Peace and Conflict 2014

Paul K. Huth, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, David A. Backer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781612054360
• eBook ISBN: 9781315284354
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Peace and Conflict is a biennial publication that provides cutting-edge data and analysis concerning domestic and international conflicts and corresponding peacebuilding activities. The book include forecasts of risks of political and social instability, as well as trends and patterns in conflict. The 2014 edition focusses on the 'micro level' in the study of conflict and peacebuilding, such as social relationships below the level of the nation-state, with attention to key topics such as ethnicity, climate change, foreign aid and sexual violence. Peace and Conflict is a large-format, full-color resource with numerous graphs, tables, maps, and appendices dedicated to the visual and summary presentation of information. Crisp narratives are highlighted with pull-quote extracts emphasizing major findings.

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1.	INTRODUCTION TO PEACE AND CONFLICT 2014

 

 

Since the publication of Peace and Conflict 2012, developments in many regions and countries attest to the continuing problems of armed conflict, as well as the complexities of crisis management and post-conflict peacebuilding. For instance, the Egyptian military’s forcible removal of former president Mohamed Morsi in July 2013, and subsequent violent repression of the Muslim Brotherhood, highlights the deep challenges to democratization. While Egypt now teeters on the precipice of full-scale civil war, Syria has been engulfed in massive internal violence since mid-2011, exhibiting large-scale victimization of civilian populations, deep divisions among the rebel forces opposing the Assad regime, and growing internationalization of the conflict, with many regional actors supporting the opposing sides. In January 2013, the Malian government teetered on the edge of collapse under the threat of Islamist-led fighters moving from territory they controlled in northern Mali, but a French intervention turned back the rebels. The political crisis has stabilized, at least for the short term, as a peace agreement was reached with Tuareg rebel forces, new elections were held, and a UN peacekeeping operation was authorized. In Kenya, national elections held in April 2013 did not result in the widespread violence associated with the previous round of national elections in December 2007, which is a positive sign for the stability of the country.

These events in the several countries exemplify the types of topics taken up by the authors in various chapters of Peace and Conflict 2014. For example, the political crisis in Egypt raises larger questions about the prospects of democratization during periods of leadership transition, which Erica Frantz addresses in Chapter 4. The Syrian civil war has resulted in widespread attacks on civilians, but no reports of high levels of sexual violence. In Chapter 10, Amelia Hoover Green tackles the matter of why civil wars vary in the extent to which sexual violence is committed by opposing armed forces. The longstanding ethnic conflict in Mali, contrasted with episodic variation in Kenya, raises questions about ethnic grievances as a cause of armed violence, which are central to the analysis by Lars-Erik Cederman, Luc Girardin, and Julian Wucherpfennig in Chapter 8. The involvement of forces linked to al-Qaeda in the Malian conflict connects to the analysis by Gary LaFree and Laura Dugan of global and regional trends in terrorism in Chapter 5.

As with previous editions, Peace and Conflict 2014 is organized into two main sections. The first section, comprised of Chapters 2–5, presents the standard, recurring features of Peace and Conflict. In this section, the authors offer analyses of global trends in political instability, armed conflict, democracy, and terrorism. The second section, comprised of Chapters 6–11, is devoted to the special theme of “Disaggregation and the Microdynamics of Conflict and Peacebuilding.” In this section, the authors discuss an important recent shift in research, describing new sources of data that are being collected and used, detailing the distinctive insights that associated analysis provides, and explaining the implications for policy and practice. In addition, Chapter 12 presents another regular feature of Peace and Conflict, a review of active armed conflicts around the world.

In Chapter 2, David Backer and Paul Huth report the latest results from the Peace and Conflict Instability Ledger, a worldwide ranking of countries’ risk of facing significant political instability and armed conflict during the period of 2012–2014. Particular attention is paid to those 25 countries at the greatest risk of instability, as well as those countries that have experienced the largest changes in risk scores—both positive and negative—over the previous five years. Not surprisingly, the Ledger categorizes countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq among the most at risk. Interestingly, Egypt is in the “some risk” category, while Syria is in the “low risk” category, whereas both have recently suffered considerable turmoil and violence. The chapter acknowledges the inherent imperfections of forecasting and offers suggestions about how the Ledger and related analysis could be improved to yield a better fit to observed outcomes.

In Chapter 3, Backer and Huth report on global trends in armed conflict from 1946–2012, including both interstate and intrastate confrontations. They provide information on the onset, recurrence, and termination of conflicts. In particular, conflict recurrence remains a persistent problem for countries emerging from civil wars.

In Chapter 4, Frantz examines global trends in democratization from 1947–2004, with a focus on the relationship of leadership transitions to successful or failed democratization efforts. She finds that leadership changes typically do not correspond with fundamental changes in political systems. Yet when leaders are forced out of power by coups coupled with mass protests and demonstrations, there is a substantial spike in the likelihood of systemic change. These general patterns provide a larger context for assessing the prospects for democratization following the ongoing unrest in Egypt.

In Chapter 5, LaFree and Dugan present a careful analysis of trends in terrorism from 1970–2011, using information on more than 104,000 terrorist attacks recorded in the Global Terrorism Database. A striking pattern is the pronounced U-shape pattern in the number and severity of terrorist attacks from 1992–2011, where a sharp decrease in terrorism during the 1990s was followed by a steep increase in terrorism since the early 2000s. One new feature of their analysis—connecting to the special theme of Peace and Conflict 2014—is a disaggregation at the county level of over 3,000 terrorist attacks in the United States from 1970–2011. A central finding is that attacks in the United States are heavily concentrated in a small number of counties around major cities. The recent Boston Marathon terrorist attacks seem to fit well with this general pattern.

In Chapter 6, Karsten Donnay, Elena Gadjanova, and Ravi Bhavnani provide an overview of recent research that disaggregates conflicts by actors, timing, and location. They highlight various topics, including the targeting of civilian populations, in-fighting and side-switching among rebel groups, and the relationship between subnational inequality among groups and the onset of violent conflicts. They make a strong case that researchers using disaggregated data on both conflict behavior and the attributes of combatant actors has generated insights on policy-relevant issues such as the effectiveness of counterinsurgency strategies, the causes of civilian migration during armed conflicts, and the probability that rebel groups will target civilian populations with violence.

In Chapter 7, Joshua Busby, Clionadh Raleigh, and Idean Salehyan encapsulate groundbreaking work being done as part of the Climate Change and African Political Stability (CCAPS) program over the past five years. In the process, they provide an overview of the design and applications of two newly created disaggregated datasets on conflict behavior in Africa: the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset (ACLED) and the Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD). They also discuss the Climate Security Vulnerability Model (CSVM), which has been developed to study the political and security consequences of climate change at the subnational level in Africa. Of note, the CSVM has been used to address questions such as whether foreign assistance is being targeted to those areas most vulnerable to climate change and whether areas of strategic interest to the United States are also areas of high climate vulnerability.

In Chapter 8, Cederman, Girardin, and Wucherpfennig review the noteworthy advances made in the study of ethnic conflict via the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) research program. Among the major products of this vibrant program is a family of new datasets with comprehensive information on access to political power at the national level by over 800 ethnic groups around the world and their conflict behavior from 1946–2009. A number of associated studies provide strong evidence that patterns of political exclusion and discrimination suffered by ethnic groups, as well as high levels of economic inequality between groups, are related to the onset of civil-war violence.

In Chapter 9, Hoover Green discusses recent efforts to collect more disaggregated and reliable data on sexual violence during armed conflicts. She convincingly argues that problems in collecting data warrant caution. Nonetheless, researchers have made considerable progress, with notable findings emerging across studies. One is that the occurrence of sexual violence during armed conflicts varies considerably. Another is that patterns of sexual violence do not seem to closely follow patterns of lethal violence. Instead, the causes of sexual violence can be quite distinct, roughly divided between those that emphasize strategic use of sexual violence as an element of military strategy and organizational explanations centered on the command-and-control systems of armed forces.

In Chapter 10, Patrick Vinck and Phuong Pham shift the attention to studying challenges to successful post-conflict peacebuilding and reconstruction at the local level. Their central argument is that peacebuilding too often involves top-down strategies, which fail to appreciate local dynamics of how civilian populations react to post-war reconstruction policies set by national governments and intergovernmental institutions. They distill results from general population surveys conducted during and after civil wars in six countries between 2005 and 2010. This unique body of research reveals that individuals’ experiences of conflict are diverse, as are their views and preferences about peacebuilding efforts, which often differ from priorities established by political authorities.

In Chapter 11, the final contribution to the special theme section, Patrick Meier highlights the very recent use of information crowdsourced from social media to monitor and address humanitarian crises. He reviews the impressive initiatives to track the onset and escalation of violence in Libya in 2011 and on an ongoing basis in Syria since 2011, as well as the application of similar approaches in the wake of two natural disasters in 2012: Typhoon Pablo in the Philippines and the Oklahoma tornado. He also reflects on the challenges of using social media as a source, including the volume, veracity, and representativeness of the information. Despite these potential complications, Meier argues that crowdsourcing from social media is a valuable new tool for improving crisis monitoring and humanitarian responses by national governments and intergovernmental institutions.

Finally, in Chapter 12 Jonathan Wilkenfeld provides descriptive histories of the 26 intermediate and major armed conflicts in 22 countries that were active as of December 31, 2012. Each case is illuminated with details about the origins and evolution of the conflict and any change in status since the publication of Peace and Conflict 2012.

David A. Backer
Jonathan Wilkenfeld
Paul K. Huth

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2.	THE PEACE AND CONFLICT INSTABILITY LEDGER: RANKING STATES ON FUTURE RISKS

David A. Backer and Paul K. Huth

This chapter presents the latest results of the Peace and Conflict Instability Ledger. The focus of the analysis is the ranking of countries around the world according to their estimated risk of experiencing significant bouts of political instability or armed conflict during the three-year period of 2012–2014. Those risk estimates are obtained using a statistical forecasting model, developed based on historical data, that confirms strong correlations between the onset of instability or conflict and several factors. The most current data available for these factors, from the individual countries, are plugged into the forecasting model, yielding projections of the risk that they face in the future. Once again, the findings illuminate a concentration of serious vulnerabilities in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Awareness of these risks, as well as where they worsened and improved, is an important resource in conflict preparedness and management.

Methodology

The Ledger represents a synthesis of leading research on conceptualizing, explaining, and forecasting political instability. The definition established by the Political Instability Task Force (PITF) is employed.¹ This definition guided the PITF’s compilation of state failure events during 1955–2006, which encompass a wide variety of types, including revolutionary wars, ethnic wars, adverse regime changes, and genocides or politicides. While the set of events is heterogeneous, they share a fundamental similarity: their onset signals the arrival of a period in which government’s capacity to deliver core services and to exercise meaningful authority has been disrupted, threatening it...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Special Theme—Disaggregation and the Microdynamics of Conflict and Peacebuilding: Introduction
• Special Theme—Disaggregation and the Microdynamics of Conflict and Peacebuilding: Introduction
• Additional Resources
• References
• Peace and Conflict Editorial Advisory Board
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• About the Contributors
• About the Center for International Development and Conflict Management