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Understanding the dynamics of identity-based conflict remains a central challenge of contemporary peace research.

Insurgency and counterinsurgency are widely described as "population-centric warfare": a competition between military actors over civilian loyalties. Drawing on a high-resolution conflict event data set and a new approach for analyzing reactive behavior in space and time, this article answers the question of how civilian cooperation and defection are systematically driven by incumbent and insurgent violence. Theoretically, the study contributes to resolving a dispute between proponents of deterrence- and alienation-based approaches to population-centric warfare. Empirically, this analysis improves upon the mixed results from previous microstudies in favor of an integrated picture: indiscriminate violence has almost no effect on collaboration with the adversary in its immediate spatiotemporal vicinity. At larger levels of aggregation, however, a clear reactive pattern of collaboration with the adversary becomes visible which is in line with alienation-based reasoning.

What determines the type of violence used by military actors in civil wars? Drawing on Kalyvas's "information problem" and Boulding's "loss of strength gradient", this paper proposes a simple model of how the violence becomes more indiscriminate as a function of distance from the actors' power centers. The proposed mechanism is a growing inability of the actors to distinguish between collaborators of the adversary and innocent bystanders. Tested on the conflict event level for 11 cases of insurgency, the results indicate that a simple distance-decay mechanism can explain the occurrence of indiscriminate violence to a large extent.

A method for predicting conflict zones in civil wars based on point process models is presented in this paper. Instead of testing the validity of specific theoretical conjectures about the determinants of violence in a causal framework, this paper builds on classic literature and a wide body of recent studies to predict conflict zones based on a series of geographic conditions. Using an innovative cross-validation design, the study shows that the quantitative research program on the micro-foundations of violence in civil conflict has crafted generalizable insights permitting out-of-sample predictions of conflict zones. The study region is delimited to ten countries in Sub-Saharan Africa that experienced full-blown insurgencies in the post-Cold War era.

Insurgency and counterinsurgency are widely described as "population-centric warfare": a competition between military actors over civilian loyalties. Drawing on a high-resolution conflict event data set and a new approach for analyzing reactive behavior in space and time, this article answers the question of how civilian cooperation and defection are systematically driven by incumbent and insurgent violence. Theoretically, the study contributes to resolving a dispute between proponents of deterrence- and alienation-based approaches to population-centric warfare. Empirically, this analysis improves upon the mixed results from previous microstudies in favor of an integrated picture: indiscriminate violence has almost no effect on collaboration with the adversary in its immediate spatiotemporal vicinity. At larger levels of aggregation, however, a clear reactive pattern of collaboration with the adversary becomes visible which is in line with alienation-based reasoning.

What determines the type of violence used by military actors in civil wars? Drawing on Kalyvas's "information problem" and Boulding's "loss of strength gradient", this paper proposes a simple model of how the violence becomes more indiscriminate as a function of distance from the actors' power centers. The proposed mechanism is a growing inability of the actors to distinguish between collaborators of the adversary and innocent bystanders. Tested on the conflict event level for 11 cases of insurgency, the results indicate that a simple distance-decay mechanism can explain the occurrence of indiscriminate violence to a large extent.

Dependency attorneys who represent children in child abuse and neglect proceedings engage in cross‐cultural lawyering. Beyond the inevitable cultural differences between lawyer and child client in terms of education, development, and age, there are often differences in race, sexual orientation, language, neighborhood of residence, and countless other cultural dimensions. Cultural differences can lead to miscommunications and misunderstandings between attorney and client, which in turn hurt the quality of representation. Increasing the cultural competence of an attorney can improve the attorney's ability to work effectively with children from different cultures. Unfortunately, very few states currently require cultural competence training for attorneys who represent children. This article calls for making cultural competence training mandatory for all dependency attorneys to improve the quality of representation for children involved in the dependency system.

This study introduces a theoretical model of how insurgency develops as a function of reactive mobilization. The theory extends a classic distance-decay model by incorporating Kalyvas' typology of violence. It implies that geographic conditions crucially determine the accuracy of applied violence and thereby its public perception, which in turn determines the actors' ability to mobilize. As a first test of these effects, I propose a new geographic indicator that expresses the spatial accessibility of a country's population for both central governments and peripheral insurgent movements. Two empirical implications of the theory are tested with a large- N data set on outcomes and casualties in insurgencies. The new indicator is significantly associated with both military outcomes and the number of casualties in insurgencies since 1970 and strengthens statistical predictions.

The changing global environment requires from public sector leaders to have specific competencies to meet pressing economic and community needs. The main objective of this research was to explore the determinants of affective competencies for leaders in the South African Public sector. A questionnaire was administered among a sample of Public sector managers (N=168). The respondents perceived that public sector leaders displayed below average affective competencies relating to internalizing, organizational influencing and valuing political awareness. Significant large gaps existed between the current displays of the affective competencies versus the importance thereof. Recommendations are made. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n27p942