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The purpose of the paper is to explore how an entrepreneur seizes opportunities in different contexts over the course of time through the developmental phases of an enterprise. The investigation is about a Chinese entrepreneur who founded a feather processing firm in 1978 after the start of the economic reform in the country. A qualitative research approach was selected to guide the exploratory nature of the study. Relevant data have been collected from news reports, articles and books written about the entrepreneur and the case company. During the early phase of the firm's development, the entrepreneur depended heavily on political connections to search for and seize opportunities. Institutional actors, such as the local government and the central government, played the role of mediators by introducing the entrepreneur to the most important actors in the market and providing resources such as loans, land, labour, etc. The foundation of the company was not the result of the foresightedness of the entrepreneur but of the Chinese central government. Thus, we refer to this entrepreneurship as state-promoted entrepreneurship. The entrepreneur's relationship with the institutional actors was represented by patronage, privilege and protection. As time progressed, experience grew and institutional policies changed towards favouring foreign trade, the entrepreneur sought opportunities independently, occasionally bypassing the important institutional actors. We refer to such a phenomenon as "State-parenting entrepreneurship", which is similar to how parents raise their children in a protective environment during the early years and subsequently allow them, over time, to move on independently.

In 'Positioning Women in Conflict Studies', Sabrina Karim and Daniel W. Hill, Jr., re-evaluate the literature on gender, international politics, and conflict to reveal that the term 'gender equality' is often used to refer to four distinct concepts: women's inclusion, women's rights, harm to women, and beliefs about women's roles. They develop original measures for each of these concepts and examine their impact on inter-state war onset, intra-state conflict onset, state repression/human rights violations, and terrorism. Overall, Karim and Hill demonstrate how the conceptualization and measurement of gender equality and women's status is critical in understanding how to reduce political violence globally.

AbstractRecent world events, such as the rise of hypermasculine authoritarian leaders, have shown the importance of both sex and gender for understanding international politics. However, quantitative researchers of conflict have long relegated the study of sex and gender inequality as a cause of war to a specialized group of scholars, despite overwhelming evidence that the connections are profound and consequential. In this review essay, we demonstrate the tremendous progress made in this field by analyzing a wave of research that examines the relationships between sex and gender inequality and war. We divide this work into theories that emphasize strategy versus those that analyze structures. In addition, we focus on two aspects of this research agenda—specifying mechanisms that link sex and gender inequality to war, and leveraging data at multiple levels of analysis—to outline fruitful pathways forward for the broader international security research agenda. Ultimately, we argue that the study of the nexus of sex and gender inequality and war will enliven theoretical debates, illuminate new hypotheses, and enrich the policy discourse with robust evidence.

The use of forced recruitment strategies during war can adversely affect military effectiveness and human rights. Given these costs, under what conditions do state leaders adopt coercive recruitment during civil wars? We find that between 1980 and 2009, states changed their recruitment practices 140 times during civil wars – half of which were towards coercive recruitment. Since structuralist explanations focus on factors that remain more or less constant over time, they cannot explain the frequency of these changes. Instead, we focus on individual-level factors and argue that leaders' dispositions as risk-takers determine their beliefs about using force to solve collective action dilemmas during civil wars. Further, conflict context matters for leaders' recruitment decisions – when rebel groups engage in coercive recruitment, leaders may also feel more justified in using such strategies. Using the LEAD Dataset and data on recruitment, we find that risk-tolerant leaders, including those who have had careers in the security sector, as well as those who have prior experience as a rebel or revolutionary leader, are more likely to use force to increase recruitment. While we theorize that this effect may be mitigated by combat experience, the evidence is mixed. Lastly, we find that rebels' use of forced recruitment makes state leaders less likely to use voluntary recruitment.

The use of forced recruitment strategies during war can adversely affect military effectiveness and human rights. Given these costs, under what conditions do state leaders adopt coercive recruitment during civil wars? We find that between 1980 and 2009, states changed their recruitment practices 140 times during civil wars – half of which were towards coercive recruitment. Since structuralist explanations focus on factors that remain more or less constant over time, they cannot explain the frequency of these changes. Instead, we focus on individual-level factors and argue that leaders' dispositions as risk-takers determine their beliefs about using force to solve collective action dilemmas during civil wars. Further, conflict context matters for leaders' recruitment decisions – when rebel groups engage in coercive recruitment, leaders may also feel more justified in using such strategies. Using the LEAD Dataset and data on recruitment, we find that risk-tolerant leaders, including those who have had careers in the security sector, as well as those who have prior experience as a rebel or revolutionary leader, are more likely to use force to increase recruitment. While we theorize that this effect may be mitigated by combat experience, the evidence is mixed. Lastly, we find that rebels' use of forced recruitment makes state leaders less likely to use voluntary recruitment.

During highly uncertain, post-conflict elections, police officers and youth-wing party activists often engage in low-intensity electoral violence, which cannot be readily explained by national-level, institutional, elite-level strategic incentives for violence. Responding to calls to examine 'non-strategic' election violence, this article examines both the key actors most likely to perpetrate violence on-the-ground, and the micro-level perceptions underlying their decisions. In post-conflict contexts, police and youth-wing party activists operate within uncertain, information-poor and weakly institutionalized settings. Consequently, their pre-existing attitudes towards the use of violence, democracy, electoral institutions and towards other political actors influence how and when they engage in electoral violence. We proposed two different paths for reducing this uncertainty and improving attitudes: a) civic engagement programs and b) experience with 'crucial' elections, which we defined as the first post-conflict election following the withdrawal of external guarantors of electoral security. We employed a unique, locally led field experiment and panel data collected during the 2017 Liberian election to demonstrate how a 'crucial election' improved attitudes of both police and youth activists, while civic engagement programming did not. The findings suggested that elections following major structural reforms may reinforce democratization by improving the attitudes of the actors most likely to participate in violence.

How to restore citizens' trust and cooperation with the police in the wake of civil war? We report results from an experimental evaluation of the Liberian National Police's (LNP) "Confidence Patrols" program, which deployed teams of newly retrained, better-equipped police officers on recurring patrols to rural communities across three Liberian counties over a period of 14 months. We find that the program increased knowledge of the police and Liberian law, enhanced security of property rights, and reduced the incidence of some types of crime, notably simple assault and domestic violence. The program did not, however, improve trust in the police, courts, or government more generally. We also observe higher rates of crime reporting in treatment communities, concentrated almost entirely among those who were disadvantaged under prevailing customary mechanisms of dispute resolution. We consider implications of these findings for post-conflict policing in Liberia and weak and war-torn states more generally.

Contemporary United Nations (UN) peacekeeping deployments commonly pursue both security and economic objectives, but the existing scholarly literature contains hardly any systematic assessments of peacekeeping missions' economic effects. We address this issue in two ways. First, we use cross-country data to show that UN peacekeeping missions are large-scale economic interventions. They stimulate demand in depressed economic environments; we find significantly higher economic growth in the presence of peacekeeping deployments than in comparable cases without them. However, we estimate that economic growth rapidly declines when missions end, which suggests that they do not necessarily promote stable economic development. Second, we provide evidence in this vein by turning to microlevel survey data that we collected in Monrovia, where the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) had a large presence from 2003 onward. Our data suggests that UNMIL's spending created demand for low-skill employment in the service sector, largely without facilitating skill transfers or loosening credit constraints for business owners. This illustrates the problem of "peacekeeping economies" suggested by our cross-country analysis: peacekeeping missions help create an economic boom fueled by demand in nontraded products, particularly low-skill services, which may not be robust to the mission's withdrawal.

In the aftermath of civil conflict, war-torn states often require reform of their government institutions. Gender balancing, or the inclusion of more women in security-sector institutions, is an increasingly common reform incorporated into state-building processes. Our theoretical priors suggest that gender balancing may influence unit cohesion, operational effectiveness with respect to sexual and gender-based violence, and organizational gender norms. We study these propositions using laboratory experiments with police officers of the Liberian National Police (LNP). We randomly assigned the proportions of women and men in 102 groups of six LNP officers to observe their deliberative processes and group choices. In our experiment, adding more women increased unit cohesion, but we find no evidence to suggest that simply adding more women would increase group (or individual) sensitivity to sexual and gender-based violence. We also find that, despite an increase in participation and influence by women, male beliefs about women's role in policing do not improve with the inclusion of women. As one of the first experimental studies to assess the effects of gender composition within the actual population of interest, our results shed light on how international interventions to address gender equality in postconflict countries affect important outcomes related to security.