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With this article we hope to add something new to explanations for violence within polities. We examine the consequences of time in power for political violence. We are interested in the length of time a leader is in power and the time when political violence occurs. We start with a simple hypothesis: the longer a leader is in power, the less likely it is that there will be occurrences of large-scale political violence. We are not aware of any theories of violence that have taken account of leadership duration. We do not argue below that leadership duration and the timing of violence explain all variation in violent political outcomes. Rather, it is our assertion that theories of violence have ignored an important factor: the length of time that a leader has been in power. Throughout the analyses presented in this article we have found a relationship between the number of years a leader has been in power and the probability and volume of political violence that the nation that they are governing is likely to experience. As the length of a leader's time in power increases, the probability of political violence declines. This relationship has been demonstrated to be significant in both statistical and substantive terms in a number of different statistical settings that make a variety of assumptions about the quality of the data we are working with and the underlying relationships we are investigating.

The participation of women in armed insurgencies calls into question a widespread belief that women are inherently more peace loving than men on account of their hard-wired caring disposition. To explain why women engage in political violence, existing research either ignores the fundamental collective action problem involved because of motivations focused on the value of the cause, or looks for selective incentives in the form of loot and appropriation, which often cannot be found. This paper offers a simple gendered model of the supply of violence that can account for both peaceful and violent choices and make sense of the apparent extremism of some choices as rational, not fanatical behaviour. Crucially, it regards the individual reward for violence as not material gain, but the possibility of women of breaking out of the cage of traditional gender roles and making a statement by their deeds, thereby joining a cult of heroes and martyrs. For evidence, we turn to the extraordinary involvement of women in the Russian revolutionary movement leading up to the 1917 revolution.

Social, economic and political injustice promotes violence among youth. Political parties involved in Nepali democratic upheavals resort to violence; this is where youth are portrayed as major actors in performing violent acts. Youths have always taken part in these political struggles. Political parties have used facts that relate to people suffering from various miseries as a means of manoeuvring and mobilizing youth to participate in armed struggles and uprisings. One would expect these violent episodes to have decreased as the country is now transitioning from armed conflict towards a sustainable peace, but instead post-war Nepal has been continuously facing challenges that youth are posing through their violent behaviours. Addressing issues of unemployment, a corrupt political culture, nepotism and inappropriate political socialization are factors which require urgent responses with political commitment to stop youth participation in political violence. One way to realize this would be to encourage youth engagement in positive peace-building endeavours in Nepal.

Five lessons for future research on political violence may be drawn from the articles in this special issue. Researchers should (1) analyze political violence not as a sui generis phenomenon but as one form among others that contentious politics sometimes takes; (2) attempt to determine actors' own reasons for their choice (or rejection) of violent strategies; (3) take the "conflict situation" that encompasses the interactions of all the relevant actors (not single states, movements, or networks) as the unit of analysis for explaining collective strategic choices; (4) take the networks in which individuals interact (not single individuals) as the unit of analysis for explaining individuals' strategic choices; and (5) examine actors' decisions to eschew violence as well as their decisions to employ it in order to avoid overgeneralized explanations for the latter. Adapted from the source document.

Probably no other aspect of the South African conflict has elicited more divergent explanations and misinterpretations than the ongoing political violence. It is variously attributed to (1) de Klerk's double agenda and unreformed police; (2) a 'third force' of right-wing elements in the security establishment, bent on derailing the Government's negotiation agenda; (3) Inkatha–A.N.C. rivalry, engineered by ambitious Buthelezi in danger of being sidelined as an equal third party; (4) the A.N.C.'s campaign of armed struggle, ungovernability, and revolutionary intolerance; (5) ingrained tribalism, unleashed by the lessening of white repression that merely resulted in 'black-on-black' violence formerly held in check; (6) the legacy of apartheid in general, a 'lost youth' generation. Helen Suzman, for example, singled out sanctions for at least 'part of the blame' in her 1991 presidential address to the Institute of Race Relations, while its director, John Kane-Berman, lists all parties as having 'bloody hands'.

Examines the relationship between the length of time a leader is in power and the time when large-scale intrastate violence occurs; includes insurgency, civil war, and violence directed by government or by the leader, 1950-82.

Considerable research effort has been invested in establishing the appropriate relationship between patterns of land distribution and political violence. In an article in the June 1988 issue of the Review, Manus I. Midlarsky proposed and tested a new measure of the distribution of land, which he called "patterned inequality." He presented supporting evidence with data from Latin American and Middle Eastern countries. In this controversy, Midlarsky's analysis is challenged by Edward N. Mutter, Mitchell A. Seligson, and Hung-der Fu. They advocate an alternative measure of land inequality, test its effect on levels of political violence in Latin America, and find it wanting. In his rejoinder, Midlarsky offers new analytical support for his claims.

Lords of the Lebanese Marclies: Violence and Narrative in an Arab Society. Michael Gilsenan. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. 377 pp.Memories of Revolt: The 1936‐1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Ted Swedenburg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 259 pp.