In post-conflict societies, security is provided by a broad range of actors including the state as well as various non-state formations. The paper identifies three types of post-conflict societies and analyses dynamics of the security market in cases where international troops have intervened. A...

This paper seeks an explanation for the resilience of the Syrian authoritarian regime under Hafez and Bashar Al-Asad. It will be argued that this resilience is to a relevant extent caused by the fact that the regime's "material" as well as "ideational" forms of power share a common element, if...

Using a micro-level approach to poverty traps, this paper explores welfare dynamics among households in post-war rural Mozambique. Conceptually, the paper builds on an asset-based approach to poverty and tests empirically, with household panel data, for the existence of a poverty trap. Findings...

This paper explores the use of hydrocarbon revenues in post-conflict Algeria. While the bloody years of the 1990s now seem to be over, recurring terror attacks and the ongoing state of emergency leave room for doubt that a situation of stable peace has been achieved yet. It is therefore...

According to quantitative studies, oil is the only resource that is robustly linked to civil war onset. However, recent debates on the nexus of oil and civil war have neglected that there are a number of peaceful oil-rentier states, and few efforts have been spent to explain why some...

The paper provides an assessment of India's role in the final years of the civil war in Sri Lanka (2003-2009). In particular, it looks for explanations for India's inability to act as a conflict manager in its own region, which is in contrast to predominant assumptions about the role of powerful...

Given the widespread focus on socioeconomic factors, it comes as no surprise that religion is neglected in most theoretical explanations of African civil conflicts. While scholarly interest is increasing in light of the civil wars in Sudan, Nigeria, and northern Uganda, no systematic empirical...

International conflicts over natural resources are frequently cited as the most prominent threat to global peace in the decades ahead. However, this subject has not yet been adequately tackled in the academic literature. This paper contributes to filling the gap by, first, proposing a four-class...

Theoretically, the "mobilization hypothesis" establishes a link between religion and conflict by arguing that religious structures such as overlapping ethnic and religious identities are prone to mobilization; once politicized, escalation to violent conflict becomes likelier. Yet, despite the...

The debate on institutional engineering offers options to manage ethnic and other conflicts. This contribution systematically assesses the logic of these institutional designs and the empirical evidence on their functioning. Generally, institutions can work on ethnic conflict by either...