This paper argues that state weakness is broader than implied previously in the civil war literature, and that particular types of weakness in interaction with natural resources have aggravating or mitigating consequences for the risk of civil war. While in anocracies or unstable regimes natural...

This paper combines household survey data with event data on the timing and location of armed conflicts to examine the impact of Burundi's civil war on children's health status. The identification strategy exploits exogenous variation in the war's timing across provinces and the exposure of...

Previous research proposes that peace is more likely to become durable if all rebel groups are included in the settlement reached. The argument implies that if actors are excluded and continue to pursue the military course, this could have a destabilizing effect on the actors that have signed an...

This paper suggests a new factor that makes civil war more likely: the inability of political actors to make credible promises to broad segments of society. Lacking this ability, both elected and unelected governments pursue public policies that leave citizens less well-off and more prone to...

Using an "event-study" methodology, this paper analyzes the aftermath of civil war in a cross-section of countries. It focuses on those experiences where the end of conflict marks the beginning of a relatively lasting peace. The paper considers 41 countries involved in internal wars in the...

No systematic study has examined the effect of post-conflict justice on the duration of peace on a global basis. This paper attempts to fill that void by building on a newly constructed dataset (Binningsbo, Elster, and Gates 2005), which reports the presence of various forms of post-conflict...

The authors analyze the relationship between ethnic polarization and the duration of civil wars. Several recent papers have argued that the uncertainty about the relative power of the contenders in a war will tend to increase its duration. In these models, uncertainty is directly related to the...

Several studies of civil war have concluded that economic inequality between individuals does not increase the risk of internal armed conflict. This is perhaps not so surprising. Even though an individual may feel frustrated if he is poor compared with other individuals in society, he will not...

Autocratic regimes are quite often short-lived kleptocracies formed and maintained through force and used to appropriate wealth from subjects. Some of these autocracies collapse after only a year or two of plundering while others manage to survive for 15 or 20 years. This paper asks why some...

Post-conflict countries receive substantial aid flows after the start of peace. While post-conflict countries' capacity to absorb aid (that is, the quality of their policies and institutions) is built up only gradually after the onset of peace, the evidence suggests that aid tends to peak...