The global success of the film KONY 2012 by Invisible Chil-dren, Inc., manifests far greater magical powers than those of Joseph Kony and his ruthless Lord’s Resistance Army, which it portrays. The most prominent feature of the Invisible Children lobby is the making and constant remaking of a...

Review of the monograph: Jeremy I. Levitt, Illegal Peace in Africa: An Inquiry into the Legality of Power Sharing with Warlords, Rebels, and Junta, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-521-88868-4, 314 pages

Civil conflicts constitute one of the most significant threats to human security. Understanding when belligerents are willing to undertake conflict management efforts is an important first step in better understanding how civil conflicts can be dealt with by the international community. In this...

We develop a method to estimate which side will win a civil war. The key insight we deliver is that, for typical sovereign debt contracts, the probability of debt repayment will equal the probability of victory in a civil war. We test our predictor for standard outcomes in civil wars, including...

Multidimensional peacekeeping has drawn the United Nations (UN) into state-building, and missions have taken on significant responsibilities for good governance. Since it aims at transforming states from fragile post-conflict situations into inclusive, well-governed societies, multidimensional...

We model the transition from a chaotic status quo to a more orderly political regime as a two-stage game involving two warring factions and the citizens. The warring factions move first and decide the form of government by (1) inviting an external arbitrator, (2) choosing the people as...

This article reflects on the importance of linking micro and macro levels of analysis in order to advance our current understanding of civil wars and political violence processes and discusses the contributions of the articles in this special issue. We first identify the main problems in...

This article examines desertion in civil wars, focusing on the role of combatants’ hometowns in facilitating desertion. Analyzing data from the Spanish Civil War, the article demonstrates that combatants who come from hill country are considerably more likely to desert than combatants...

Does it matter whether a civil war is fought as a conventional, irregular, or symmetric nonconventional conflict? Put differently, do “technologies of rebellion†impact a war’s severity, duration, or outcome? Our answer is positive. We find that irregular conflicts last...

Previous quantitative research on ethnic civil war relies on macro-level proxies in an attempt to specify the conditions under which ethnic minorities rebel. Going beyond an exclusive focus on minorities, the present study employs Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as a way to model ethnic...