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There have been victories in the fight against al-Shabaab in Somalia, but claims of major success are belied by the group's persistent presence throughout the country. (Survival / SWP)

Much of the current discourse on public educational reform in the U.S. collapses into concerns over testing and/or school governance. Yet there are neoliberal policies being promoted in the guise of educational reform initiatives that are eroding teacher union gains, particularly in urban centers. This article focuses on a recent conflict between the United Federation of Teachers and Mayor Michael Bloomberg over a fair labor contract in New York City as an illustrative example of the antiteacher union trend taking place in urban education reform efforts in the U.S. The author calls for greater teacher union–community solidarity to recapture public education.

This article develops a theory of competitive intervention in civil war to explain variation in the global prevalence of intrastate conflict. I describe the distortionary effects competitive interventions have on domestic bargaining processes and explain the unique strategic dilemmas they entail for third-party interveners. The theory uncovers the conditional nature of intervention under the shadow of inadvertent escalation and moves beyond popular anecdotes about "proxy wars" by deriving theoretically grounded propositions about the strategic logics motivating intervener behaviors. I then link temporal variation in patterns of competitive intervention to recent decreases in the prevalence and average duration of internal conflicts. The theory is tested with a quantitative analysis of all civil wars fought between 1975 and 2009 and a qualitative case study of the Angolan civil war (1975–1991). My results underscore the importance of a generalizable account of competitive intervention that not only explains past conflicts, but also informs contemporary policy.

Determining the appropriate fatality threshold criteria for case selection in the civil war literature has proven contentious. Yet, despite continued debate, our survey of the literature finds that scholars rarely examine their findings across multiple thresholds. Of those that did evaluate their findings in this way, nearly half found that their results changed at different thresholds. Because minor and major conflicts often exhibit different causal patterns, scholars should explore their empirical findings across a range of theoretically motivated thresholds. To illustrate the utility of this approach, we demonstrate that the relationship between narcotics and conflict intensity varies across thresholds. We then introduce a dynamic theory that emphasizes the endogeneity of rebel groups' decisions to turn to drug cultivation during civil war.

Existing research has identified numerous explanations for why some civil wars last longer than others. Yet, the type of labor that state militaries recruit has remained unexplored in this context. We consider how a state's military personnel system affects its ex post decision to keep fighting. We argue that conscription renders access to military labor relatively easy and, thus, less expensive. As military wages fall, war becomes less costly, the production of military power becomes more labor intensive, and the hazard of conflict termination declines. In a volunteer force, in contrast, military labor is relatively scarce and, therefore, more expensive. Accordingly, war becomes more costly, the production of military power becomes more capital intensive, and the hazard of conflict termination rises. These effects are reinforced as a conflict persists, leading to an increased divergence in duration across conscripted and volunteer militaries. We test these contentions using a global sample of civil wars, finding robust support for each expectation. We also validate the underlying mechanisms linking conscription to protracted conflict in two illustrative cases. Our results highlight the importance of labor-side determinants of war duration and contribute to a growing literature that explores how the composition of military forces affects conflict dynamics.

AbstractThis article provides an accessible introduction to the phenomenon of monotone likelihood in duration modeling of political events. Monotone likelihood arises when covariate values are monotonic when ordered according to failure time, causing parameter estimates to diverge toward infinity. Within political science duration model applications, this problem leads to misinterpretation, model misspecification and omitted variable biases, among other issues. Using a combination of mathematical exposition, Monte Carlo simulations and empirical applications, this article illustrates the advantages of Firth's penalized maximum-likelihood estimation in resolving the methodological complications underlying monotone likelihood. The results identify the conditions under which monotone likelihood is most acute and provide guidance for political scientists applying duration modeling techniques in their empirical research.