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"A staff report not a report of the Commission."--Cover. ; "A staff report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence."--Cover. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Mode of access: Internet.

The police are often key actors in conflict processes, yet there is little research on their role in the production of political violence. Previous research provides us with a limited understanding of the part the police play in preventing or mitigating the onset or escalation of conflict, in patterns of repression and resistance during conflict, and in the durability of peace after conflicts are resolved. By unpacking the role of state security actors and asking how the state assigns tasks among them—as well as the consequences of these decisions—we generate new research paths for scholars of conflict and policing. We review existing research in the field, highlighting recent findings, including those from the articles in this special issue. We conclude by arguing that the fields of policing and conflict research have much to gain from each other and by discussing future directions for policing research in conflict studies.

This paper offers a typology of different forms of political violence, linking them in a continuum and in an interdependent field of forces. The forms identified are systemic violence, institutional violence, group violence, armed struggle, terrorism, and war. In the final section, after discussing how these types of violence influence one another, a strategy is suggested for their simultaneous reduction.

The global threat of Al Qaeda post 9/11 and ISIL, increased Sunni-Shia conflicts, and violence in the Middle East and Pakistan dominate headlines and challenge governments in the region and globally. Both Muslim extremists and some Western experts and observers speak of a clash of civilizations or a culture war in Muslim-West relations. Both the discourse and violence yet again raise questions about the relationship of Islam to violence and terrorism: is Islam a particularly violent religion? Critics cite Quranic passages, doctrines like jihad and events in Muslim history as strong indicators and proof that Islam is the primary driver of Muslim extremism and terrorism. What do the Quran and Islamic law have to say about violence, jihad and warfare? What are the primary drivers of terrorism in the name of Islam today? This article will address these questions in the context of development of global jihadist movements, in particular Al Qaeda and ISIL, their roots, causes, ideology and agenda.

To address security concerns, governments often implement trade barriers and restrictions on the movement of goods and people. These restrictions have negative economic consequences, possibly increasing the supply of political violence. To test this hypothesis, we exploit the restrictions imposed by Israel on imports to the West Bank as a quasi-experiment. In 2008 Israel started enforcing severe restrictions on the import of selected dual-use goods and materials, de facto banning a number of production inputs from entering the West Bank. We show that after 2008 (i) output and wages decrease in those manufacturing sectors that use those materials more intensively as production inputs, (ii) wages decrease in those localities where employment is more concentrated in these sectors, and (iii) episodes of political violence are more likely to occur in these localities. Our calculations suggest these effects account for 18% of the violent political events that occurred in the West Bank from 2008 to 2014.

Address: U.S. Dept. of State, Bureau of Diplomatic Security, Diplomatic Security Service, Office of Intelligence and Threat Analysis, SA2, 2121 Virginia Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20520 ; Mode of access: Internet. ; Produced by the Office of Intelligence and Threat Analysis, Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS/DSS/ITA).

Can institutionalized transfers of resource rents be a source of civil conflict?Are cohesive institutions better in managing distributive conflicts? We studythese questions exploiting exogenous variation in revenue disbursements tolocal governments together with new data on local democratic institutions inNigeria. We make three contributions. First, we document the existence of astrong link between rents and conflict far away from the location of the actualresource. Second, we show that distributive conflict is highly organized involvingpolitical militias and concentrated in the extent to which local governmentsare non-cohesive. Third, we show that democratic practice in form havingelected local governments significantly weakens the causal link between rentsand political violence. We document that elections (vis-a-vis appointments), byproducing more cohesive institutions, vastly limit the extent to which distributionalconflict between groups breaks out following shocks to the availablerents. Throughout, we confirm these findings using individual level surveydata.

Vigilantism is usually perceived as a form of political violence. But we can distinguish three types of vigilantism with respect to its relation to the state: a) vigilantism in place of the state, b) vigilantism as a better state, and c) vigilantism beyond the state. I shall show that the relation between vigilantes and the state is thus not always oppositional, and that the political dimension of vigilante actions in fact varies considerably.

This paper investigates how the devolution of oil windfalls affects the likelihood of political violence. It shows that transferring large shares of oil wealth can prevent conflict, while transferring small shares can trigger it. Among the different transfer schemes, fiscal transfers (to subnational governments) yield the highest levels of consumption, but direct transfers (to people) are the most effective in preventing conflict. By averting conflict, transfers can improve ex ante welfare; however, only a subset of the ex ante welfare optimal transfers is optimal ex post and thus self-enforcing. Among them, those that avert conflict by reinforcing repressive regimes are of particular policy interest.

Policy, media and academic attention on violence in the Sahel region has been widespread since the onset of the Arab Spring, and the escalating violence in recent months in Mali. This research explores the nature, patterns and dynamics of this violence in regional and national comparative perspective, contrasting divergent dynamics of violence both within and across the region. Data is drawn from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Dataset (ACLED), which facilitates analysis of both contemporary and historical patterns. Regional characteristics of Sahelian violence are highlighted, which underscore a relatively low level of violence in the region as a whole, with increases in conflict levels largely driven by the single case of Mali in recent months. Detailed analysis of specific groups and actor types reveal important intra-regional discrepancies which have been largely obscured by characterisations of a regional, trans-national crisis. Together, these observations point to the need to interrogate narratives of regional dynamics which may conceal important national and even sub-national variations and drivers of political violence.

This article introduces the critical analysis of the links between political violence, law and memory that is discussed in the collection of articles that follows. The collection challenge common assumptions about political violence, unveil the processes, practices and discourses through which the Sovereign's violence is legitimized and the demos' violence is delegitimized, and let emerge the dynamic links between violence and law.

This study analyses the relationship between perceived marginalisation and the willingness of civilians to participate in, and justify political violence in Nigeria's Niger Delta region. The dominant literature in this area tends to highlight political, economic and identity marginalisation as the causal factors behind political violence. However, there remains a lack of clarity in the conceptualisation and operationalisation of the purported political and socioeconomic marginalisations. This because large portion of the literature fails to take into account the psychological aspect of marginalisation. Using a statistical analysis of Afrobarometer1 survey data collected in 2003, the study applies two regression models to measure the predictive effects of 16 variables on attitudes towards both political violence justification and the willingness to participate in political violence in the Niger Delta. The benefit of survey methodology is it is a more accurate measurement of the term marginalisation, as marginalisation is perceived by people and is thus a psychological phenomenon. By disaggregating these broad marginalisation terms into discrete items, this study provides a more nuanced analysis of the motivating factors behind political violence. Interestingly, no measures of economic marginalisation were statistically significant in either model. Two elements of political marginalisation exhibited a statistically significant effect on the justification of political violence. Multiple aspects of political marginalisation and identity group prioritisation exhibited statistically significant effect on the willingness to participate in political violence, however not all items exhibited effects predicted by the majority of the literature. This analysis does confirm that the relationship between citizen and state is a salient predictor of attitudes towards political violence. However, the results also demonstrate that the blanket marginalisation terms used in political science literature are overly simplistic and lack nuance. Nevertheless, both scholars and policy makers should prioritise the government's relationship with society when crafting policy designed to minimise political violence.

This is the published version, also available here: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/ad.v24i1.22122. ; Des temps coloniaux à nos jours, l'activité politique a toujours été accompagnée d'un certain niveau de violence au Nigeria. Les deux tentatives d'instauration de la démocratie civile durant la première et seconde républiques se sont soldées par un échec en raison de l'anarchie sociale. Une fois de plus, le pays est en plein à une convulsion sociale, en témoigne une avalanche d'attentats à la bombe et d'assassinats dans tout le pays. Le présent article soutient que la violence politique actuels au Nigeria est le résultat due processus de transition politique raté. `et en l'occurrence, l'interruption brutale due processus de transition qui était supposé introduire la Troisième République. Par ailleurs, l'article affirme que la violence, dans sa nature, est totalement différente de la violence politique que connaissait le Nigeria avant, constituant ainsi une génération nouvelle due phénomène. La conclusion qu'il est possible de tirer provisoirement est que la violence politique peur avoir un impact négatif sur le dernier programme de transition due Nigeria, entante donné surtout le penchant bien connu des militaires à use du prétexte d'instabilité pour perpétuer leur règne.

Conflict research is generally focused on explaining those people that engage in violence. This thesis suggests that we also study ordinary civilians and their opinions and support for violence. Such a civilian-centered research focus is necessary because implicit in much of conflict research there are some underlying assumptions, moral judgments, and geographic ideas about violence-supporters. These ideas which can be called imaginary moral geographies of political violence (MGPV) are causing large divides in the conflict literature. It is preferable to study violence-support directly rather than to imagine them. Attempting to empirically explain and describe the spaces and geographies of support for violence in a GIS may be one fruitful way to better understand political violence and its supporters. Using multilevel modeling various theories are tested to find out why people really support the use of violence. Generally, the finding in the thesis is that most of the varied theories have some influence on support for violence. Similarly, based on geo-locating levels of support to the national and province level, we also find that the real MGPV's can be said to be mixture of most imagined MGPVs. Violence-support is neither entirely supported, nor entirely opposed and that neither is it only located 'over there' or 'over here'. Nor should violence-support be judged since it clearly can happen to any of us, depending on our situation.

The introductory article to the special issue discusses terrorism and political violence in the Nordic countries and reviews the state of academic research on the topic. Even though the Nordic countries appear to have suffered from lower levels of terrorism and political violence than many other Western states, they have been less void and peripheral with regard to such phenomena than common wisdom and academic scholarship would suggest. While some notable acts of violence like the July 2011 attacks in Norway have been covered in research literature to a certain degree, other phenomena such as far-right violence in Sweden have attracted less attention. The article discusses the ways in which the analysis of Nordic countries could contribute to the field of research and how articles included in the special issue address existing gaps in literature. ; Peer reviewed