Contributions to the quantitative civil war literature increasingly rely on geo-referenced data and disaggregated research designs. While this is a welcome trend, it necessitates geographic information systems (GIS) skills and imposes new challenges for data collection and analysis. So far,...

A recent Climatic Change review article reports a remarkable convergence of scientific evidence for a link between climatic events and violent intergroup conflict, thus departing markedly from other contemporary assessments of the empirical literature. This commentary revisits the review in...

Much of the recent literature on civil war treats explanations rooted in political and economic grievances with considerable suspicion, and many empirical studies conclude that there is no relationship between ethnic diversity or measures of inequality and political violence to support such...

The vast majority of civil wars occur in economically less developed countries, as measured by GDP per capita. This paper assesses two suggested explanations for this: one emphasizing that poverty facilitates rebel recruitment due to lowered economic opportunity cost of rebelling, and the other...

The vast majority of civil wars occur in economically less developed countries, as measured by GDP per capita. This paper assesses two suggested explanations for this: one emphasizing that poverty facilitates rebel recruitment due to lowered economic opportunity cost of rebelling, and the other...

The vast majority of civil wars occur in economically less developed countries, as measured by GDP per capita. Two suggested explanations for this are prominent: one emphasizing that poverty facilitates rebel recruitment due to lowered economic opportunity cost of rebelling, and the other...