Creating Order Amidst Civil War
A new article by Paul Staniland, professor at the University of Chicago:
Bargains, deals, and tacit understandings between states and insurgents are common in civil wars. This fascinating mix of conflict and cooperation shapes patterns of politics, governance, and violence. Building on recent findings about state formation, this article offers a conceptual typology of political orders amidst civil war. Wartime political orders vary according to the distribution of territorial control and the level of cooperation between states and insurgents. Orders range from collusion and shared sovereignty to spheres of influence and tacit coexistence to clashing monopolies and guerrilla disorder. Examples from contemporary South Asian conflicts illustrate these concepts, which are scalable and portable across contexts. Scholars need to think more creatively about the political-military arrangements that emerge and evolve during war. A key policy implication is that there are many ways of forging stability without creating a counterinsurgent Leviathan.
You can download it here (ungated). Highly recommended!
Source: themonkeycage.org
Video depicting organized violence in Africa from 1989 to 2010. Based on the UCDP’s Georeferenced Event Dataset, which tracks violence across time and space around the globe.
Paul Collier: “Africa Must Liberalize Internally”
In a recent interview, Paul Collier discusses the pros and cons of trade liberalization in Africa, the efficacy of economic sanctions and the importance of solid democratic institutions to conflict-stricken countries. Since he is one of the most important authors in civil war studies, it is always good to know what he is thinking about.
You can read the interview on The European Magazine website.
Source: marginalrevolution.com
New data allows for unique conflict research
Which factors increase the risk for armed conflict and war? What circumstances make conflict resolution more likely to be successful? If work for peace is to bear fruit; these questions needs to be answered. Today, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) releases a new dataset which opens up new possibilities for the study of armed conflict. Using these data, useful findings relating to climate change and armed conflict have already been made.
Existing data on armed conflicts cover only individual countries or provide information only on a yearly basis. This has limited the extent to which the data can be used. One example is that such data do not permit studies of local issues of civil war. For this reason peace and conflict researchers have in recent years realized the necessity for more detailed data on armed conflict.
The dataset which is released today covers all armed conflicts in Africa from 1989 through 2010 and contains information on the precise date and place of individual instances (events) of armed violence. This allows for new research on the causes, dynamics, and resolution of armed conflict. Further, patterns and the geographic developments of conflicts can be analyzed using software for geographic information systems (GIS).
More information here.
Rights group abandons ‘blood diamonds’ scheme
Global Witness says the Kimberley Process, a global diamond regulatory project, ignores links between gems and violence.
Thinking Little: Giving Greater Focus to Small Arms
Weapons of mass destruction fears, which aren’t invalid, overshadow what might actually be a bigger, and less easy to approach, threat: that of the proliferation small arms and light weaponry. Are nukes the weapons we should be most immediately worried about? I don’t think so.
Not that we shouldn’t care about nuclear programs, or about people like Ahmedinejad or Al Qaeda having them. Of course we should. A focus on preventing acquisition of large scale disaster weaponry like the CBRN (chemicalbiologicalradiologicalnuclear) class of weapons isn’t exactly a tactic matched with the technologies of the wars that we face (well, not ‘we,’ I don’t face wars. I just blog about them).
The wars we fight are wars where small arms rule. And this is the point in my blog post where I say, if you haven’t already read C.J. Chivers’ The Gun, it’s an incredibly important work and you’re missing out on a whole lot of small arms insight if you haven’t. The problem with the insurgencies and conflicts and civil wars of current times and recent history is that they are fueled not by the big scary weaponry of doomsday proclamations, but by the AK-47s that you can train a child to use and the RPGs that can take down Chinooks and the IEDs that you can make with two pieces of duct tape and a marshmallow. (Okay… maybe more like an fertilizer and easily-made contact detonators, but you get the point.) Ignoring the power that regions bloated with small arms that don’t need much in the way of instruction manuals and which are easily bought, sold and smuggled across borders to put in the hands of whomever is ignoring the power that makes these wars so dangerous. And peacebuilding? Nationbuilding? Those processes don’t work on war-ravaged, freaked out populations with guns at the ready. Regions that continue to have untrackable and unregulated access to small arms and light weaponry will continue to feel the threat of armed groups, will continue to feel the need to arm themselves in defense, and will continue to experience regular community violence. You can’t build peace on a pile of AK-47s (or their Chinese knock-off cousins).
About 85 percent of IEDs are made with fertilizer from a single company inside Pakistan. When it comes to “our interests in Afghanistan” (and by “interests” I mean keeping as many body parts on as many people as possible and actually maybe leaving there before I have my first grandchild), that’s probably far more immediately problematic than Pakistan’s nukes. The greatest single loss of US life in Afghanistan was most likely the result of an RPG, not a nuke or a disease or a freaky terror chemical. We need to be preventing those RPGs from being so easily accessible in the first place.
By all means, keep being freaked out by the idea of Al Qaeda getting their hands on nuclear fuel or biological weaponry; I know I will be. But for the sake of the way conflict works now, and for the sake of actually creating sustainable peace, we have to be far more focused on creating and enforcing actionable international agreements to limit and track the small arms trade and to tailor our foreign/military policies to give larger weight to the smaller weapons.
Source: thepoliticalnotebook
Master of Arts in Political Science at the University of São Paulo. 
