Suchergebnisse

Internal party rifts in the Nepali government preoccupied leaders, who squandered opportunities to prepare a coherent response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic resulted in a four-month lockdown, with widespread economic and social consequences. The government's response to criticism was to propose legislation restricting citizens' rights, prompting accusations of creeping authoritarianism. Continued tensions along Nepal's borders led to escalated rhetoric. The crises of 2020 exacerbated existing problems with governance, social inequality, and poverty.

This article shows that the statistical correlation between poverty and violence during the conflict in Nepal (1996–2006) is unlikely to be explained by grievances or low opportunity costs among the poor, but is better explained by considering the rebels' strategy. This underscores the importance of validating arguments from statistical studies.

This article examines the impact of colonial-era armed conflict on contemporary institutions. It argues that when British colonial administrators were faced with armed insurrection they responded with institutional reform of the police, and that the legacy of these reforms lives on today. Violent opposition prompted the British colonial administration to expand entrance opportunities for local inhabitants in order to collect intelligence needed to prosecute a counterinsurgency campaign. This investment in human capital and institutional reform remained when the colonial power departed; as a result, countries which experienced colonial-era conflict have more efficient policing structures today. I demonstrate how this worked in practice during the Malayan Emergency, 1948–60. Archival data from Malaysia show that local inhabitants were recruited into the police force in greater numbers and were provided with training which they would not have received had there been no insurgency. This process was consolidated and reproduced upon independence in path-dependent ways. To expand the empirical domain, I statistically explore new archival data collected from the UK National Archives on police financing across colonial territories. The results show that armed insurgency during the colonial era is associated with higher percentages of police expenditure during the colonial era and higher perceived levels of contemporary policing capacity.

On January 21st, 2017 five million people worldwide participated in the Women's March to advocate for many issues, including equal rights for women. Every individual rally had something in common: words. There were signs, speeches, protesting and chanting as people tapped into the indisputable power of words. With every social or political movement, the language of the time changes with it. This is inevitably true for the word "wife". In its most basic form, "wife" refers to a woman who is married. But to a lot of people, myself included, "wife" seems to conjure images of ticky-tacky homes, knee-length pastel skirts, and a suffocating male-dominated culture that just won't go away. Where did these negative connotations come from and how are they changing in the current social and political climate? This presentation will explore the etymology of the word "wife" to seek answers to these questions, while also looking to a future where "wife" means lover, equal partner, most trusted friend and companion.

Why do regimes delegate authority over a territory to nonstate militias, in effect voluntarily sacrificing their monopoly over the use of violence? This article argues that two factors increase the probability of states delegating control to a proxy militia, namely, military purges and armed conflict. Military purges disrupt intelligence-gathering structures and the organizational capacity of the military. To counteract this disruption, military leaders subcontract the task of control and repression to allied militias that have the local intelligence skills necessary to manage the civilian population. This argument is conditioned by whether the state faces an armed insurgency in a given region since intelligence, control, and repression are needed most where the state is being challenged. This hypothesis is tested on unique data for all subnational regions within Myanmar during the period 1962 to 2010 and finds that proxy militias are more likely to be raised in conflict areas after military purges.

Common notions about the source of communal land conflict in Africa have long explained it as growing out of conditions of environmental scarcity. This article argues instead that the institutional structure of the legal system is central to understanding which countries are prone to experience communal land conflict. When competing customary and modern jurisdictions coexist in countries inhabited by mixed identity groups, the conflicting sources of legal authority lead to insecurity about which source of law will prevail. Because the source of law is contested, conflict parties cannot trust the legal system to predictably adjudicate disputes, which encourages the use of extrajudicial vigilante measures. Using new data on communal violence in West Africa, this argument is examined for the period 1990–2009. The results show that in countries where competing jurisdictions exist, communal land conflict is 200–350% more likely. These findings suggest that researchers should consider the role of legal institutions and processes in relation to social unrest and collective violence.

In recent years, several large-scale data-collection projects have produced georeferenced, disaggregated events-level conflict data which can aid researchers in studying the microlevel dynamics of civil war. This article describes the differences between the two leading conflict events datasets, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program Georeferenced Events Dataset (UCDP GED) and the Armed Conflict Location Events Dataset (ACLED), including their relative strengths and weaknesses. The aim of the article is to provide readers with some guidelines as to when these datasets should be used and when they should be avoided; it finds that those interested in subnational analyses of conflict should be wary of ACLED's data because of uneven quality-control issues which can result in biased findings if left unchecked by the researcher. The article concludes that those interested in non-violent events such as troop movements have only ACLED to choose from, since UCDP has not coded such data, but again warns researchers to be wary of the quality of the data. Finally, while the creation of these datasets is a positive development, some caveats are raised in relation to both datasets about the reliance on media sources.