Internal Violent Conflicts Research Articles

The Space of Memory in Post-Conflict Societies: The Influence of Amnesty Laws

The behaviour that opposing groups adopt is not simply reactive. They are based on memories of past events, as well as on expectation of what will happen in the future. To put it simply, through memory, past, present and future are linked, outlining the relationships of individuals belonging to post-conflict societies, regardless of being victims, perpetrators or bystanders, and, mostly importantly, regardless of having lived or not during the violent conflict. Based on the idea of the transmission of memory through generations, the present paper calls attention for the spaces that memories occupy within reconciliation processes of post-conflict societies. Particularly, it connects internal violent conflict to memory in order to understand the grand debate between “forgetting and remembering” with regard to amnesty laws. Therefore, considering memory a key element in reconciliation processes, this presentation focuses on amnesty laws, as a mechanism of reconciliation, and questions how the political choice for this mechanism has shaped civil war memories, influencing the reconciliation processes of post-conflict societies. In particular, it aims to contribute to the debate about whether or not amnesty facilitates the oblivion of civil war memories. The case of Mozambique serves to illustrate the present paper.

Violent conflict and inequality

This paper analyses the distributive impacts of internal violent conflicts, in contrast to previous literature which has focused on the effects of inequality on conflict. We use cross-country panel data for the time period 1960–2014 to estimate war-related changes in income inequality. Our results indicate rising levels of inequality during war and especially in the early period of post-war reconstruction. The return of inequality to pre-war levels may take up to four decades after the end of conflict. However, we find that this rise in income inequality is not permanent. While inequality peaks around 5 years after the end of a conflict, it declines again to pre-war levels within the end of the first post-war period. Lagged effects of conflict and only subsequent adjustments of redistributive policies in the period of post-war reconstruction seem to be valid explanations for these patterns of inequality. A series of alternative specifications confirms the main findings of the analysis.

Internal Violent Conflicts and Overt War among National States?

We focus on geopolitical tensions, possibilities of internal violent conflicts or overt war among national-states. First, we examine the most important concepts and practices of the neoliberal globalization. The current world situation seems to indicate that neoliberalism is not a theory, a class strategy designed to redistribute wealth upward toward an increasingly narrow fraction of people, despite national contradictions. We review sources of international tensions and some important data of transnational corporations in the North and South. Historical experiences show that crisis can produce different kinds of changes and distinct political responses in societies, such as internal violent conflicts or overt war among national-states. Some of these conflicts can be analyzed by employing two frameworks; national-states framework and global class relations. We argue that in a highly globalized world, the existence of overt war among strong nation-states could seriously damage the globalist bloc transnational commanding class, whereas internal violent conflicts can easily appear almost everywhere as a natural consequence of social and economic inequalities. In order to counterweight the crisis and fascist movements we propose alliances among the dominated classes and other dominated groups.

Conceptualizing “Post-Conflict Reconstruction” and “Ongoing Conflict Reconstruction” of Failed States

In recent decades, the world has seen many internal violent conflicts that dramatically affect the social, economic, and political conditions of human geographies at multiple spatial scales, from the national level to the scale of individual cities and communities. Geography, as a multidimensional discipline, should be in a unique position to contribute to understanding of such conflicts and of post-conflict geographies and their futures in terms of reconstruction and rebuilding. However, in the geography literature, there is little attention given to post-conflict human geographies and their related subjects. At present, there are many emerging post-conflict geographies, which would greatly benefit from theoretical and practical knowledge to guide their future. This paper aims to contribute to building a foundation for developing knowledge on reconstruction of post-conflict and ongoing conflict human geographies. Based on the existing multidisciplinary bodies of knowledge on post-conflict reconstruction, this paper develops a new conceptual framework for post-conflict reconstruction and for ongoing conflict reconstruction as a more adequate way to understand and plan reconstruction in the face of ongoing conflict and offers new insights for the reconstruction agenda.

Terrorist targeting and energy security

Sudden, short-term disruptions seriously endangering energy security can be triggered by a variety of events—among them attacks by terrorists. This study investigates terrorist attack practices against energy infrastructures and discusses how we may understand them. Our results indicate that attacks against energy infrastructures are comparatively few. Also, we find no strong connection between the ideologies of various terrorist groups and their proclivity to attack. In addition, the highly disproportionate number of attacks in a handful of countries highlights the strong geographic concentration of attacks. To explain these findings, we analyze terrorist targeting incentives including intimidation levels, symbolism, attack feasibility, and concerns for stakeholders. We argue that terrorists in general have comparatively few incentives to attack energy supply infrastructures based on our assessment of these factors. Moreover, higher levels of terrorist incidents in states more prone to internal violent conflict may suggest stronger incentives to attack energy infrastructures. When outlining energy security policies, the low frequency of worldwide attacks coupled with the high concentration of attacks in certain unstable countries should be taken into consideration. Energy importing countries could benefit from developing strategies to increase stability in key energy supply and/or transit countries facing risks of internal instability.

Cultures, Clashes and Peace

Ethnic and religious fractionalization have important effects on economic growth and development, but their role in internal violent conflicts has been found to be negligible and statistically insignificant. These findings have been invoked in refutation of the Huntington hypothesis, according to which differences of ethnic, religious and cultural identities are the ultimate determinants of conflict. However, fractionalization in all its demographic forms is endogenous in the long run. In this paper, we empirically investigate the impact of violent conflicts on ethno-religious fractionalization. The data involve 953 conflicts that took place in 52 countries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East between 1400 CE and 1900 CE. Besides a variety of violent confrontations ranging from riots, revolts and power wars between secular sovereigns, the data cover religiously motivated confrontations. We document that countries in which Muslim on Christian wars unfolded more frequently are significantly more religiously homogenous today. In contrast, those places where Protestant versus Catholic confrontations occurred or Jewish pogroms took place are more fractionalized, both ethnically and religiously. And the longer were the duration of all such conflicts and violence, the less fractionalized countries are today. These results reveal that the demographic structure of countries in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa still bear the traces of a multitude of ecclesiastical and cultural clashes that occurred throughout the course of history. They also suggest that endogeneity could render the relationship between fractionalization and the propensity of internal conflict statistically insignificant. Finally, instrumenting for conflicts with some geographic attributes and accounting for the endogeneity of fractionalization with respect to ecclesiastical conflicts shows that religous fractionalization likely has negative effects on economic growth.

A Science of Humanitarian Action?

Sword and Salve: Confronting New Wars and Humanitarian Crises. By Peter J. Hoffman, Thomas G. Weiss Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006. 272 pp., $75.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7425-3977-6), $28.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7425-3978-4). Sword and Salve , by Peter Hoffman and Thomas Weiss, traces how the recent responses to “new wars” have led to a “humanitarianism in crisis” (de Waal 1997; Rieff 2002; Terry 2002; Kennedy 2004) and sketches the actions needed to salvage the humanitarian enterprise as a whole. The book's core argument is that humanitarian organizations must respond to global changes in violence by increasing their analytical capabilities and by adopting a more consequentialist approach to humanitarian crises. According to Hoffman and Weiss, the traditional humanitarian principles of neutrality, impartiality, and consent are “unlikely to provide satisfactory guidance in contemporary armed conflicts” (p. 210). As a result, they should be put into a context of explicit strategic thinking as organizations choose goals and commit resources. In short, humanitarianism today will “be judged not by intentions, but by consequences” (p. 210). Hoffman and Weiss advance this core argument with a historical discussion of the emergence of humanitarianism within the state system. Even though principles of neutrality and impartiality were largely appropriate to past conflicts, which were dominated by interstate wars, they have become increasingly dysfunctional in a world of “new wars” that are marked by fragmented political authority, the proliferation of nonstate actors, and the shift toward internal violent conflict (Chapter 3). These new forms of violent conflict have turned humanitarian aid …

Lessons Learned from the 1990–1997 Peace Process in the North of Mali

AbstractThe intra-state conflict in Mali between 1990–1997 represents a rare case of successful management of an internal violent conflict in Africa in the post-Cold War era. This article examines the conditions that permitted negotiations to yield a lasting peace in Mali. ``Success'' is measured in terms of the ability to arrive at an agreement that is not only signed by all parties, but that can be effectively implemented as well. The case of Mali exemplifies a conflict that was ``ripe for resolution'' at the outset of negotiations and yet required considerable effort to ensure success beyond the initial negotiated agreement. The article presents some lessons learned from the negotiation process and an analysis of why the outcome was durable. In Mali, ripeness was complemented by the ability to build trust and confidence through careful timing, by a flexible mix of informal and formal negotiations at different stages of the conflict, by appropriate third party intervention, and by popular participation from civil society. All of these factors were essential to success.