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Scholarship on civil war is overwhelmingly preoccupied with armed activity. Data collection efforts on actors in civil wars tend to reflect this emphasis, with most studies focusing on the identities, attributes, and violent behavior of armed actors. Yet various actors also use nonviolent methods to shape the intensity and variation of violence as well as the duration of peace in the aftermath. Existing datasets on mobilization by non-state actors – such as the Armed Conflict Events and Location (ACLED), Integrated Conflict Early Warning System (ICEWS), and Social Conflict Analysis Database (SCAD) – tend to include data on manifest contentious acts, such as protests, strikes, and demonstrations, and exclude activities like organizing, planning, training, negotiations, communications, and capacity-building that may be critical to the actors' ultimate success. To provide a more comprehensive and reliable view of the landscape of possible nonviolent behaviors involved in civil wars, we present the Nonviolent Action in Violent Contexts (NVAVC) dataset, which identifies 3,662 nonviolent actions during civil wars in Africa between 1990 and 2012, across 124 conflict-years in 17 countries. In this article, we describe the data collection process, discuss the information contained therein, and offer descriptive statistics and discuss spatial patterns. The framework we develop provides a powerful tool for future researchers to use to categorize various types of nonviolent action, and the data we collect provide important evidence that such efforts are worthwhile. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Letendre, Fincher & Thornhill (2010) argue that pathogen intensity provides the ultimate explanation for why some countries are more prone to civil war than others. They argue that the economic and political factors highlighted in previous research on civil war are largely caused by underlying differences in pathogen intensity, and contend that disease proneness increases the risk of civil war through its effects on resource competition and xenophobia. They present empirical evidence that they interpret as consistent with their argument: a statistically significant correlation between pathogen intensity and civil war onset. In this comment, we raise concerns over their interpretation of the empirical evidence and their proposed causal mechanisms. We find that the data provide stronger evidence for the reverse causal relationship, namely that civil war causes disease to become more prevalent. This finding is consistent with the literatures on the public health effects of civil war as well as research on state capacity and public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the debate over the security implications of climate change revolves around whether changing weather patterns will lead to future conflict. This article addresses whether deviations from normal rainfall patterns affect the propensity for individuals and groups to engage in disruptive activities such as demonstrations, riots, strikes, communal conflict, and anti-government violence. In contrast to much of the environmental security literature, it uses a much broader definition of conflict that includes, but is not limited to, organized rebellion. Using a new database of over 6,000 instances of social conflict over 20 years – the Social Conflict in Africa Database (SCAD) – it examines the effect of deviations from normal rainfall patterns on various types of conflict. The results indicate that rainfall variability has a significant effect on both large-scale and smaller-scale instances of political conflict. Rainfall correlates with civil war and insurgency, although wetter years are more likely to suffer from violent events. Extreme deviations in rainfall – particularly dry and wet years – are associated positively with all types of political conflict, though the relationship is strongest with respect to violent events, which are more responsive to abundant than scarce rainfall. By looking at a broader spectrum of social conflict, rather than limiting the analysis to civil war, we demonstrate a robust relationship between environmental shocks and unrest. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the negative economic consequences of civil conflict are well known, does civil conflict have sector-specific effects that threaten food and economic security? This article surveys the effects of civil conflict on reported marine and inland fish catch, focusing on the effects of conflict through redeployment of labor, population displacement, counter-insurgency strategy and tactics, and third-party encroachment into territorial waters. Analysis of 123 countries from 1952 to 2004 demonstrates a strong, statistically robust and negative relationship between civil conflict and fisheries, with civil wars (1000+ battle deaths) depressing catch by over 16% relative to prewar levels. The magnitude of this effect is large: the cumulative contraction in total fish catch associated with civil war onset is roughly 13 times larger than the estimated effect of an extraordinarily strong El Niño, the ocean-atmosphere phenomenon associated with global declines in fisheries. Robust evidence of a Phoenix effect is lacking: post-conflict fisheries do not quickly bounce back to prewar catch levels due to more rapid growth. Analysis of conflict episodes indicates that conflict intensity, measured by battle deaths, negatively affects fish catch, while population displacement and conflict proximity to the coast do not. While these findings contribute to the growing literature on the economic effects of civil conflict, they also are important for regional fisheries management organizations, which must increasingly pay attention to sociopolitical factors that dramatically affect the utilization of aquatic resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article identifies and addresses key conceptual and measurement issues raised by measures of state capacity in studies of civil conflict. First, it reviews competing definitions and operationalizations of state capacity, focusing specifically on those that emphasize (1) military capacity, (2) bureaucratic administrative capacity, and (3) the quality and coherence of political institutions. Second, it critically assesses these measures on the basis of construct validity, focusing attention on whether they accurately capture the theoretical concept of state capacity, and whether they allow the researcher to differentiate between competing causal mechanisms. Third, it employs principal factor analysis to identify the underlying dimensionality of 15 different operationalizations of state capacity. State capacity is characterized by low dimensionality, with three factors -- or dimensions of state capacity -- explaining over 90% of the variance in the 15 measures. While the first factor, rational legality, captures bureaucratic and administrative capacity, the second, rentier-autocraticness, and third, neopatrimoniality, capture aspects of state capacity that cut across theoretical categories. The article concludes by suggesting a multivariate approach to modeling state capacity, and that (1) survey measures of bureaucratic quality, and (2) tax capacity are the most theoretically and empirically justified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]