Working Paper
Quid pro quo: how the wartime economy shapes the violent contestation of the state after war
Why do some conflict-affected areas remain an arena of violent contestation of the state, while others transition to peace? I suggest that economic networks developed during intrastate conflict—i.e. wartime economies—give rise to continued pockets of...
Working Paper
Aid and violence reduction
Although the provision of security to all their citizens is a state’s fundamental duty, over 50 countries experienced armed conflict in 2021. The international development community has identified armed conflict as an impediment to development and...
Journal Article
Acting like a state
This article examines the complex local dynamics of armed violence in post-war Abkhazia. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the Abkhaz participants and non-participants in this violence and a range of secondary materials, it adapts the conceptual...
Working Paper
Do fences make good neighbours?
India has employed a variety of military, political, and economic measures to combat the long running insurgency in Kashmir with little evidence on what contributes to stability in the region. This paper uses a variety of tests to detect structural...
Working Paper
Conflict and development
We survey selected parts of the growing literature on the microeconomics of violent conflict, identifying where academic research has started to establish stylized facts and where methodological and knowledge gaps remain. We focus our review on the...
Working Paper
Riots and social capital in urban India
This paper explores the relationship between household exposure to riots and social capital in urban India using a panel dataset collected by the authors in the state of Maharashtra. The analysis applies a random-effect model with lagged covariates...
Working Paper
Political representation in the wake of ethnic violence and post-conflict institutional reform
The lack of political representation often lies at the origin of identity-based violence, and, when not resolved, can re-ignite violence. We study who perceives gains and losses in political representation in Rwanda and Burundi and why. We rely on a...
Working Paper
The social and political consequences of wartime sexual violence
Wartime sexual violence is widespread across conflict zones and thought to leave a disastrous legacy for survivors, communities, and nations. Yet, systematic studies on i) the prevalence and ii) the social and political consequences of wartime sexual...
Working Paper
Between victory and statehood
What accounts for armed violence in the aftermath of civil war? Efforts to develop a comprehensive framework to understand this phenomenon have been made in the literature. Yet existing studies have in general looked at distinct pre-war, wartime, and...
Working Paper
Don’t rock the boat? Fears of conflict and support for protest in Iraq and beyond
Why do people support—or refrain from supporting—nonviolent protests for political change? The literature offers different answers to this question, but one variable that has received little attention is fears of protest unleashing violent conflict...
Working Paper
Statebuilding in fragile countries
Supporting state capacity is a priority for the international community, yet the record of internationally supported statebuilding to date has been mixed at best. A key question for continuing research concerns the factors influencing more versus...
Working Paper
A cultural perspective on the cycle of violent conflicts in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria
Violent conflicts act as disincentives for sustainable socioeconomic development in conflict-prone societies, especially in the Global South. Existing studies focus largely on economic, political, and social triggers of violent conflicts; cultural...
Working Paper
Cultivating change: the long-term impact of forced labour in Mozambique
Following the abolition of slavery, various forms of compulsory labour were adopted by colonial powers to develop their economies. This paper analyses the contemporary consequences of compulsory cotton production—a forced labour system that operated...
Working Paper
Ethnic conflict: the role of ethnic representation
We investigate the impact of the political representation of minority groups on the incidence of ethnic conflict in India. We code data on Hindu-Muslim violence and Muslim political representation in India and leverage quasi-random variation in...
Working Paper
The legacy of Mexico’s Drug War on youth political attitudes
We investigate the impact of childhood exposure to organized criminal violence on sociopolitical attitudes in Mexico, where an entire generation of youths has been raised amid the country’s most violent conflict over the past century. We fielded an...
Working Paper
War violence, nationalism, and party support
Under what conditions can legacies of past violence shape political behaviour? We propose a theory of how war victimization defines attitudes over the long run, and how these can be activated by changes in the political environment. We argue that...
Working Paper
The violent legacy of fascism
We still have limited knowledge about the long-term effects of fascism on European democracies. European countries experienced cycles of violence between the 1960s and 1980s. Can such violence be explained by legacies of mobilization during fascism...
Working Paper
Crosscutting cleavages and ethno-communal violence
Recent literature has shown that crosscutting social cleavages reduce the likelihood of civil war. This article argues that the same logic does not apply to lower-scale group violence such as riots, which differ in such a way that crosscutting social...
Working Paper
Concealed costs: illicit economies and the erosion of the local tax base in Colombia
Tax revenues are fundamental to state-building and development, particularly in the aftermath of conflict. Through the lens of the recent post-conflict experience of Colombia, this paper explores the challenges of increasing tax revenues amid...