"The role of various stakeholders in the management of natural resources is not clear in the West African countries. This paper discusses the historical changes in power delegation from central origins to peripheral institutions. The analysis covers the rise of bylaws across the Western African...

The world is generally becoming less violent, but the debate on climate change raises the specter of a new source of instability and conflict. In this field, the policy debate is running well ahead of its academic foundation—and sometimes even contrary to the best evidence. Although...

Income varies considerably within countries and the locations where conflicts emerge are rarely typical or representative for states at large. Yet, most research on conflict has only examined national income averages and neglected spatial variation. The authors argue that civil conflicts are...

Most quantitative assessments of civil conflict draw on annual country-level data to determine a baseline hazard of conflict onset. The first problem with such analyses is that they ignore factors associated with the precipitation of violence, such as elections and natural disasters and other...

Contributions to the quantitative civil war literature increasingly rely on geo-referenced data and disaggregated research designs. While this is a welcome trend, it necessitates geographic information systems (GIS) skills and imposes new challenges for data collection and analysis. So far,...

Contemporary conflict research usually measures the influence of ethnicity on conflict by capturing ethnic constellations as country-based indices, such as ethnic fractionalization or polarization. However, such aggregated measures are likely to conceal the actual operation of actor-specific...

When all else fails, aggrieved groups of society often resort to violence to redress their grievance - either by seeking to overthrow the ruling government or by attempting to secede. The strength of the rebel group relative to the state determines what direction the conflict will take. In...

Geographical factors play a critical role in determining how a civil war is fought and who will prevail. Drawing on the PRIO/Uppsala Armed Conflict dataset covering the period 1946-2000, the authors have determined the location of all battle-zones for all civil wars in this time period, thereby...

In recent years, the quantitative international relations literature has increasingly paid attention to the potential problem of serially correlated observations in time-series cross-section (TSCS) data. Today, no study using TSCS data is published unless it manages to control for temporal...