"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...

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...

Established in 1964, the Journal of Peace Research (JPR) celebrates 50 years. This anniversary special issue of the journal offers broad reviews of research areas that have been central both to the journal and to the field of peace and conflict research generally. An opening article co-authored...

Why do some armed civil conflicts last longer than others? Drawing on a contest success function model, we show that geographic factors (such as location, terrain, and natural resources) interact with rebel fighting capacity and together play a crucial role in determining the duration of...

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...

Effects of climate change are frequently claimed to be responsible for widespread civil violence. Yet, scientists remain divided on this issue, and recent studies suggest that conflict risk increases with higher rainfall, loss of rainfall, higher temperatures or none of the above. Lack of...

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...

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...