With the ascendance of the terrorist group known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the international community has struggled to adapt to the new international security context. Among the challenges that are currently being confronted are questions relating to how states may...

International criminal prosecutions have become more common since 1993, both domestically and at international courts and tribunals. Where the United States government is unable to control how and when international criminal law is enforced, prosecutions may confront realist U.S. self-interest....

The establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) and a war crimes court (the Special Court for Sierra Leone or SCSL) in Sierra Leone has been described as a transitional justice (TJ) model that advances both justice and reconciliation. Whether these institutions have been a...

I begin with a mea culpa. In 2016, I published an article about citizen’s arrest. The idea for the article arose in 2014, when a disgruntled Virginia citizen came in off the street and attempted to arrest a law school professor while class was in progress. I set out to research and write a...

The conflict in Northern Ireland was an example of "complex warfare" with both insurgency and sectarian violence. We present a unified model that helps to identify these two forms of conflict from the spatial distribution of violence. The model predicts that tectonic boundaries between...

I show that contemporary civil conflict has detrimental effects on social capital in Africa. Using individual-level survey data on ethnic identity and group-level data on civil conflict, I find that ethnic identity is positively correlated with the incidence and the intensity of civil conflict,...

The Sahel and the Sahara are faced with exceptional political instability involving a combination of rebellions, jihadist insurgencies, coups d’état, protest movements and illegal trafficking. The backdrop to this accumulated violence is a globalised security environment, which blurs the...

Recent advances in political science and economics highlight the role of historical events in shaping contemporary political and economic outcomes. This article joins the growing literature by utilizing disaggregated data and mediation analysis to explore the causal mechanisms bridging ethnic...

This paper considers the effectiveness of Angolan government, UN and non-governmental attempts to protect human rights in Angola from early 1998 to date, during and in the immediate aftermath of the recent conflict. Angola has suffered from one of the longest running conflicts in Africa....