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Although conflict issues – the stated goals of actors engaged in conflict – hold a privileged position in many theoretical explanations of the occurrence, dynamics, and resolution of civil war, global issue data are scarce beyond datasets that focus on specific thematic areas. This article aims to bring issues into the forefront of civil war scholarship by presenting the UCDP Conflict Issues Dataset (CID). This global yearly dataset contains 14,832 conflict issues – divided, at the most disaggregated level, into 120 sub-categories – raised by armed non-state groups involved in intrastate armed conflict in 1989-2017. By bringing issues back in, the UCDP CID provides opportunities to reevaluate several central questions about the onset, duration, intensity, and resolution of civil war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do militant groups decide to escalate or deescalate their use of violence in conflict? Examining the case of the "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, we analyze groups that adopt violence as a political strategy and evaluate factors that influence its application. To do so, we adopt a novel empirical approach to the study of militant groups. Drawn from information science, this approach enables estimation of variable influence and uncertainty within structured case studies, and is thus ideal for topics such as militant decision-making where systematic data collection is difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do governments make concessions to some rebels but not others? We argue that the origins of rebel groups influence the bargaining process, and the government's willingness to make concessions in particular. Rebel groups inherit different resource endowments – community ties and military expertise – from pre-existing "parent" organizations. These resource endowments are visible to the government, and they provide critical information about the likely durability of the rebellion. We expect that rebel group origins facilitating these endowments are associated with the state offering concessions earlier in the conflict. Employing original data on rebel group origins, as well as information on government concessions during post-Cold War African conflicts, we find general support for our expectations, although not all types of parent organizations are equally beneficial to rebel groups when it comes to extracting concessions from the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emphasis in recent decades on weak state capacity as an explanation of civil war detracts from an important fact: some of the deadliest and most protracted rebellions since WWII arose not where the state was weak, but rather in areas of significant state power. This study challenges the predominance-of-peripheral-conflict paradigm by disentangling rebel formation from civil war onset and emphasizing the urban origins of numerous rebel groups. Quantitative analyses show that three group types—military-, social interest-, and political party-based groups—are far more likely to form in large cities, especially the capital, and far less likely to form in the rural countryside. Case studies then illustrate the constraints and opportunities nascent rebel groups of each type face. This study advances the field's understanding of a surprisingly large number of violent rebellions that current mainstream approaches and the emphasis on weak states and conflict opportunities cannot effectively explain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantitative approaches to conflict research are evolving to incorporate better theoretical, methodical, and dataset tools. One key area where our progress is especially limited relates to the social origins of rebel groups: how a group's political identity emerges as a focal point for mobilization and future conflict behaviors. We benchmark two key empirical agendas in civil war and rebellion research and then discuss key contributions of this special issue. In bringing together multiple theoretical perspectives and original datasets, including the individual-level and group-level data, the contributions to this special feature push the research frontier further along these lines. Jointly, they demonstrate that a rebel group's origins – where it comes from, who are its constituents, what is its political appeal, and how it organizes – have far-reaching implications to explanations along different dimensions and across a wide range of contexts and regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Turkey's Kurdish borderlands, smugglers occasionally entered insurgent corridors, the guerrilla-controlled mountainous passages, to bypass state control. This article takes insurgent corridors to frame sovereignty as monopolization of space-making and proposes space-making as a key analytic to examine the forms of sovereignty that facilitate or undermine specific extractive practices. As a spatial form, corridors are central to the claiming and exercising sovereignty and extraction without having complete territorial control across a bounded space or the whole population in that space, the territoriality identified with nation-states. By controlling corridor space and monopolizing the traffic in them, colonial empires, nation-states, corporations, and rebel movements exercised sovereignty and extracted value that is carried or generated by corridor traffic. The insurgent corridors further complicate corridor sovereignty as the Kurdish guerillas monopolized corridor-making without monopolizing and extracting the corridor traffic under a post-nation-state political vision that favors grassroots democratized organization of mobilities and livelihoods rather than centralized exclusive authority and biopolitical governance on them. The insurgent corridors constituted what I call countersovereignty, a practice contesting not only the existing state sovereignty but also political models of nation-state sovereignty and territoriality. While anthropologists understand refusal as disengagement from actors claiming sovereign superiority, the insurgent corridor countersovereignty entailed a distinct form of political refusal that rejects mimicking state sovereignty and associated forms of biopolitical governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do conflicts within a country's borders affect its behavior beyond them? We argue that fighting insurgencies at home shapes a country's human rights posture at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC). States often suppress insurgencies using methods that violate their international human rights commitments. They are therefore hesitant to condemn other countries' alleged violations for fear of reciprocal condemnation of their own actions. This is especially true in countries with greater media freedom where the media is more likely to hold the state accountable for human rights violations, and to highlight its apparent hypocrisy internationally. Such states, we argue, are more likely to vote against or abstain from resolutions that target individual states for human rights transgressions. We test this claim with a global statistical analysis of country voting patterns at the UNHRC from 1973 to 2017. Our results yield new insights into the determinants of countries' voting behavior in multilateral human rights fora. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Under what conditions do states protect minority rights in a context of domestic resistance? Recent decades have seen rapid divergence on LGBT rights worldwide, with Africa presented as "norms antipreneur" in the face of international pressure. Yet, in 1996, South Africa was the first country in the world to provide constitutional protection on grounds of sexual orientation. This article develops an original theory on LGBT rights protection using a conflict-to-rights framework. Employing process tracing, elite interviews and archival sources, I show how a situation of insurgency allows LGBT activists to build networks and increase egalitarian attitudes to attain in-group status. Continued violence also works to block public participation in policy-making while dividing opposition forces, allowing a tiny group of activists to effectively lobby for change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether non-monotonic patterns exist between forest coverage and conflict processes in Myanmar. Specifically, the paper finds that forest coverage and civil conflict follow an inverted U-shaped relationship: conflict decreases at extremely low and high densities of forest coverage but increases at medium and somewhat high forest densities. Following the logic of the variability of rugged terrain, we argue that this pattern reflects the dual mechanisms of refuge and tactical advantages for rebel groups, who intentionally use such terrain to maximize logistical advantage while minimizing the military advantages enjoyed by better equipped government forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memories about historical episodes of violence are a window not only into experiences of people's past struggles but also about their aspirations for the future. In this article, I focus on memories about the armed conflict in El Salvador (1980–1992) to better understand how sets of individual recollections reveal collected patterns in the narrative arcs of those who personally lived through the conflict. In so doing, I aim to expand prior works that have explored communities of memory in El Salvador. To accomplish this goal, I rely on an oral history archive. Using a grounded theory approach, I investigate how people in a rural community in northern El Salvador remember the armed conflict, how their collected memories compare with prior research about life stories of former members of the guerrilla movement and the armed forces, and finally, how oral histories contribute to a scholarly understanding of social memories of violence. I find that, within this archive, people's recollections of the armed conflict can be organized around four themes: (1) community organizing, (2) repression, (3) exile, and (4) reconstruction. I suggest that the metaphor of the exodus serves to understand how individuals from this region remember the armed conflict. I argue that the exodus memory community reveals the importance of acts of everyday resistance to state repression, sheds light on how noncombatants remember the conflict, and suggests a larger and ongoing trajectory to community organizing in which the war is an important chapter, but not the only one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Water has been formulated as a resource or a hazard within water resources geography. We propose that reframing of water as hydro-heritage opens up richer analytical possibilities for examining the pluriverses and multiple ontologies that animate gendered experience of water. We are concerned with how hydro-heritage has or could have contributed to healing in the post-conflict Swat valley of Pakistan. We highlight how the Taliban insurgency and the reconstruction following its military defeat displaced people's worlds of meaning in Swat. We find that the pre-conflict mountain springs were a site for an enchanted affective encounter between humans and non-humans, where a multifaceted gendered experience of water was enacted. The developmental imaginaries of the Pakistan state in the post-conflict reconstruction phase and the accompanying social changes deracinated water and springs from their pluriversal moorings towards 'modern water' with damaging material and emotional consequences for the people of Swat. This was particularly pronounced in terms of gendered access to water, health and mobility. We suggest that water as hydro-heritage has the potential to heal, provided people's worlds of meaning and experience of water are recentred in developmental imaginaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic work performed in Chengdu, China, this article presents a decolonial analysis of Chinese Lolita dressing, criticising the unjustified accusations of catering to paedophilia and escapism. Lolita dressing is a clothing style originating from the Gothic clothing style of rebellious rock music singers in 1990s Japan. Some fashion studies and the mass media tend to place Lolita dressing in the context of a counter-public subculture narrative. However, such a framework is biased due to its Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism appears as origin-centrism in forming two unjustified accusations. The accusation of catering to paedophilia is formed based on its Euro-American etymological origin. The word 'Lolita' is inextricably associated with paedophilia in Western culture, which leads the general public, and mass media in particular, immediately to the discussion of Lolita dressing as being an abnormality. The accusation of escapism is based on its Japanese subcultural origin. Japanese Lolita dressing is an intentional refusal of the mainstream expectation of being an adult woman. This directs the discussion of Lolita dressing to youthful escapism from a disappointing reality. These two presumptions are problematic in Chinese Lolita dressing practices. Chinese Lolita dressing practitioners tend to integrate Lolita dresses into their ordinary life instead of using Lolita dresses as a medium to build an imagined identity. For Chinese Lolita dressing practitioners, Lolita dresses are neither abnormal nor counter-public. In short, Chinese Lolita dressing should be positioned as a fashionable clothing category among diverse clothing practices instead of as a subculture or an example of a counter-public rebellion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What determines the outcomes of civil wars? Existing literature highlights numerous factors at the systemic, state, and organizational levels of analysis. Yet there is little research on the attributes of rebel leaders in shaping war outcomes despite ample theories of their importance in steering their organizations. This article focuses on rebel leaders' age as one key driver of their behavior. Applying insights from developmental psychology to the context of armed rebellion, we argue that young rebel leaders are the most likely to suffer military defeats, middle-aged leaders to win military victories, and elderly ones to reach negotiated settlements. We use a mixed-methods strategy to substantiate our claims, combining case studies of George Washington and Yasser Arafat with new data from the Rebel Organization Leaders (ROLE) database. Our findings help advance the study of non-state violent leaders in world politics while illuminating neglected sources of risk and opportunity for peace practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between film and cities, focusing on how cities have influenced cinema and how cinema has shaped our understanding of urban spaces. It reviews four books that examine different aspects of this relationship, including censorship debates in early twentieth-century urban America, Black filmmaking in Los Angeles, location shooting in San Francisco, and the global circulation of urban imagery in film. The books highlight the intersections of regulation, race, and capital in the construction of cinematic representations of cities. The article provides a detailed analysis of each book's contributions to the field of film and urban history. It also discusses the representation of cities in Hollywood films, contrasting the depictions of San Francisco and Los Angeles in films from the late 1960s and early 1970s. The emergence of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers, a group of Black independent filmmakers who focused on South Central Los Angeles, is also explored. The article mentions the book "Noir Urbanisms," which offers a global perspective on cinematic urban history by examining the portrayal of cities in film noir. Overall, the article emphasizes the importance of considering the political and economic factors that shape the representation of cities in film. [Extracted from the article]

Kidnapping is a common tactic used by insurgent groups. However, why insurgents commit kidnappings remains insufficiently understood. Based on 1,386 group-year observations of 140 insurgents between 1998 and 2012, we analyze conditions driving the within-group temporal changes in their involvement (1 vs 0) versus event-frequency in kidnappings. We find that changes in specific quasi-state activities (i.e., extraction and provision of public services), which may rely on kidnappings for coercive enforcement and social control, predict kidnapping "involvement" only. Meanwhile, general resource and capacity conditions (i.e., territory-control, criminal networks and combat-lethality) influence changes in both kidnapping involvement and event-frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central African Republic is a fragile state mired in internal instability and external interventions. The article presents the case of Russian involvement in the country. It argues that the utilisation of the Wagner Group is setting up proxy neo-colonial ties between the regime and Moscow. The political elite in the Central African Republic is protected against a possible takeover by rebel troops or an army coup and the external benefactor is allowed to export the sought-after natural resources and gather some diplomatic support. The relationship thus clearly follows the neo-colonial pattern rather than developing the state capacities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to understand how Chinese audiences have consumed and engaged in BBC's Sherlock as a transcultural fan with the help of digital media. Drawing on the transcultural and gendered fan studies and 36 qualitative interviews, this article interrogates Chinese Sherlock fandom within the hybridised transcultural flow of texts and identity. The key argument is that Chinese Sherlock fans have created a female-dominated fandom that updates the gendered fandom by enriching paratexts of Boys' Love (BL) whilst China's censorship has largely constrained fans' homosexual productivity. On the one hand, the wide application of digital media technologies largely helps Chinese fans to access Sherlock transnationally and contribute to the global Sherlock fandom; on the other, the censoring mediascape in China has restricted fan prosumption, as erotic/homosexual fan work is not regarded as a canonical culture. This study thereby concludes, although Chinese Sherlock fans have been cultivated to circumvent the media censoring mechanism and produce fantexts outside China that features resistance power and fan intelligence, the compromised fan culture is understood as incomplete rebellion because Chinese fans have made concessions and the alternative choices are tacit by the national power itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is an extensive body of literature examining how rebel groups recruit civilians. Much of this scholarly work focuses on the role of material and ideological appeals in mobilizing recruits. However, despite expectations about the importance of recruitment processes, there is currently a lack of data on the persuasive recruitment practices of a large cross-section of groups, making it difficult to test a variety of implications stemming from theories about armed group recruitment. To remedy this, I developed original data—the Rebel Appeals and Incentives Dataset (RAID)—which contains information on 232 militant groups for the period 1989 to 2011. RAID details not only the specific types of recruitment appeals groups make, but the degree to which they rely on ideological appeals, relative to material incentives, for recruitment. To demonstrate the value of the dataset, I employ RAID to test two hypotheses about rebel recruitment and wartime rape derived from existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Western defeat in Afghanistan was due to an inadequate process of strategic reflection informed, first, by an overestimation of the attractiveness of the Western political agenda to Afghans and, second, by overconfidence in the effectiveness of its military approach. As a corollary, popular support for the Taliban was underestimated. The insurgents possessed a degree of what we term strategic cohesion—a sociopolitical and military embeddedness within society—that produced a far stronger strategic effectiveness than we could replicate in our Afghan allies. Furthermore, a military-professional mindset underestimated the degree to which political considerations permeated the battlefield. The political effect of military actions was insufficiently integrated into strategic practice. Specifically, the linchpin officer in staff planning and field operations in Western armies struggled to act as what we term strategic colonels. In both respects, the war continues to offer important lessons for Western involvement in future conflict, including with Russia and China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why does government violence deter political challengers in one context but inflame them in the next? This paper argues that repression increases opposition activity at low and moderate levels but decreases it in the extreme. There is a threshold level of violence, where the opposition becomes unable to recruit new members, and the rebellion unravels—even if the government kills more innocents. We find empirical support for this proposition in disaggregated data from Chechnya and a meta-analysis of sub-national conflict dynamics in 71 countries. The data suggest that a threshold exists, but the level of violence needed to reach it varies. Many governments, thankfully, are unable or unwilling to go that far. We explore conditions under which this threshold may be higher or lower and highlight a fundamental trade-off between reducing government violence and preserving civil liberties. JEL Classification: D74, F51, H56. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the phenomenon of crime–terror nexus from the standpoint of the linkage between banditry and Boko Haram insurgency in Northern Nigeria. Using a descriptive analysis predicated on a combination of primary and secondary studies, the paper reveals that both groups have functionally adapted each other's structures and strategies. While Boko Haram and its splinter groups have occasionally engaged in acts of banditry, there has been mutual co-option by both groups as the exigencies of their operations demand. Nigeria's drive at mitigating the banditry-terrorism conundrum must proceed with a pragmatic understanding of the gamut and dynamics of their situational nexuses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate whether the threat of recruitment by rebel groups spurs domestic and international migration. The existing literature on wartime displacement has largely focused on potential victims of violence. We argue that alongside potential victims, we should expect to see the out-migration of individuals who are attractive to the rebels as potential recruits. To test this hypothesis, we draw on original survey data collected in the context of the MFDC insurgency in southern Senegal. Causal identification stems from instrumenting recruitment threat with the density of the local forest canopy cover. Analyzing data from 3,200 respondents and over 24,000 family members, we show that individuals who fit the recruitment profiles of rebel groups are more likely to leave and be sent away by their families. Our paper contributes micro-evidence for a mechanism linking violent conflict to migration, which so far has received scant attention, and provides a deeper understanding of the composition of refugee flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of the West German New Left in part drew from the particular kind of critical theory that Adorno still represented but in search of radicalization it drew on Walter Benjamin, who for many was the real hero, and Italian Marxism as represented by Negri, but this was dangerous territory. Through its founder and publisher Peter Gente, along with his partner Heidi Paris, it shaped the New Left in West Germany over several decades. I The Summer of Theory i is a fascinating reconstruction of the German New Left through a reading of one of its iconic publishers and the mission of its pivotal figures, Peter Gente and Heidi Paris. I Minima Moralia i had a transformative effect on German left-wing thought, making Adorno famous, but it also marked a disenchantment with Marxism, which was reflected in Merve's publications. [Extracted from the article]

Why do some civil wars turn into interstate wars? I analyze an asymmetric information model of civil war onset, rebel-sided intervention, and interstate retaliation with endogenous stakes. Interstate war occurs when rebels believe that the threat of intervention will compel the government to acquiesce, the third party believes that the government will tolerate an intervention, but they both underestimate the government's resolve. The model also has implications for civil wars. Retaliation can deter intervention and rebellion, but intervention can compel the government to give up power, so predicting civil war requires accounting for this triadic interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That terrorism is a "weapon of the weak" is such deeply held conventional wisdom it has become almost a cliché. "Weak" means many different things in the literature, however, and little rigorous empirical research has tested the contention that weaker groups, however conceived, are more likely to employ terrorism. This article explores prominent weapon of the weak arguments to develop testable hypotheses about group strength and the prevalence of terrorism. Using measures of deliberately indiscriminate attacks on civilians by rebel groups in civil conflicts, as well as multiple measures of rebel strength, it examines systematically whether weaker groups are more likely to employ terrorism. I find surprisingly little empirical support for the conventional wisdom. There is no clear or consistent evidence that deliberately indiscriminate terrorism is a weapon of the weak rather than the strong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the recurring themes pertaining to the 'Northeast' of India is the question of ethno-political unrest prevalent in the region. While the lens through which this 'unrest' is interpreted is diverse, the language of 'insurgency' continues to be the privileged perspective. This has led to the reductionist perception that the issue is a particularly postcolonial phenomenon, and in the Naga and Zo Hills, an aftermath of the Christian mission influence in these areas. This perception is problematic as it offers no conceptual space to account for the historical particularities that have shaped these respective struggles, and is unable to imagine a way beyond countering to understanding in seeking honourable and sustainable resolutions. This paper explores the particularities of the Naga and Zo 'insurgencies', particularly in the context of their encounter with the British Empire and Christian missionaries, to seek substantive insights about dialogic transformation as a possible way forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arendt's concept of the social is at the heart of her interventions in racial politics in the United States. Readers of Arendt often focus on whether her distinction is too rigid to accommodate the reality of US racial politics, or whether it can be altered to be more capacious. The central issue here is that of closing the gap between conceptual abstraction and concrete reality. However, by extending our archive regarding the social and political beyond Arendt—to work in subaltern studies and the thought of Arendt's radical Black contemporaries—I argue that we can craft a concept of the social as a counterinsurgent logic by which political acts are reduced to social disorder, neutralizing the political edge and novelty of revolt. The distinction between the social and political is therefore useful not to describe or categorize kinds of revolts or struggles but to critically examine the way they are interpretatively and concretely transformed from 'political' to 'social' struggles. Situating Arendt among contemporary revolutionaries such as James and Grace Lee Boggs, I argue that they mobilized such a distinction, asking not what rebellions were but what might be made of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Context: Historians have established that Black students used force to challenge racist repression in schools throughout the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. However, the existing literature's national focus raises unanswered questions about the extent to which Black students' forceful responses to discrimination varied across local contexts. Focus of Study: This article examines 42 episodes from Louisiana secondary schools in which Black students collectively used force to resist subordination between 1965 and 1974. Drawing upon Black Studies scholarship, it treats these incidents as political acts of rebellion rather than lawless "riots." Research Design: To determine where, when, how, and why Louisiana's Black students used force, this historical study draws upon archival materials from eight collections at five archives, more than one dozen local and national newspapers, and author-conducted interviews. Conclusions/Recommendations: Although Black students acted on shared concerns about systemic inequality, site-specific factors shaped each rebellion. This essay therefore argues that scholars should not mistake the ubiquity of Black students' violent opposition to white supremacy as an indication that subordination or resistance remained static across time and space. It encourages further localized study that is attentive to the temporal and geographic contingencies that shape the racial politics of education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patron states provide their proxies with support for a variety of reasons. To better understand the relationship between states and their proxies, it is important to deconstruct the different means of support. For instance, even after an armed group gains economic and military autonomy, ideological affiliation can be an important factor. The ideological convictions of individuals within an armed group serve as a compass for the actions of the larger group, especially in relations to the patron state. This is the case with Hezbollah. Today, the group has outgrown its dependence on Iran for military and economic support; nevertheless, it remains committed to the ideals of Iran's revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the dangers and threats faced by Syrian journalists covering the conflict since the pro-democracy protests erupted in March 2011. While most Western research on the Syrian Revolution has focused on the working difficulties faced by correspondents, parachutists or foreign freelancers, this article scrutinizes the working conditions for Syrian content providers. Syrian journalists' testimonials of fear and their perception of danger and vulnerability provide a humanistic lens not only on the scope of what revolution and war mean to many who have lived it and been transformed by it, but also on the reality of informing in dangerous contexts. The study contemplates the practitioners' working risks and perceptions of fear and threats, as well as their personal security measurements. The characterization of fear during the militarization of the rebellion as a semi-normalized way of life, suggested by Pearlman's article, 'Narratives of fear in Syria' (2016), allows the authors to place their study in a conceptual frame. The implementation of a survey answered by 82 Syrian journalists was complemented by semi-structured interviews with a selected group of 12 participants. In a context in which 86.6 percent of the respondents had colleagues who had died while working, the findings illustrate that Syrian reporters and media activists perceive their work as extremely dangerous. In the perception of fear, the adoption of personal safety measures by practitioners does not always contribute to decreasing it; the trauma experience can act both as a paralysing and empowering working factor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John M. MacKenzie's book, "A Cultural History of the British Empire," provides a comprehensive exploration of the cultural impact of the British Empire throughout its history. The book covers various aspects of the empire's influence, including language, literature, religion, architecture, and art, and considers the perspectives of both the colonizers and the colonized. MacKenzie examines the complexities of cultural contact and encounter, the ideological justifications for imperialism, the networks that sustained the empire, and the process of hybridity that emerged from cultural exchange. The book also highlights instances of cultural resistance and rebellion against British rule. While the book acknowledges the advancements brought by the empire, it does not shy away from discussing its exploitative nature and the erasure of cultures. MacKenzie's work offers a global perspective on the empire, including lesser-known regions, and avoids reinforcing Eurocentric narratives. The book is accessible to a broad readership and serves as a valuable resource for understanding the enduring effects of the British Empire on global culture and societies. [Extracted from the article]

Through interaction with decolonial IR this paper develops a research agenda extending recent English School (ES) work engaging a Global IR agenda. It argues recent developments in ES work that look to world history and which substantially improve ES accounts of "primary institutions" of international society can be further enhanced by decolonial concepts and methods. By focusing on war as a major primary institution of international society, and specifically Counterinsurgency and Counter-Terrorism, the paper shows how "worlding" as a decolonial approach can extend ES theory's critical reach. Key benefits include enriching its account of political space and identifying ways to open research to perspectives and insights from marginalized populations with deep knowledge and understanding of war through lived experience. Decolonial research methods and associated distinctive ontological and epistemological claims can open ES research to additional world histories its present methods close, further invigorating the principal sociological approach to theorizing international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the Peace Negotiations in Civil Conflicts (PNCC) dataset, which identifies whether a state-party and rival non-state armed group is in the formal negotiation phase of a peace process. The PNCC goes beyond recording instances of peace talks by offering a conceptual framework to identify when a government-rebel group dyad is at risk of formal negotiations. It explicitly considers issues central in event-history modelling, including censoring and the observation period. The PNCC also provides detailed information on negotiations, including the date and location of peace talks, and whether negotiations were bilateral or through mediation. The PNCC is the first source to distinguish mediated and non-mediated civil conflict negotiations under a single framework. Structured over the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset with global coverage for 1975-2013, the PNCC is integrable to commonly used civil war datasets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In I Insurgent Aesthetics i , however, Ronak Kapadia insists that the US has been waging a "long war" throughout history, including the last century, and furthermore, that it is not simply "at war", but I is i war itself (p. 5). Kapadia redeploys the term I forever war i to critically describe, not only the United States' global war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11, but also its domestic war on crime and, by extension, drugs (p. 5). Ronak Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War, reviewed by Emilia Sawada. [Extracted from the article]

Counterinsurgencies mostly fail, as the 2021 allied withdrawal from Afghanistan illustrates. Still, confronting insurgencies remains a central component in ongoing counterterror efforts around the world. The crux of counterinsurgency (COIN) centers on winning the 'hearts and minds' of noncombatants in order to cut militants off from a needed source of material and psychological support. In practice, however, COIN has failed to leverage a pacified civilian population into a military victory and has instead led to protracted engagements with unclear and contradictory goals. I argue that this policy failure can be explained by rehabilitating the doctrine's colonial heritage to its contemporary deployment. I do so by tracing the doctrinal origins of COIN to American-led pacification programs in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Using time as a conceptual anchor, I draw on postcolonialism and social theory to unearth how embedded imperialist notions of Self/Other in the doctrine help explain this ongoing failure. A temporal lens augments an analysis of COIN in three respects. First, it illustrates the longevity of counterinsurgency as a geopolitical practice of pacifying 'disruptive Others'. Second, it reveals a paradox in a doctrine that intimates an end state marked by the absence of those disruptive Others but is designed to constantly seek out disruption. Finally, it lays bare differing motivations for the imperial Self to endure the encounter with the Other in the first place. I conclude by reflecting on the potentially harmful consequences both at home and abroad should the underlying assumptions of COIN remain unexamined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Massimiliano Tomba's Insurgent Universality locates an "alternative legacy of modernity" in how revolutionary movements across three centuries and four continents interpreted and claimed different pasts, concepts, and alternatives for themselves. These movements, from the Communards to the Zapatistas to the Russian Revolutionaries, engaged in democratic experiments in self-government, radical equality, and collective possession. In this forum, Tomba's interlocutors offer reflections and questions about the position of the critical historian, universality, and colonialism. Tomba's response explains the stakes of his project with two further examples of his historiographic practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A two-stage game investigates how counterterrorism measures affect within-country competition between two rival terrorist groups. Although such competition is commonplace (e.g., al-Nusra Front and Free Syria Army; Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and the National Liberation Army; and al-Fatah and Hamas), there is no theoretical treatment of how proactive and defensive measures influence this interaction. Previous studies on rival terrorist groups are solely empirical concerning group survival, outbidding, and terrorism level, while ignoring the role that government countermeasures exert on the rival groups' terrorism. In a theoretical framework, alternative counterterrorism actions have diverse impacts on the level of terrorism depending on relative group sizes and government-targeting decisions. In the two-stage game, optimal counterterrorism policy rules are displayed in terms of how governments target symmetric and asymmetric terrorist groups. Comparative statics show how parameter changes affect Nash or subgame perfect equilibrium outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contested identity of Kashmir and Kashmiris and their intrinsic pain of hoping for freedom [ Azadi ] have found expression through The Srinagar Conspiracy, a novel by Vikram A. Chandra (2000). The article highlights how, through the fractured friendship between a Muslim and a Kashmiri Pandit boy, Chandra traces the upsurge of militant insurgency in Kashmir in the late 1980s and 1990s. The article also examines how the changing dynamics of identity were manipulated by the politics of ethnic and religious nationalism in Kashmir, leading to the 1989 insurgency and its drastic implications. The article also shows how the ethos of Kashmiriyat has been compromised, while the call for azad [free] Kashmir has remained an unrealised dream. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do some secessionist claims turn violent and others stay peaceful? This study elucidates the role of inequality and diversionary tactics of states in secessionist violence. Horizontal inequality increases the grievances of minorities and fuels rebellion. States with high vertical inequality prefer to suppress peripheries instead of increasing redistribution and alleviating their material grievances. States shun redistributing toward peripheral regions because sharing with one group prompts demands for redistribution among other groups, including the dominant group. Fearing resource reallocation at the national scale and potential loss of their elevated social status, the elites opt for violent solutions for secessionist crises. Using a new dataset on self-determination movements I test these conjectures and find strong support for them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pan Afrikan Resistance in the Western Hemisphere Many intellectuals consider the Afrikan revolt in 1791 on the island of Ayiti as the most spectacular of the Afrikan revolts and wars to emerge in the Western Hemisphere. Therefore, the question posed in this essay is what are the converging streams and historical examples of Afrikan wars of resistance, much like in Ayiti (Hayti/Haiti), against racist foreign imposition or enslavement? Furthermore, this essay agrees with Manuel Barcia identification and usage of the terms Afrikan "war/warfare" instead of "rebellion/revolt" because the Afrikan actions against enslavement/slavey were a demonstration of: An ethical behavior associated with war, which was strongly tied to their cosmologies of the world. Afrikan intellectuals such as Ama Mazama, bádélé Bakari Kambon, and others tell us that Afrikan people must begin to revisit and take on Afrikan names, languages, and other essential aspects needed to build a sustainable Afrikan system/government. [Extracted from the article]

Do citizens care about due process rights when holding insurgent groups accountable for violence? We examine public perceptions of justice and fairness in judicial proceedings brought against suspected Islamic State (ISIS) militants and their supporters in Mosul, Iraq. We conducted a survey of Mosul residents and people in ISIS-affiliated displacement camps outside Mosul to evaluate public support for detainee due process rights. Using a trial and punishment survey experiment, we find that Mosul residents, while favoring capital punishment for ISIS involvement, are also sensitive to procedural due process rights of the accused. People with self-reported ISIS affiliations, in contrast, are more concerned with substantive due process, and do not see capital punishment outcomes as fair, regardless of procedural considerations. Although rebel group sympathizers and opponents have clashing perspectives on what constitutes equitable punishment for participation in insurgency, both recognize the importance of due process rights to long-term peace and security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The devastation of lives, livelihood and property in Nigeria caused by over a decade of insurgency by the Boko Haram terrorists is a subject of security, policy, humanitarian and academic concern. Several counter-measures have been adopted by both state and non-state actors to combat the insurgency with limited successes recorded. Consequently, studies have examined several efforts taken by the Nigerian government toward ending the Boko Haram insurgency, including the challenges confronting such efforts. However, Nigeria's de-radicalization, rehabilitation and reintegration programme for ex-Boko Haram fighters, known as Operation Safe Corridor, has received marginal attention in literature. The Operation Safe Corridor programme which was established in September 2015 is aimed at de-radicalizing, rehabilitating and reintegrating repentant Boko Haram insurgents into society. Using a field survey method involving key informant interviews and focus group discussions as well as documentary reports, this article examines the progress and pitfalls of the Operation Safe Corridor programme. It argues that the failure to mainstream the concerns of local communities both in policy and programming of Operation Safe Corridor severely undermines the prospect of successful and effective reintegration of ex-Boko Haram fighters. The article concludes that if this gap is not addressed, the programme will succeed in terms of the number of ex-combatants graduating from it but will fail in terms of reintegrating the graduating ex-combatants into society. This poses significant risks to both Boko Haram defectors and society at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigate the potential relationship between female combatants and conflict duration. We contend that recruiting female combatants extends war duration via its influence on state–rebel bargaining. The recruitment and deployment of female combatants contribute to divergent perspectives between the rebels and the incumbent regarding the rebel group's capabilities and the depth of its resolve, which impedes successful bargaining and extends the duration of the conflict. Results from duration analyses using data on the estimated prevalence of female combatants in rebel groups active between 1964 and 2011 support our central hypothesis and suggest that the use of female fighters is associated with longer conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Counterinsurgents frequently rely on mass arrests to impede rebel operations, but in so doing, risk detaining innocent civilians. Wrongful detention can backfire, fueling insurgent violence by alienating detainees and their kin. Can counterinsurgents mitigate wrongful detention through targeted compensation? I study this question using project-level data on US payments to individuals deemed innocent and released from Coalition custody in Iraq between 2004 and 2008. Leveraging plausibly exogenous variation in the allocation of detainee release payments, I document a robust, negative association between counterinsurgent compensation for wrongful detention and insurgent violence. The violence-reducing effects of detainee release payments were greatest in Sunni and mixed sectarian areas; for the types of insurgent attacks, most prone to civilian informing; and when detainee release was complemented by other population-centric reforms. These results suggest that post-harm mitigation helps shift civilian perceptions, inducing civilians to share more information with counterinsurgent forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Ending impunity" is often heralded as the key mechanism for stopping rape in war. Yet, little systematic evidence or analyses exist of the relationship between impunity (or lack thereof) and sexual violence. We argue that amnesties signal impunity and permissiveness for sexual violence, which can perpetuate and instigate more sexual violence by rebels. Trials, on the other hand, signal a nonzero probability of punishment, which could have a deterrent effect. Studying all intrastate armed conflicts in the period 1989–2011, we find in line with the impunity signal that amnesties are associated with sexual violence by rebels, but we are not able to demonstrate a deterrent effect of trials. While the study prevents us from conclusively saying that ending impunity would be an effective policy tool to stop sexual violence in war, the association between amnesties and subsequent sexual violence is a testament to the perils of impunity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two prominent features in current world affairs are the unprecedented level of global economic integration and the growing incidence of intrastate violence. We develop and test a novel argument linking global integration through foreign investment to intrastate armed conflict. The presence of multinational corporations in developing countries can cause market concentration, resulting in high rents. Disputes between governments and would-be challengers over the appropriation of these rents are likely to turn violent, increasing the incidence of armed conflict. State capacity mitigates this positive association between foreign investment and intrastate war. Strong states have the capacity to deter rebellions, address citizens' demands through institutionalized mechanisms, and credibly commit to the peaceful resolution of conflicts. Using data from developing countries for over four decades and addressing potential endogeneity and selection biases, we find strong support for our hypotheses. Our findings have important implications for understanding the link between economic interdependence and conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British conquest of India was not akin to venividi vici dictum. Rather, it was a slow and gruelling expansion marked by resistance to it from cross-sections of individuals and social groups in Bihar and Jharkhand. The resistance of Fateh Shahi and Tilka Manjhi during early colonial rule were spontaneous in nature and were individual-centric. In contrast, the Kol and Santhal rebellions of mid-nineteenth century were organised group activity and also had an alternative vision regarding the socio-economic and political order to be created in the aftermath of the rebellion. The present article tries to delineate the variations in the nature, organisational structure and vision of the series of the resistance movements prior to 1857. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scholars have paid scant attention to the role of the Bhil and the Mina tribes of southern Rajputana States of Mewar, Banswara and Partapgarh in the 1857 national war of independence. These tribals were dissatisfied with the settlement of British paramountcy in the Rajputana States in 1818 as it was responsible for depriving them of their right to collect rakhwali (protection tax) from the neighbouring States, restraining their movements by stationing the Mewar Bhil Corps and the Kota Contingent in tribal regions, creating a fissure in their society by recruiting a section of tribals as soldiers in these Political Corps and, above all, penalising them as criminals for witch swinging and witch murdering in contravention of their community resolution. Disgruntled with the series of these innovations the Bhil chiefs, such as those of Pahara Bhomat in Mewar Hill Tracts, Onkar Rawat of Mowree Khera and Dalla Rawat of Sodulpur in Banswara State, and the Minas of Uncha village (in Jahazpur district of Mewar State) on the border of Deoli cantonment, revolted to end the British rule under the spell of the 1857 rebellion of the native sepoys of the British regiments at Neemuch, Nasirabad and Mhow cantonments. These tribal uprisings spread, far and wide, in Banswara, Partapgarh and Mewar Hill Tracts in southern Rajputana on the spur of Rawat Kesri Singh of Salumbar, a powerful Sisodia Rajput jagirdar of Mewar State, the Vilayati mercenaries (Makranis and Arabs) and Maratha General Tantia Tope who campaigned with his rabble force throughout Rajputana States between June 1858 and April 1859 for seeking support of people to overthrow the British government and also for punishing those Rajput rulers who had sided with it and surrendered to it the rebel leaders. Of course, the British government suppressed the tribal rebellions with the support of the Rajput rulers of Mewar, Partapgarh and Dungarpur States, but the prolongation of the 1857 tribal rebellions in southern Rajputana even after the restoration of British power in the imperial city of Delhi (September 1857) and in Lucknow (March 1858) confirmed the contention of the eminent historian V. D. Savarkar that the 1857 rebellion was the Indian War of Independence. Thus, the tribals have left a legacy of their valour and patriotic fervour during the 1857 national war of independence in Princely Rajputana. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]