Previous research has shown that the duration of a civil war is in part a function of how it ends: in government victory, rebel victory, or negotiated settlement. We present a model of how protagonists in a civil war choose to stop fighting. Hypotheses derived from this theory relate the...

Though European colonialism had a profound and lasting impact on the development of contemporary Africa, there are few studies that assess these effects empirically. This study explores one facet of the colonial legacy: ethnic conflict. Despite the pervasiveness of ethnic strife across the...

The Maoist insurgency in Nepal presents an anomaly for students of civil war and democratic transitions. How was the Maoist wing of the Nepal Communist Party able to mobilize peasants to support their insurgency when they could not mobilize enough peasants to vote for them in elections? The...

We seek to investigate the determinants of Nepal's relapse into authoritarianism and resort to violence rather than reform as a response to the Maoist insurgency. Revolutionary insurgency emerged in Nepal after a transition to parliamentary democracy, whereas democracy is supposed to inoculate a...