Much of recent international relations literature argues conflicts to achieve or to frustrate regional dominance will become more virulent in the future. In this context we examine different approaches in international relations theory regarding the role and importance which they attribute to...

Ausgehend von der in der wissenschaftlichen Literatur artikulierten Erwartung, dass Konflikte um die Durchsetzung oder Verhinderung regionaler Vorherrschaft in der Zukunft an Virulenz zunehmen werden, wird die Rolle und Bedeutung regionaler Führungsmächte im Rahmen verschiedener theoretischer...

While the Guatemalan Truth Commission came to the conclusion that agents of the state had committed acts of genocide in the early 1980s, fundamental questions remain. Should we indeed speak of the massacres committed between 1981 and 1983 in Guatemala as "genocide", or would "ethnocide" be the...

The concept of "structural stability" has been gaining prominence in development policy circles. In the EU's and the OECD Development Assistance Committee's (OECD DAC) understanding, it describes the ability of societies to handle intra-societal conflict without resorting to violence. This study...

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...

This paper analyzes the role of ethnicity in shaping the character of Kenya's political parties and its party system since 1992. Drawing on a constructivist conception of ethnicity, it uses a framework of comparison derived from Donald Horowitz and distinguishes between three party types: the...

Since the sweeping (re)introduction of multiparty systems in the early 1990s almost all sub-Saharan countries have introduced bans on ethnic or - in more general terms - particularistic parties. Such party bans have been neglected in research, and this paper engages in a preliminary analysis of...

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...

This paper examines the representations of violence in Guatemalan and El Salvadoran literature against the backdrop of persistently high levels of violence and crime following the civil wars in both countries. It adopts an interdisciplinary approach settled within cultural studies and uses two...

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...