Religious elites are active for peace in many violent conflicts. Normative explanations often do not suffice to explain their engagement. In this paper we draw on the findings of social‐movement research to identify the factors that induce rationally acting religious elites to be active for...

Does extraction increase the likelihood of antistate violence in the early phases of state-building processes? While much research has focused on the impacts of war on state-building, the potential “war-making effects” of extraction have largely been neglected. The paper provides the first...

This paper investigates the role of state capacity for political violence. Most previous studies have suffered from inadequacies of country-level data, questionable validity of indicators or theoretical shortcomings. This paper aims at overcoming some of these challenges. We focus on one...

The rationale is straightforward and persuasive: intrastate conflicts are by definition subnational phenomena. If we want to understand them fully, it may be wise to refocus our attention from the country level to the subnational level. Where violence is located might inform us as to why it...

Religious elites are active for peace in many violent conflicts. Normative explanations often do not suffice to explain their engagement. In this paper we draw on the findings of social-movement research to identify the factors that induce rationally acting religious elites to be active for...

Given the widespread focus on socioeconomic factors, it comes as no surprise that religion is neglected in most theoretical explanations of African civil conflicts. While scholarly interest is increasing in light of the civil wars in Sudan, Nigeria, and northern Uganda, no systematic empirical...

Is violent opposition less likely to occur in subnational regions that have been treated preferentially by the respective country’s ruling elite? Many authoritarian regimes try to secure political support by providing critical segments of the population with privileged access to economic or...

Institutions can contribute to regulating interethnic conflict; however, in many cases they fail to bring about lasting peace. The paper argues that their negligence of intraethnic factors accounts for some of this failure. Ethnic groups are often treated as unitary actors even though most...