Most wars are now civil wars. Even though international wars attract enormous global attention, they have become infrequent and brief. Civil wars usually attract less attention, but they have become increasingly common and typically go on for years. This report argues that civil war is now an...

Quantitative studies of civil war have focused either on war's onset, or its termination, producing important insights into these end points of the process. The authors complement these studies by studying how much war we are likely to observe in any given period. To answer this question, they...

The authors combine an empirical model of external intervention, with a theoretical model of civil war duration. Their empirical model of intervention allows them to analyze civil war duration, using"expected"rather than"actual"external intervention as an explanatory variable in the duration...

Some theorists of ethnic conflict argue that the physical separation of warring ethnic groups may be the only possible solution to civil war. Without territorial partition and (if needed) forced population movements, they argue, ethnic war cannot end and genocide is likely. Other scholars have...

The two volumes of Understanding Civil War build upon the World Bank's prior research on conflict and violence, particularly on the work of Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, whose model of civil war onset has sparked much discussion on the relationship between conflict and development in what came...

The two volumes of Understanding Civil War build upon the World Bank's prior research on conflict and violence, particularly on the work of Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, whose model of civil war onset has sparked much discussion on the relationship between conflict and development in what came...

Earlier studies have shown that United Nations peace operations make a positive contribution to peacebuilding efforts after civil wars. But do these effects carry over to the period after the peacekeepers leave? And how do the effects of UN peace operations interact with other determinants of...

The median voter hypothesis is important to endogenous growth theories because it provides the political mechanisms through which voters in more unequal countries re-distribute a greater proportion of income and thus (it is argued), by blunting incentives, reduce the country's growth rate. But...

Thepaper studies regional (spatial) inequality in the five most populous countries in the world: China, India, the United States, Indonesia, and Brazil in the period 1980-2000. They are all federations or quasi-federations composed of entities with substantial economic autonomy. Two types of...

The Polish stabilization program implemented in 1990 as part of the transition to capitalism entailed unexpectedly high social costs. The often unstated assumptions had been that since central planning was intrinsically inefficient, stabilization in Poland might be less costly in terms of lost...