In Tunesien, Ägypten und Libyen wurden 2011 nach Massenprotesten und blutigen Auseinandersetzungen die langjährigen Machthaber Ben Ali, Mubarak und Qaddafigestürzt. Alle drei Staaten befinden sich seither in einem noch nicht abgeschlossenen Transformationsprozess. Diese Umbruchphase ist...

It has become commonplace to explain the proliferation of private security services as causally determined by crime rates and institutional weakness. By contrast, this paper ar-gues that another explanatory factor needs to be emphasized, especially for post-war so-cieties: continuity and change...

The termination of war is mostly seen as a basis not just for recovery but for a fundamental transformation or change in development paths towards peace, stability and development. The Central American peace processes of the last decades were one of the first laboratories for the liberal...

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...

In the last two years, the Syrian uprising has turned from a civil protest movement against an authoritarian regime into an outright civil war in which the antagonists’ affiliations and identities are increasingly framed in sectarian speech. In summer 2012, various politicians and analysts...

The rationale is straightforward and persuasive: intrastate conflicts are by definition subnational phenomena. If we want to understand them fully, it may be wise to refocus our attention from the country level to the subnational level. Where violence is located might inform us as to why it...

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...

We employ a two-tier spatiotemporal analysis to investigate whether uranium operations cause armed conflict in Africa. The macrolevel analysis suggests that . compared to the baseline conflict risk . uranium ventures increase the risk of intrastate conflict by 10 percent. However, we find ethnic...

While mediation efforts in violent conflicts often fail, the academic literature on mediation has long ignored both this phenomenon and its consequences. This paper aims to fill this significant knowledge gap by examining the conditions under which the failure of mediation leads to an escalation...

Is violent opposition less likely to occur in subnational regions that have been treated preferentially by the respective country’s ruling elite? Many authoritarian regimes try to secure political support by providing critical segments of the population with privileged access to economic or...