to the fair conditions for living a flourishing life, which gives rise to a duty on the part of the state. This duty then competes with some of the state's other duties, such as distributive goals like satisfying the difference principle. The basic thought is that given people have an interest in flourishing, they would prefer to flourish more rather than less. While no one can demand the right to flourish itself—since that would not be sensitive to their own responsibility with respect to their flourishing—it seems appropriate that agents might demand the right to the fair conditions of flourishing. The state determines, in part, whether we have a fair shot at securing our flourishing through the institutions that govern the structure of society and the public culture that the state cultivates. Agents in the position would find it and to select a set of principles to govern society which include a duty on the part of the state to secure and fair conditions for people's This gives grounds for that the state has a duty to promote flourishing. that argument in that the state has a duty to promote flourishing, or the fair conditions for flourishing. that show that the state has the authority to promote I am skeptical that the mere that the state has a duty to promote flourishing shows that the state has the authority to promote This is to a general fact about the between an agent's duties and their authority over others. The fact that an has a duty does not that the has any or claim rights over that For example, I make a to my to the and so have a duty to This gives me a duty to the necessary means to to the as a it does not give me any authority over others such that they must provide me the means necessary to my If I lack a the fact that I have a duty to my does not give me authority over anyone else to their I only have authority over whatever I prior to the The basic reason for this from people's right to live their own life. If agents could authority over others simply by duties, then people's right to live their own life subject to the duties through the to by others, their authority over their own life. It must be that the agents with the authority to fulfill this duty is compatible with people's right to live their own life, and so an argument is needed. here may be that there is a difference between me having authority over others through making a and the state having authority over its citizens to fulfill its duties. For citizens the state, and so it might seem that if the state has a duty, then the citizens must also have that duty by of their the state. I that this can be so between the duties of a and those who the is For instance, a might be subject to an example, to a agents the also being subject to that is, the are not subject to an obligation to the that agents have do not to all those who the The authority to take the necessary for the to its duty has to on the authority of the over the of the rather than on the fact that the has a Correspondingly, there needs to be an independent argument to show that the state has the authority to fulfill its even if citizens have a duty to promote flourishing based on the state's duty, this does not show that this is the right kind of duty to extend the state's authority. For citizens can have political duties that are also and so do not extend the state's authority. One potential is the duty of duty of citizens to provide public reasons that other citizens can accept in political by some anti-perfectionists such as Quong, and to which Tahzib also This duty is not a it is not by the state or its but by the or of other Anti-perfectionists can hold that it is an illegitimate assumption to argue from the fact that citizens have a political duty to the conclusion that this duty extends the authority of the state. For there still the question of whether this duty is an enforceable duty, a duty that constrains people's right to live their own life, and which therefore can ground the authority of the state to promote flourishing. argument is to show that the political duty of the state to an extension of state authority. The discussion in Section shows how anti-perfectionists like Quong and might argue for which political duties extend the state's authority consistent with people's right to live their own the fact that certain political duties follow from people's natural For Tahzib to make a similar claim for the duty to promote flourishing, he would need to argue that the authority to promote flourishing from people's natural is, that there is a natural duty to promote flourishing. it seems to just be an assumption that it is already within the state's authority to promote people's flourishing, and the duty just how the state may exercise its authority. argument at most shows that the state has the duty to promote perfectionist but not that this duty extends the legitimate authority of the state to promote perfectionist This a general for perfectionist arguments for the state having the authority to pursue perfectionist policies based on the claim that the state has a duty to promote flourishing. such a duty is to demonstrate the claim to authority, perfectionists can also show that such a duty limits people's right to live their own life. The way for perfectionists to do though, requires that perfectionists show that there is a natural duty to promote flourishing. As I in Section III.I, against the legitimacy objection on the basis of a natural duty to promote flourishing is dialectically as the same intuitions that support the legitimacy objection also support denying that there is a natural duty to promote flourishing. dialectical perfectionists and anti-perfectionists assume that the over whether the state has the authority to promote flourishing is about whether the state may legitimately exercise authority when that authority is for the sake of promoting flourishing. But why not use considerations about flourishing to from among the range of legitimate policy rather than partially that That is, of considerations about flourishing extending

Violent conflicts are observed in many parts of the world and have profound impacts on the lives of exposed individuals. The limited evidence available from specific country or region contexts suggest that conflict exposure may reduce health service utilization and have adverse affects on health. This study focused on identifying the association between conflict exposure and continuum of care (CoC) services that are crucial for achieving improvements in reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health and nutrition (RMNCHN). We combined data from 2 sources, the Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program's (UCDP) Georeferenced Event Dataset, for a sample of 452,192 women across 49 countries observed over the period 1997 to 2018. We utilized 2 consistent measures of conflict-incidence and intensity-and analyzed their association with maternal CoC in 4 key components: (i) at least 1 antenatal care (ANC) visit; (ii) 4 or more ANC visits; (iii) 4 or more ANC visits and institutional delivery; and (iv) 4 or more ANC visits, institutional delivery, and receipt of postnatal care (PNC) either for the mother or the child within 48 hours after birth. To identify the association between conflict exposure and components of CoC, we estimated binary logistic regressions, controlling for a large set of individual and household-level characteristics and year-of-survey and country/province fixed-effects. This empirical setup allows us to draw comparisons among observationally similar women residing in the same locality, thereby mitigating the concerns over unobserved heterogeneity. Around 39.6% (95% CI: 39.5% to 39.7%) of the sample was exposed to some form of violent conflict at the time of their pregnancy during the study period (2003 to 2018). Although access to services decreased for each additional component of CoC in maternal healthcare for all women, the dropout rate was significantly higher among women who have been exposed to conflict, relative to those who have not had such exposure. From logistic regression estimates, we observed that relative to those without exposure to conflict, the odds of utilization of each of the components of CoC was lower among those women who were exposed to at least 1 violent conflict. We estimated odds ratios of 0.86 (95% CI: 0.82 to 0.91, p < 0.001) for at least 1 ANC; 0.95 (95% CI: 0.91 to 0.98, p < 0.005) for 4 or more ANC; and 0.92 (95% CI: 0.89 to 0.96, p < 0.001) for 4 or more ANC and institutional delivery. We showed that both the incidence of exposure to conflict as well as its intensity have profound negative implications for CoC. Study limitations include the following: (1) We could not extend the CoC scale beyond PNC due to inconsistent definitions and the lack of availability of data for all 49 countries across time. (2) The measure of conflict intensity used in this study is based on the number of deaths due to the absence of information on other types of conflict-related harms. This study showed that conflict exposure is statistically significantly and negatively associated with utilization of maternal CoC services, in each component of the CoC scale. These findings have highlighted the challenges in achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 3 in conflict settings, and the need for more concerted efforts in ensuring CoC, to mitigate its negative implications on maternal and child health.

BackgroundViolent conflicts are observed in many parts of the world and have profound impacts on the lives of exposed individuals. The limited evidence available from specific country or region contexts suggest that conflict exposure may reduce health service utilization and have adverse affects on health. This study focused on identifying the association between conflict exposure and continuum of care (CoC) services that are crucial for achieving improvements in reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health and nutrition (RMNCHN).Methods and findingsWe combined data from 2 sources, the Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) and the Uppsala Conflict Data Program’s (UCDP) Georeferenced Event Dataset, for a sample of 452,192 women across 49 countries observed over the period 1997 to 2018. We utilized 2 consistent measures of conflict—incidence and intensity—and analyzed their association with maternal CoC in 4 key components: (i) at least 1 antenatal care (ANC) visit; (ii) 4 or more ANC visits; (iii) 4 or more ANC visits and institutional delivery; and (iv) 4 or more ANC visits, institutional delivery, and receipt of postnatal care (PNC) either for the mother or the child within 48 hours after birth. To identify the association between conflict exposure and components of CoC, we estimated binary logistic regressions, controlling for a large set of individual and household-level characteristics and year-of-survey and country/province fixed-effects. This empirical setup allows us to draw comparisons among observationally similar women residing in the same locality, thereby mitigating the concerns over unobserved heterogeneity. Around 39.6% (95% CI: 39.5% to 39.7%) of the sample was exposed to some form of violent conflict at the time of their pregnancy during the study period (2003 to 2018). Although access to services decreased for each additional component of CoC in maternal healthcare for all women, the dropout rate was significantly higher among women who have been exposed to conflict, relative to those who have not had such exposure. From logistic regression estimates, we observed that relative to those without exposure to conflict, the odds of utilization of each of the components of CoC was lower among those women who were exposed to at least 1 violent conflict. We estimated odds ratios of 0.86 (95% CI: 0.82 to 0.91, p < 0.001) for at least 1 ANC; 0.95 (95% CI: 0.91 to 0.98, p < 0.005) for 4 or more ANC; and 0.92 (95% CI: 0.89 to 0.96, p < 0.001) for 4 or more ANC and institutional delivery. We showed that both the incidence of exposure to conflict as well as its intensity have profound negative implications for CoC. Study limitations include the following: (1) We could not extend the CoC scale beyond PNC due to inconsistent definitions and the lack of availability of data for all 49 countries across time. (2) The measure of conflict intensity used in this study is based on the number of deaths due to the absence of information on other types of conflict-related harms.ConclusionsThis study showed that conflict exposure is statistically significantly and negatively associated with utilization of maternal CoC services, in each component of the CoC scale. These findings have highlighted the challenges in achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 3 in conflict settings, and the need for more concerted efforts in ensuring CoC, to mitigate its negative implications on maternal and child health.

The apparent failure of competitive party politics to take root in much of contemporary Africa has not curtailed efforts by military regimes to extend popular participation. Curiously, current scholarship does not adequately reflect the range of such initiatives.' While analysts periodically look for liberalizing trends in Africa's soldier states and are primed to consider the prospects for a return to civilian rule,2 few have examined participatory institutions under indeterminate military tutelage.3 Indeed, the literature reflects a tendency to assume that officers who tarry in government regard the modem bureaucratic army as a paragon for the organization of society as a whole.4 There is growing evidence to suggest, however, that in the future Africa's military rulers will have greater recourse to corporatist models of state-society relations as they seek to avoid a return to the barracks. Why this is so and what characteristics these structural alternatives are likely to assume are central questions addressed in this essay. Following a brief typology of corporatist systems, my purpose here is to relate the installation of corporatist modes of representation and policymaking in Africa to the quest for effectiveness and legitimacy by regimes faced with a crisis of governance which is inseparable from the international context of capitalism. This proposition will be developed more fully in a case study of neotraditional corporatism in Niger. Distinctions among several frequently occurring varieties of corporatism establish the parameters for elaborating the special case of neotraditional corporatism, a mode of governance that draws heavily on indigenous cultural patterns of authority, interest aggregation, and leader-follower relations as prime sources of legitimation. By examining Niger's recent experience with participation fostered through a five-tier hierarchy of development councils, we shall see how a corporatist-style representational system was installed by the military rulers in a two-step process. First the system was presented as transitional; it served to draw civilian constituencies into preparations for a return to constitutional government. Then, when Niger's domestic economy began wrenching from the shocks of a precipitous decline in the price and market for uranium, the existence of these purportedly transitional participatory structures preempted the formation of class-based parties or pluralist political alternatives. The. final section of our analysis, which links the onset of a crisis in Niger's political economy of development with the new politics of participation, explores the regime's recourse to corporatist intermediaries in the implementation of structural and policy reforms. Following a discussion that highlights the interactive relationship between economic policy dilemmas and the problems of governance, we conclude with a few theoretical and empirical observations about neotraditional corporatism and regime legitimation in Niger.

ABSTRACTStudies on attitudes toward democracy in post-authoritarian settings tend to overlook support for democracy before the authoritarian experience. Since authoritarian experiences are alleged to affect attitudes towards democracy and authoritarianism, we use the case of Chile to assess the determinants in support for democracy between 1972 and 2013. Estimating marginal effects and predicted probabilities for probit models on polls conducted before and after military rule (1973–1990), we find weak support for authoritarianism before 1973 and stable support for democracy before, during and after military rule. We also review public opinion polls for the authoritarian period to show stable support for democracy. Since democracy was restored, views on the military regime have worsened. The authoritarian experience did not change the determinants of attitudes toward democracy. Those in the middle class and leftists supported democracy more strongly before, during and after military rule.

Globally, 1-5 billion people live in countries affected by violent conflict. International aid to fragile and conflict-affected states accounts for 30 percent of global official development assistance (ODA) flows. However, no low-income fragile or conflict-affected country has yet to achieve a single Millennium Development Goal (MDG). For the first time, a group of these countries have joined together to discuss their shared development challenges and advocate for better international policies to address their needs. Calling themselves the g7+, this group represents an important new voice in the debate over aid effectiveness and it carries high expectations. This article describes the rise of the g7+ and attempts to answer the question on everyone's mind: Can it deliver? Recent years have witnessed a new criticism of the international aid architecture and its shortcomings in addressing the challenges posed by state fragility. Attention has shifted from hard targets in terms of percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) spent on official development assistance, and even the MDG targets, to the overall effectiveness of international development efforts. Critics have pointed to persistent shortcomings in the way that international assistance is delivered, particularly in problems of will and attention, lack of engagement with national stakeholders, aversion to risk, inflexible and cumbersome financing mechanisms, opaque decisionmaking processes, lack of country ownership, and a distressing lack of coherence and coordination among international actors. The potential for donor assistance to have the unintended effect of undermining, rather than bolstering, state capacity and legitimacy is now widely recognized. International actors have been faulted for applying cookie-cutter approaches to complex problems in vastly diverse environments, even as thinking on the challenges posed by conflict and fragility has evolved. In the past several years, there have been a number of milestones in seeking a structured international response to the failures of development assistance to meet challenges of fragility. Building on the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness- in 2007 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries endorsed a set of Principles for Good International Engagement in Fragile States and Situations (the Fragile States Principles) to guide aid to fragile states. However, these were top-down reform efforts: despite the good thinking that underpinned the Fragile States Principles, they were created by donors, for donors. Much like the Washington Consensus, which governed development policy in the 1980s, the early discourse on aid effectiveness largely consisted of outsiders diagnosing the problem, prescribing the solution, and assuming responsibility for carrying out the treatment. This started to change at the Third High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, held in Accra, Ghana, in 2008, in which developing countries played a more active role in the preparations, and civil society groups across the developed and developing world were widely consulted. On the fragile-states front, perhaps the most significant development to come out of Accra was the establishment of the International Dialogue on Peacebuilding and Statebuilding. [1] The Dialogue brings donor and recipient countries together to devise a realistic set of peacebuilding and statebuilding objectives to address the root causes of conflict and fragility. Its participants include OECD donors; nontraditional donors (such as Brazil and China); international and regional organizations (including the UN, the World Bank, the African Union, and the African Development Bank); representatives of civil society; and, most importantly, representatives of conflict-affected and fragile states. First proposed at a preparatory meeting in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, in July 2008, the Dialogue was endorsed in Accra in September 2008 and formally launched at the end of that year. …

Drawing on newly collected empirical data, this article explores the complex long-term political relationship between the state and the military in Mali. It argues that post-2013 French intervention has lacked an understanding of the place of the military within state structures. This led to an approach to statebuilding premised on the false idea that Mali has historically been a weak state, with weakness defined in military terms. It challenges this understanding and provides a counterargument rooted in a historical approach. It highlights how the French focus on military strengthening post-2013 inadvertently created the conditions for the 2020 coup d’état.

Although the Northern Nigerian state of Kaduna has the second highest incidence of violent conflicts among Nigeria’s 36 states, the population generally reports a low level of expected victimization. A large-N survey conducted in the state in 2021 showed that 65% of the population believe they are unlikely to be directly affected by violent conflict in the future. This is surprising, given that 42% of respondents experienced at least 10 conflict incidents within a 10 km radius around their dwellings between 1997 and 2020. Ordered logit regressions reveal that the more individuals are exposed to conflict, the less worried they are about getting victimized. The negative correlation between violent conflict and expected victimization might be due to the existential threat posed by violent conflict, which prompts people to rely more heavily on their ethnoreligious kinship ties for both material and non-material support. This, in turn, attenuates their fear of victimization.

Social media enable broad and diverse publics to mobilize around a shared collective identity. In this article, the authors use social movement literature and studies of peace and conflict to foreground the role of platform-mediated communication in creating a national identity in a fragile state. We argue that, by affording activists with a possibility of public, yet anonymous interactions, social media may play a crucial role in conferring state legitimacy during a violent conflict. Investigating the case of Mariupol, Ukraine, where a small group of citizens employed social media to support and legitimize the Ukrainian state among the city population, the authors illuminate the use of new media affordances to construct a national identity among digitally networked publics, mobilizing support for a threatened state.

Violent conflict and instability affect men and women in heterogeneous ways, including differentiated impacts on economic, social, physical, and mental well-being. This study assesses the impact of the post-2013 conflict in South Sudan on adolescent girls and young women. The analysis uses data from the Adolescent Girls Initiative endline survey and the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data to measure conflict exposure using constructed cluster-level, self-reported, and external conflict exposure variables. The impact of conflict exposure is then estimated on a set of socioeconomic outcomes of adolescent girls by comparing exposed and non-exposed clusters before and after the conflict. The results suggest that girls from clusters more affected by the conflict had statistically different outcomes compared with girls from less affected clusters. Specifically, there is strong evidence that the conflict negatively affected outcomes related to income opportunities, aspirations, marriage, and household characteristics, but increased self-reported empowerment and entrepreneurial potential scores. The results indicate that impacts on labor supply, personal motivation, household conditions, and other forms of victimization are important channels through which conflict negatively impacts adolescent girls.

Urbanization and violent conflict have been two global trends gaining more and more momentum in recent years. This has important implications for agricultural development, which unfortunately are still not well understood. Urban proximity is generally associated with agricultural intensification and improved market participation, while farming systems in remote areas are characterized by larger shares of subsistence production. Such differences along the remoteness gradient likely also play a role in how conflict exposure affects agricultural production. That is, we must assume that the effect of conflict on agricultural development is location-dependent—a fact that is generally neglected in empirical analysis. We address this gap by drawing from a unique nationally representative data set of 2,292 paddy farmers in Myanmar and estimating the effect of conflict exposure and travel times on agricultural production during the monsoon season of 2021. By applying multivariate additive models, we allow for nonlinear and interacted effects of conflict exposure and urban proximity, thereby explicitly exploring spatial variation in the effect of conflict exposure. We find strong positive effects of urban proximity on paddy rice intensification and sales, while conflict exposure has disproportionately negative effects in direct proximity to urban centers and very remote areas. For agricultural development—and smallholder incomes in general—this means that productive areas, on the one hand, and the poorest areas of the country, on the other hand, are especially affected by conflict.

State fragility and violent conflict are among the most daunting challenges that face us today in reducing poverty and human suffering – and achieving the development goals we have all signed up to. While there is increasing recognition that functioning states matter for development, international engagement in situations of fragility and conflict has often neglected the foundations upon which strong and legitimate states are built.

BackgroundThe relationship between exposure to conflict violence during pregnancy and the risks of miscarriage, stillbirth, and perinatal mortality has not been studied empirically using rigorous methods and appropriate data. We investigated the association between reduced exposure to conflict violence during pregnancy and the risks of adverse pregnancy outcomes in Colombia.Methods and findingsWe adopted a regression discontinuity (RD) design using the July 20, 2015 cease-fire declared during the Colombian peace process as an exogenous discontinuous change in exposure to conflict events during pregnancy, comparing women with conception dates before and after the cease-fire date. We constructed the cohorts of all pregnant women in Colombia for each day between January 1, 2013 and December 31, 2017 using birth and death certificates. A total of 3,254,696 women were followed until the end of pregnancy. We measured conflict exposure as the total number of conflict events that occurred in the municipality where a pregnant woman lived during her pregnancy. We first assessed whether the cease-fire did induce a discontinuous fall in conflict exposure for women with conception dates after the cease-fire to then estimate the association of this reduced exposure with the risks of miscarriage, stillbirth, and perinatal mortality. We found that the July 20, 2015 cease-fire was associated with a reduction of the average number of conflict events (from 2.64 to 2.40) to which women were exposed during pregnancy in their municipalities of residence (mean differences −0.24; 95% confidence interval [CI] −0.35 to −0.13; p < 0.001). This association was greater in municipalities where Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) had a greater presence historically. The reduction in average exposure to conflict violence was, in turn, associated with a decrease of 9.53 stillbirths per 1,000 pregnancies (95% CI −16.13 to −2.93; p = 0.005) for municipalities with total number of FARC-related violent events above the 90th percentile of the distribution of FARC-related conflict events and a decrease of 7.57 stillbirths per 1,000 pregnancies (95% CI −13.14 to −2.00; p = 0.01) for municipalities with total number of FARC-related violent events above the 75th percentile of FARC-related events. For perinatal mortality, we found associated reductions of 10.69 (95% CI −18.32 to −3.05; p = 0.01) and 6.86 (95% CI −13.24 to −0.48; p = 0.04) deaths per 1,000 pregnancies for the 2 types of municipalities, respectively. We found no association with miscarriages. Formal tests support the validity of the key RD assumptions in our data, while a battery of sensitivity analyses and falsification tests confirm the robustness of our empirical results. The main limitations of the study are the retrospective nature of the information sources and the potential for conflict exposure misclassification.ConclusionsOur study offers evidence that reduced exposure to conflict violence during pregnancy is associated with important (previously unmeasured) benefits in terms of reducing the risk of stillbirth and perinatal deaths. The findings are consistent with such beneficial associations manifesting themselves mainly through reduced violence exposure during the early stages of pregnancy. Beyond the relevance of this evidence for other countries beset by chronic armed conflicts, our results suggest that the fledgling Colombian peace process may be already contributing to better population health.