How do large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) increase the risk of conflict, and what kind of policies can mitigate this effect? We address these questions with a systematic and policyoriented synthesis of prior research. First, we suggest a simple conceptual framework linking LSLAs to social...

Social conflict pervades human society and fulfils a number of essential functions in its development and transformation, including the creation of new norms and institutions. The Historical Social Conflict Database (HiSCoD) is an ongoing project designed to provide to scholars and society at...

Using firm-level data for five countries in Latin America we find a negative and statistically significant link between social conflict in rural areas and ownership of mines. This result suggests that the social conflict around mining projects can affect strategic firm behavior intended to...

Immigration is a crucial issue in contemporary politics, and attitudes towards immigration are highly dispersed in many countries. We treat individuals' immigration friendliness (IF) as a feature of their self-image or identity and hypothesize that, similar to other pro-social self-images,...

This research advances the hypothesis and establishes empirically that interpersonal population diversity has contributed significantly to the emergence, prevalence, recurrence, and severity of intrasocietal conflicts. Exploiting an exogenous source of variations in population diversity across...