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In 2015, Germany experienced a record high influx of refugees - and received international praise for its 'welcome culture'. At the same time, however, attacks on refugees rose to an alarming level. This article describes the distribution of these attacks and probes their causes, using detailed socioeconomic and political data while modelling a hierarchical data structure. Controlling for further relevant factors taken from the extant literature, the analysis first tests whether the strength of extreme right political parties plays a role and, second, it models a contagion effect, taking into account spatial as well as temporal proximity. The findings suggest that the strength of right-wing parties in a district considerably boosts the probability of attacks on refugees in that area. They also corroborate the idea of behavioural contagion. The set of social-structural variables employed as controls yielded only limited explanatory power.

This paper investigates the role of state capacity for political violence. Most previous studies have suffered from inadequacies of country-level data, questionable validity of indicators or theoretical shortcomings. This paper aims at overcoming some of these challenges. We focus on one specific aspect of state capacity: the role of governmental manpower. We argue that its subnational effect on political violence follows a non-linear, inverted-U shape. We investigate this hypothesis in the context of southern Sudan, covering the period from 2006 to 2010. We use unique data on the geographical distribution of public personnel across 75 southern Sudanese counties. The data are matched with geocoded data on violent events as well as various socio-economic indicators. Our fixed-effects estimations indicate that particularly low or high levels of state capacity are associated with low levels of violence. Counties with intermediate numbers of state personnel experience the highest numbers of violent events.

This article introduces some conceptual thoughts to the study of terrorism and provides answers to questions such as: can terrorism be studied like other crime phenomena? What are the conceptual and methodological challenges when framing terrorism as crime or military conflict? What are the epistemological consequences of studying a highly politicized object? What makes terrorist violence different from other forms of political violence such as guerrilla warfare and insurgency? For this purpose, in the first part of the article a review will be conducted to ascertain what criminologists have contributed to the conception of terrorism. In the second part a model of terrorism is elaborated that depicts the crucial parameters of this form of political violence and thereby bypasses some of the existing conceptual difficulties and misconceptions. We learn from the various definitions of terrorism that the singularity of terrorism has something to do with the victim, the purpose and the consequences of violence. Specifically the fact that terrorists are as indifferent to the various targets as they are to the various political consequences of their attack is what distinguishes terrorism from related phenomena of political violence.

The spread of cell phone technology across Africa has transforming effects on the economic and political sphere of the continent. In this paper, we investigate the impact of cell phone technology on violent collective action. We contend that the availability of cell phones as a communication technology allows political groups to overcome collective action problems more easily and improve in-group cooperation, and coordination. Utilizing novel, spatially disaggregated data on cell phone coverage and the location of organized violent events in Africa, we are able to show that the availability of cell phone coverage significantly and substantially increases the probability of violent conflict. Our findings hold across numerous different model specifications and robustness checks, including cross-sectional models, instrumental variable techniques, and panel data methods

It is commonly understood that criminal violence has superseded political violence in Central America. Focusing on the social construction of violent realities in Costa Rica, El Salvador and Nicaragua, the authors describe the print media landscape in Central America and examine both the quality of leading newspapers and the main clusters of topics constituting the news discourse on violence. The analysis of the macro-structure of topic management in Central American newspapers allows a differentiation of the `talk of crime': it is more heterogeneous than often thought. There are signs that the problem of juvenile delinquency is emerging as the centre of a cross-country discourse on `ordinary violence'. On the other hand, the talk of crime is centred around a few topic clusters, with sexual violence and border-related discourse on violence being of key importance. Finally, the article points to a heterogeneous array of discourse events that is connected to political developments and power relations.