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Rebels can comply with international law during a conflict by not violating international borders, yet strategic goals may incentivize rebels to violate these borders. When do international borders affect the spatial and temporal distribution of rebel activity in a conflict setting? I theorize rebels have an incentive to refrain from violating borders when doing so will reduce their international legitimacy. When international legitimacy is a less important goal, rebels will be more likely to violate borders. I test this claim in the context of the 1948 War in Mandate Palestine by exploiting a quasi-natural experiment in how the 1947 UN partition line was drawn. Using an original dataset on over 1,000 Palestinian villages from British colonial documents and an atlas of aerial photographs of Palestine, I use a geographic regression discontinuity design to see how the UN partition line affected the location and timing of depopulated villages during the war. The results show that villages in areas that the UN assigned to the future Israeli state as part of the 1947 partition plan were more likely to be conquered before Israel received recognition. These findings have important implications for understanding where and when rebels target areas and shed new light on important dynamics of the 1948 War in Palestine.

The article explores the European Union's (EU) conflict response to Lebanon in the wake of Syria's war and its spillover effects. Seeking to boost the polity's 'resilience', the EU has deployed resources and strategies to stabilize the country, enhance its social cohesion and promote 'effective governance'. The EU has furthermore integrated Lebanon in its broader response to the outcomes of the Arab uprisings and the Syrian conflict. While the EU has become more attuned to Lebanon's conflict environment, it has had limited effectiveness in handling Lebanon's conflict processes against the benchmark of its declared goals. The EU's realist-normative dilemmas and inability to address Lebanon's core issues of contention emerge as constraining factors. The bloc is more effective in mitigating short-term strains through cooperating with the government on convergent interests such as security and refugee governance than playing an impactful role in conflict resolution.

Conflict-free Conflict Resolution (CFCR) is an emerging theory and practice of conflict resolution. Building upon traditions of innovation within the field of dispute resolution, as well as insights from a variety of disciplines including conflict studies, peace studies and developmental psychology, CFCR aims to be a unity-centered practice. Both the method and outcomes of CFCR are attempts to reflect the possibilities of helping to create conditions of unity between individuals and communities. The purpose of this article is primarily descriptive, aiming to give an initial overview of CFCR as a practice. This description is rooted in the initial applications of CFCR in a number of contexts. In this article, the theoretical underpinnings of the CFCR model are summarized, CFCR's connections with the contemporary conflict resolution scholarship are explored, and the three stages of CFCR are outlined.

This study employs interaction analysis to explore micro-level conflict processes and macro-level phasic structures of conflict management in two jury deliberations. Results indicate that the deliberations have fundamentally different conflict management processes. Differences in the tasks posed by the two deliberations and in the norms enacted in them, as well as microinteractional patterns, are posited to account for the divergent interaction processes.