Suchergebnisse

Land-use conflict in Northern Thailand has led to large-scale deforestation. This article suggests two reasons why this conflict has not been resolved despite the many legal and institutional approaches taken by Thai governments over the decades. First, conflicting directions embedded within the national policymaking level caused uncertainty for policy implementors at ministerial levels. Second, policy-drivers at the local level interacted with the specific socioeconomic context of upland residents in a way to make land-use conflict persistent. Contradictory messages by top policymakers, combined with the national ministries' focus on purely functional tasks, diminished the importance of a local area-based approach necessary for land-use conflict resolution. Additionally, vested interests favoring agricultural expansion into the forests have been more diverse and influential than those favoring forest conservation; the former having tools at hand to incentivize smallholders to encroach into forested areas. Further driving agricultural expansion was that, in a management vacuum, local private sector actors acted as the de facto policy coordinators for the fragmented government local operations; however, on the forest conservation front, there was no coordinating body. This imbalanced situation has proved fertile soil for conflict.

The gravity model of trade states that the volume of trade between two countries is proportional to the product of the sizes of the two countries and the inverse of the distance between them. The gravity model, however, was initially suggested for other types of social interactions, and it also predicts well the probability of militarized disputes. This raises a concern about omitted-variable bias in the literature on trade and conflict: if the gravity model is correlated with both trade and conflict, it is necessary to control for the size of both countries in the dyad. In this article, I analyze the nature of this bias both empirically and theoretically. I find that a correct model specification leads to a stronger relationship between trade and conflict than in the traditional models. However, the empirical finding must be reinterpreted: what is crucial is not the relationship between the value of the bilateral trade and the size of the larger economy in the dyad (`trade dependence'), but rather `trade efficiency'—the extent to which the two countries trade more than expected from the gravity model.

Water is essential to human life and activities and river is an importance source of water. This dissertation addresses two problems related to rivers. First is the water quantity allocation between countries which share an international river. International resources such as water are typically subject to conflict as individual countries perceive individual gains from increased use of the resource. This inherent conflict is also reflected in analytical studies which are typically partial equilibrium and hence naturally assume that welfare functions are increasing in the resource allocation. In this setting, the question arises if there are ever circumstances such that it is in the joint self-interest of political entities to share the resource.With a two-country-two-good Ricardian trade model, the conflicts over water naturally stems from a welfare function monotonically increasing in water could be mitigated, since the free trade welfare functions can be non-monotone when a country has absolute disadvantage in production of both goods. The welfare function is applied to a Nash bargaining game to show how it reduces conflicts over water. The results also hold when the number of production factors increases to two and number of countries sharing the river increases to three. This contributes to the literature by combining the general equilibrium trade model in a river sharing context, deriving the welfare functions that can be utilized in a game-theoretic framework of river sharing, and demonstrating the possibility that the welfare functions are not always monotonically increasing in a country's resources. Second is the allocation and efficient usage of river water in an irrigated agricultural region, with an application to the California lower San Joaquin River. The results show that the region is threaten by water salinity problems in times of drought and efficient use of the water could help increase aggregate irrigation benefits. This research incorporates a set of crop-water-salinity agricultural production functions in an integrated hydrologic-economic surface water quality model and is significant in terms of empirical originality.

This study analyzes whether climate disasters and climate-induced food scarcities influence individuals' willingness to fight for the state in a pro-government militia in the Philippines. We find that experiencing a disaster or subsistence loss corresponds to an increased willingness to join, even when accounting for other prominent explanations in the literature. This outcome, we argue, reflects the impact of climate change on the opportunity costs of conflict participation, especially in regions dependent on agriculture for income and food production, as diminished livelihood opportunities and subsistence resource access increase the viability of conflict participation as a strategy for livelihood diversification.

This paper quantifies how past transnational terrorist attacks against a potential donor's assets result in enhanced foreign aid flows to a country hosting the responsible terrorist group. Given the reversed causality between foreign aid and terrorism, our empirical analysis puts forward an instrumental variable. Both conflict and governance assistance are shown to stem from transnational terrorist incidents involving recipient–donor dyads during 1974–2013 for a global sample. For recipient-related terrorism, lagged transnational terrorist events against a donor's assets display a robust positive impact on conflict and governance aid. Placebo or falsification tests support the exogeneity of the instrument.

This study analyzes whether climate disasters and climate-induced food scarcities influence individuals' willingness to fight for the state in a pro-government militia in the Philippines. We find that experiencing a disaster or subsistence loss corresponds to an increased willingness to join, even when accounting for other prominent explanations in the literature. This outcome, we argue, reflects the impact of climate change on the opportunity costs of conflict participation, especially in regions dependent on agriculture for income and food production, as diminished livelihood opportunities and subsistence resource access increase the viability of conflict participation as a strategy for livelihood diversification.

This paper quantifies how past transnational terrorist attacks against a potential donor's assets result in enhanced foreign aid flows to a country hosting the responsible terrorist group. Given the reversed causality between foreign aid and terrorism, our empirical analysis puts forward an instrumental variable. Both conflict and governance assistance are shown to stem from transnational terrorist incidents involving recipient–donor dyads during 1974–2013 for a global sample. For recipient-related terrorism, lagged transnational terrorist events against a donor's assets display a robust positive impact on conflict and governance aid. Placebo or falsification tests support the exogeneity of the instrument.

There are many regions that meet the necessary conditions for sovereign governance in the world, but few secessionist conflicts. I argue that this relative paucity of secessionist violence is the result of government preemption of potential secessionist movements. Using cross-national geospatial data from 1992 to 2013, I find that governments invest more, measured via nighttime light emissions, in more secession-prone regions. The same factors that make territory attractive for secession, such as large populations and international borders, also make governments willing to work to retain control of that territory, contributing to the scarcity of separatist civil conflicts.

There are many regions that meet the necessary conditions for sovereign governance in the world, but few secessionist conflicts. I argue that this relative paucity of secessionist violence is the result of government preemption of potential secessionist movements. Using cross-national geospatial data from 1992 to 2013, I find that governments invest more, measured via nighttime light emissions, in more secession-prone regions. The same factors that make territory attractive for secession, such as large populations and international borders, also make governments willing to work to retain control of that territory, contributing to the scarcity of separatist civil conflicts.

This paper addresses the relationship between rebel training from external sponsors and civil war outcomes. While past research has examined how foreign support, broadly, shapes the dynamics of civil wars, little attention has been paid to how foreign training of rebel fighters affects civil wars. We theorize that rebels that receive training from formerly successful rebels are more likely to experience favorable conflict outcomes than those with no training or with training from sponsors inexperienced with fighting a civil war. These propositions are tested with a quantitative analysis of all intrastate conflicts from 1975 to 2010, providing support for our hypothesis.

This paper addresses the relationship between rebel training from external sponsors and civil war outcomes. While past research has examined how foreign support, broadly, shapes the dynamics of civil wars, little attention has been paid to how foreign training of rebel fighters affects civil wars. We theorize that rebels that receive training from formerly successful rebels are more likely to experience favorable conflict outcomes than those with no training or with training from sponsors inexperienced with fighting a civil war. These propositions are tested with a quantitative analysis of all intrastate conflicts from 1975 to 2010, providing support for our hypothesis.

Trade–conflict studies have shown that economic dependence can promote peace by costly signaling resolve. However, with higher economic integration, targets also become more vulnerable to coercion and potential challengers are incentivized to bluff. In return, target states may resist more, raising the question of whether trade still promotes peace. I theorize that bluffing does not stoke conflict in this context because the bargaining environment allows states to inform and coerce simultaneously: the factor that renders a threat less credible also restrains states from further escalation. I test this theory's implications with a structural estimation method and find supporting results.

Concerns about international terrorism make the stability of failing states central to Western foreign aid policies. This paper explores how donors reduce the volatility of aid to avoid political destabilization of recipient countries. Using a formal model, we show that stability-oriented donors control the risk of conflict, but they never fully eliminate it. Recipient governments can exploit donor preferences for stability through increased rent extraction. As a result, stability-oriented aid reduces the risk of political destabilization only under narrow circumstances. If these conditions are not met, stability aid makes conflict more likely. We present evidence for key predictions of our model.

Most multivariate models aimed at evaluating the impact of democracy on interstate conflict contain a set of control variables sufficiently large to have a confusing impact. Partly for that reason, the potentially confounding impacts of such variables as wealth, political stability, and political similarity on the relationship of democracy to conflict have still not been evaluated in a definitive manner. In other cases, multivariate models contain intervening variables that are likely to produce misleading results. Multivariate analyses aimed specifically at uncovering spurious relationships in a more straightforward and incremental manner are better able to produce clear and informative results.

Although mediation is one of the most widely used conflict management techniques, not all international conflicts involve mediation. Why do mediators intervene in some conflicts while not in others? Do third parties strategically select cases for mediation? How does their decision to intervene influence the outcome of international bargaining? This paper formally analyzes the initiation of mediation and the effect of third parties' decisions of (non-)involvement on the likelihood of war. We find that informed mediators tend to avoid cases in which a disputant is resolute (selection effect); however, even such self-serving actions can reduce the likelihood of warfare by signaling the disputant's intransigence to the other side and inducing the latter to make more concessions during bilateral bargaining (signaling effect). The Kargil War of 1999 illustrates this logic. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]