Domestic Conflict Research Articles

Get off my lawn

It is argued that threat related to territorial civil wars generates negative interpersonal attitudes that are both more intense and more broadly oriented than previously thought. That is, civil wars fought over issues of autonomy or secession foment social intolerance, a broad orientation that extends well beyond members of former enemy groups to an aversion to interpersonal differences in general. The expectation that the issue the civil war is fought over is consequential is tested with data from the World Values Survey and the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset. The empirical domain consists of over 130,000 individuals across 123 surveys in 69 countries over the 1989–2008 period. Results from multilevel models indicate a positive and statistically significant relationship between domestic territorial conflicts and subsequent social intolerance. Substantively, territorial civil wars have a far greater impact on individuals’ attitudes than do ‘standard’ correlates of social intolerance that are well established in the literature. Further, non-territorial civil war is unrelated to attitudes of social intolerance. Empirical results are robust to several model specifications and are not a mere artifact of the potential reverse relationship, whereby intolerant societies are (erroneously) presumed to be at a higher risk of civil wars in the first place. The findings have implications for the understanding of civil war resolution, civil war reoccurrence, and the contextual correlates of interpersonal intolerance.

Sustainable Environment, Economic Growth And Poverty Eradication Measures: The African Context: Why There Is No Meeting Point?

Poverty and hunger are the gravest challenges facing the African continent in the 21 st century. About One third of African population live below the United Nations poverty line of 1.5dollars per day .Most African governments are struggling with poverty, epidemics, hunger, famine, insurgency, domestic conflicts and poor governance of both human and abundant natural resources found in Africa. However, some African states are well endowed with human and natural resources but are equally enmeshed in wars, ethnic conflicts and resource curse. Majority of African population would prefer poverty eradication measure, at any cost, over environmental sustainability measures. This is because, hunger and epidemics face most Africa states with agonizing contempt .However, there is a genuine desire by most responsible African leaders and governments to eradicate poverty and to catch up with the developed west, with minimal cost to the environment. This desire, sometimes, brings these African States into collision course with not only their natural environment but also against some basic fundamental objectives of modern global institutional frameworks for sustainable economic development. Drawing from a socio- cultural perspective, and considering the level of poverty among some selected African states, this paper seeks to develop a mechanism for balancing economic growth with environmental sustainability in Africa. The methodology includes a discourse on some selected African states against the background of their existing policies and legal frameworks on economic sustainability.The significance of this paper is that an understanding of the impacts of the social- cultural backgrounds of the economic and environmental sustainability practices in these selected African states, may throw more light on why there seems to be no meeting point in Africa, between environmental sustainability practices and poverty eradication measures in Africa. The paper will recommend ways on how this balance could be achieved. Keywords : environmental sustainability, economic growth, poverty eradication and Africa.

Family Amusements: Buster Brown and the Place of Humor in the Early Twentieth-Century Home

Historians and critics often view R. F. Outcault’s comic strip Buster Brown (1902–1921) as a subversive series, as it is headlined by a naughty boy who constantly challenges adults and whose pranks appear to undermine family stability. The strip, however, also has a conservative function. While Buster Brown depicts the home as a site of conflict, it also celebrates the middle-class family as a resilient institution. The series specifically suggests that humor is effective in dealing with domestic conflict, suggesting that laughter and playfulness alleviate tensions and allow family members to sympathize with one another. In Buster Brown , the mischief-making child is made delightful rather than threatening. At a time when many Progressive Era Americans worried that the institution of the family was in a state of crisis, Buster Brown assured its readers that poking fun at family matters fortified the home.

Nation-Building through War

How do the outcomes of international wars affect domestic social change? In turn, how do changing patterns of social identification and domestic conflict affect a nation’s military capability? We propose a “second image reversed” theory of war that links structural variables, power politics, and the individuals that constitute states. Drawing on experimental results in social psychology, we recapture a lost building block of the classical realist theory of statecraft: the connections between the outcomes of international wars, patterns of social identification and domestic conflict, and the nation’s future war-fighting capability. When interstate war can significantly increase a state’s international status, peace is less likely to prevail in equilibrium because, by winning a war and raising the nation’s status, leaders induce individuals to identify nationally, thereby reducing internal conflict by increasing investments in state capacity. In certain settings, it is only through the anticipated social change that victory can generate that leaders can unify their nation, and the higher anticipated payoffs to national unification makes leaders fight international wars that they would otherwise choose not to fight. We use the case of German unification after the Franco-Prussian war to demonstrate the model’s value-added and illustrate the interaction between social identification, nationalism, state-building, and the power politics of interstate war.

Gaps in Crisis Mental Health: Suicide and Homicide-suicide

Gaps in crises of mental health include differentiating between various types of lethal violence of people who suicide and those who murder and then kill themselves and the role, if any, that substance use has in the outcome. In this study, a sample of medical examiner investigative and toxicology reports from Los Angeles and Orange counties in California were available for analysis for 432 suicide cases and 193 homicide-suicide cases. Significant differences noted were levels of alcohol were higher in suicide victims than homicide-suicide perpetrators (p=.004). Homicide-suicide perpetrators had almost twice the level of stimulants in their system than suicide victims (p = .022) but did not have elevated levels of drugs or alcohol compared to suicide deaths. Predictors of suicide included: substance abuse history, high number of drugs in system, death inside a house, and legally impaired by alcohol. Further, the cause of death was most often by gun shot or hanging. Predictors of homicide-suicide included gun shot as the cause of death, female gender, domestic conflict, children living in the home, and prior arrest for substance abuse. Download : Download full-size image

Fair Labor

Labor relations during the run up to and duration of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 have been called the “Pax Panama Pacifica” thanks to unwritten agreements between fair planners and key labor unions in San Francisco. Fair planners intended to use the exposition to declare California’s ascendance as an economic stronghold in the Pacific, but the staging of it involved work that was inexorably bound with local, domestic, class, race, and gender conflicts in the Progressive Era. This article looks at why avoiding labor strife was critical to fair organizers’ objectives, and examines in particular the groups for whom the peace did not hold: unskilled workers, women, people of color, and foreign performers.

Life after trauma in aceh: consequences and therapies

Longstanding war conflict in Aceh as well as the earthquake and tsunami in 2004 not only resulted in many deaths and destruction in many other aspects of life. In 2012-2013 this study was conducted to determine the events related to the trauma experienced by children in Aceh, consequencesand effectiveness of a psychotherapy. Intervention was given using the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). A total of 56 children from Banda Aceh and Aceh Besar were taken as samples of this study, with an age range of 5 to 17 years. To measure the effectiveness of the therapy treatment used the Children Behavior Checklist (CBCL) with 112 items for older children from 11 years on and the standard CBCL for smaller kids. The CBCL versions used the Indonesian language that has been validated. In other hand, the traumatic stressors was obtained from a list of Traumatic Events. The result shows that based on the large number of events, then the order of the highest number of cases was traumatized by the earthquake and tsunami (20%), domestic violence (15%), war conflict (13%), bullying (13%), accident (8%) , lost (4%) and trafficking (2%). Almost 75% of all children have improved in their condition and become more adaptive or in other word belong now in the “normal” category. The improvement is there can then be attributed to the therapy. About 25% remains in a clinical or borderline condition.Keywords: trauma, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy, effectiveness

Communication networks and the transnational spread of ethnic conflict

Theories of conflict diffusion have long argued that domestic conflict spreads from one country to others. One set of mechanisms explaining this relies on material flows across borders that incite violence in neighboring countries. Another set of mechanisms, however, relies on informational flows. Information about ongoing violence elsewhere triggers strategic learning and demonstration effects in subnational conflict actors which may increase the likelihood that these actors ultimately resort to violence. While the first set of mechanisms can be – and has been – assessed using spatial proximity to define connections between countries, this article provides a test of the second mechanism by analyzing communication flows. The article shows that the occurrence of ethnic conflict in a country’s main communication partners significantly increases the probability of domestic ethnic violence, and that this effect operates in conjunction with, and is at least as strong as, the spatial contagion effect of conflict in the geographic neighborhood.

The EU's Convergence Dilemma

Abstract As economic stagnation continues to mark the EU in the fifth year of the euro zone crisis, political support for integration is waning. The European Parliament elections of 2014 returned a hitherto unparalleled number of Eurosceptic MEPs, with EU-critical parties becoming the largest ones in several Member States. Much of this Euroscepticism is driven by economic polarisation between core and peripheral countries. While an increasing number of voters in the northwestern creditor countries resent having to foot the bill for what they consider economic mismanagement in the periphery, voters in peripheral countries increasingly rebel against what they deem to be an economically catastrophic Diktat from Germany and its allies. Continued political support for European integration will hinge on successful income convergence in the EU but the current dilemma is that such policies might not be politically feasible. Periods of rapid convergence would seem to suggest that success depends on two main policy strategies. First, a monetary policy that promotes credit for productive purposes, leaves inflation control to other instruments, and employs selective credit rationing to prevent asset booms. Second, a vertical industrial policy prioritising selected industrial sectors. The first policy conflicts with the present framework of euro zone monetary policy, but that framework was only installed in the first place because many peripheral countries were desperately in search of an external constraint on domestic distributional conflict. Industrial policies, in turn, require a sufficient degree of state autonomy from business elites in order to be effective, but it is highly questionable whether most states in the EU possess such autonomy. Though there are, as yet hesitant, signs of a reorientation of both monetary and cohesion policy in the EU, the question of the institutional and political preconditions for their successful implementation has been largely neglected.

Does aid cause conflict in Pakistan?

This study provides evidence from Pakistan on how the delegated task of achieving strategic objectives of the donor can lead to incompatibility of aid objectives which then generates perpetual and multidimensional domestic conflict in the recipient society. We use count data method to estimate the relationship between aid and conflict. At the aggregate level, social sector spending, regime change and youth bulge are positively and significantly related with conflict. However, aid per capita gives ambiguous results. It is significant with conflict count in the terrorism data-set and insignificant for data on armed conflict. Inclusion of youth bulge and unemployment rate confirms the marginalization hypothesis of conflict. Inflation rate and the tax variables are insignificant. This confirms that aid erodes fiscal capacity. At project-level data, conflict is strongly related with aid commitment and purpose. Discrepancy in aid allocation and commitment may accentuate conflict.

Impact of Exchange Marriage on Children in Pakistan: Social Security or Insecurity?

In this paper I deal with the impact of the exchange marriage system in Pakistan. The system does not only guide in spouse selection, but it is also provide welfare, alliance formation and give strength to kinship. No part of the study, however, dealt with the impact of the system on children anywhere in the world. Based on the qualitative investigation, this article highlights 24 case histories. The Grounded Theory Method guidelines are followed for the data collection and analysis. There are different dimensions of the exchange marriage. However, t h is study reveals child engagement/marriage (even before the birth), forced marriages, mismatch marriage, violence and emergence of domestic conflict in the system of the exchange. This study found drug addiction among children, off and on the street children, children with broken homes, neglected children, and delinquency is due to the system of the marriage. Exchange marriage does not only provide social security and alliance formation but also insecurity and obscured socialization of the children. It is important to have looked on the system of the exchange in development perspective of the future generation. This study highlights the impact of the exchange marriage system among illiterate or low educated people only who strictly follow the system of the exchange.

Quality of Life of Patients with Alcoholism

In northern India including Delhi, the 1‑year prevalence of alcohol use has been estimated as 25 to 40% in the general population, whereas in southern India, this rate has been estimated as 30 to 50%. In southern India, the prevalence of alcohol use is higher among people of lower socio‑economic status and those with lower levels of education. A large-scale survey over 32,000 people performed in 2001 in India found alcohol use rates of 20 to 38% in males and 10% among females.(3) Some people are more likely to experience the consequences of alcohol use. Alcohol dependence serves as an escape from domestic conflicts, business worries, feeling of inferiority and painful memories which happen in day to day life. It is assumed to give courage to coward, confidence to the timed, pleasure to the unhappy and success to the failure. So, it permits so slight from disappointment and frustration of reality. Therefore, alcoholism remains a serious problem in contemporary society around the world.

The Honeymoon Is Over: Maldives as a Growing Security Threat in the Indian Ocean

The island nation of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean is known for its beautiful and fragile environment—a place to visit to get away from the problems of the rest of the world. What remains largely unknown and almost wholly unstudied is the fact that it is also a microcosm of most major crises that plague international order and security today: rising authoritarianism, religious militancy and increasing domestic conflict based on a perceived conflict between ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’. This paper examines recent Maldivian sociopolitical affairs in relation to these developments and makes the case for focused academic scholarship on Maldives. It is argued that ignoring Maldives in security analyses, especially in relation to South Asia, prevents such scholarship from being comprehensive or complete.

Being Mexican : Identity, Location, and Rosa Nissán(IV)

“Hisho que te nazca – in search of desired identity” and “Sephardic narrative in Mexico : Impact, Reception, and Nissan’s photographic eye” A wider vision of education and employment After Oshinica and Lalo separate, the circumstances surrounding her attendance at the institute do change and she is now able to participate without domestic conflict. Her classmates also become a more active part of Oshinica’s life. They spend more time together and since there is no one to limit these friendshi...

The Swiss Willensnation at risk: teachers in the cultural gap during the First World War

As a neutral and multilingual country, Switzerland struggled with major domestic political conflicts during the First World War due to the two cultures of the French-speaking and German-speaking parts of the country. The divided cultural loyalties (‘fossé moral’, ‘Röstigraben’), consisting of Swiss-Germans supporting Germany and Swiss-French supporting France, were discussed intensively in both of the main teachers’ journals in Switzerland. Teachers felt the need to react and to promote unity from the beginning of the war. Despite the fact that the cantons are responsible for public education and, therefore, for the education of their students, teachers considered themselves called to educate their students to be national citizens rather than to be members of a language group. This threefold citizenship – communal, cantonal and national – was not scrutinised, but national unity became crucial due to the critical political circumstances. How did teachers promote and constitute citizenship for themselves and for their students in a nation united by free will during the First World War, a time of severe internal political conflicts?

Historians Revisit the Terror--Again

From its inception in 1789, the French Revolution swiftly moved from a democratic phase to domestic conflict, war, and repression, which peaked in intensity in 1793–94. Although the Terror almost immediately drew historians’ interest, it as a subject waned by the mid-1960s. While explaining its ebb and flow from the mid-twentieth century to the present, this essay focuses on the half-dozen syntheses of the Terror, which have appeared since 2000. This article finds that those schools of thought that had dominated the study and focus on the causes of the revolution shape the historical debate regarding the Terror. In particular, three approaches—Marxist, social/cultural, and linguistic—fan out along political lines as well from supporting to condemning the revolution. However, as this essay shows, these new studies reveal some convergence toward shared views and methods. This essay concludes with recommendations and cautions for future research.

Oil, domestic conflict, and opportunities for democratization

The resource curse literature suggests two stylized facts about oil-producing states (‘petrostates’) that are not easily reconciled with each other. On one hand, petrostates experience more frequent civil wars than non-petrostates. On the other hand, petrostates have more robust and long-lasting autocratic regimes. This is puzzling because one might expect that one form of instability would lead to the other, as is typical in non-petrostates. If petrostates are more prone to domestic conflict than non-petrostates, and conflicts are opportunities for regime transition and democratization, why do we not observe such transitions more frequently in petrostates? I argue that despite frequent conflicts, rebels rarely succeed in violently overthrowing a petrostate regime or otherwise forcing regime transition. This is because oil generates financial resources that can be used by both an incumbent government and rebels to fund armed conflict, and an incumbent government typically has greater access to these resources. In an analysis of non-democracies for 1946–2004, I also find that oil inhibits democratization in petrostates, but only in the context of violent domestic conflicts. Peaceful pathways to democracy remain open in petrostates. These findings significantly alter our understanding of resource curse. Many scholars argue that oil inhibits democracy because of rentier politics, but this standard interpretation is incomplete. Oil appears to inhibit democratization only in the context of violent domestic conflicts. Ten of the eleven transitions to democracy in petrostates since 1945 occurred without significant domestic conflict.

Forging political entrepreneurs: Civil war effects on post-conflict politics in Italy

How does violent mobilization affect post-conflict elections? This article studies the impact that violent collective mobilization has on local electoral behavior after domestic conflict. We argue that post-conflict democratic politics at the local level can be dramatically affected by local experience of civil war. The use of violence during the war and especially local political entrepreneurs who have emerged from the conflict can influence post-violent politics. We use as case-study the civil war that took place in Italy during the last phase of World War II. Using new spatially disaggregated data on armed groups' location and violent episodes, we assess the impact of the violent mobilization on the 1946 elections, which took place after the conflict. We find that partisans' mobilization and, more weakly, Nazi-Fascist violent acts influenced local politics, shifting votes towards more radical positions. Our findings hold across numerous robustness checks.

Following Civil Wars Across Borders

The Transnational Dynamics of Civil War. Edited by Jeffrey Checkel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. 319 pp., $95.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-1-107-02553-0). This edited volume has an innovative point of departure: If conflict crosses borders, how should the tools of scholarship follow? Numerous studies have shown that civil wars have increasingly important transnational dimensions. This volume combines insights from the large-N approach to civil war with perspectives from international relations and sociology on peaceful transnational politics. Its theoretical motivation is reflected in the fact that four of the nine chapters are largely theoretical. Large-N studies have shown that more than half of the armed conflicts that the world has experienced since 1945 involve a rebel group with external linkages. Transnational linkages may provide opportunity: rebel groups with limited opportunities to challenge a state often find the opportunity to mobilize greater support abroad. Yet, there may be a boomerang effect, where changes outside the state feed back into the domestic conflict and transform it. As diffusion is a rather vague metaphor for the process by which a conflict in one state spills over into another, this book aims to establish specific ways to make the metaphor operational. Some familiar concepts—emulation, persuasion, flows of resources, framing—are adapted for this purpose. The case studies explore how the rebel movements were affected by transnational processes: Afghani exiles in Pakistan, transnational Islamic militantism in Chechnya, the Kurdish diaspora in Germany, Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army fighting in its neighboring states, and transnational activism on the issue of child soldiers in the Sudan. In all …

Vivienda/violencia: intersecciones de la vivienda y la violencia intrafamiliar en Ciudad Bolívar, Bogotá

This article explores the impact of self-owned versus rented housing on violence against women in Ciudad Bolívar, Bogota. We used a mixed methods approach based on semi-structured interviews in the locality as well as on observation of domestic violence cases in the locality, between 2011 and 2012. We also analyzed the statistical data of the National Health and Demography Survey for 2010, with representative data for the locality. We concluded that self-owned housing has a protective impact because it reduces economic stress, increases women’s status and facilitates solutions to domestic conflict. Furthermore, according to the statistical data, this protective effect is associated, at both the national and local level, to a significantly lower level of violence, regardless of wealth.