Religiöse Eliten engagieren sich in vielen Gewaltkonflikten für Frieden. Normative Rechtfertigungen für ihr Verhalten können dies oftmals jedoch nur unzureichend erklären. Zur Identifizierung von Faktoren für ein Friedensengagement rationaler religiöser Eliten stützen sich die Autoren...

This paper studies the oil-violence link in the Niger Delta, systematically taking into consideration domestic and international contextual factors. The case study, which focuses on explaining the increase in violence since the second half of the 1990s, confirms the differentiated interplay of...

This article analyzes contemporary Eritrea's acute crisis within the framework of the theory of anomie. It is based on the hypothesis that militarization, forced labor, mass exodus, and family disintegration can be interpreted as the consequences of two incompatible norm and value systems: the...

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...

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...

Causal mechanisms and related contextual variables are crucial to the study of the resource-conflict link, but little systematic research has been done on their exact functioning. This paper contributes to the filling of this gap by comparing four major oil exporters (Algeria, Iran, Nigeria, and...

Postwar societies are high-risk contexts for youth violence. Nevertheless, not all postwar societies are equally violent. This article explores how these variations can be explained by focusing on the interaction between youths and adult society in a comparison of Guatemala and Cambodia....

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...

Despite the religious diversity in sub-Saharan Africa and the religious overtones in a number of African conflicts, social science research has inadequately addressed the question of how and to what extent religion matters for conflict in Africa. This paper presents an innovative data inventory...