Why do some armed civil conflicts last longer than others? Drawing on a contest success function model, we show that geographic factors (such as location, terrain, and natural resources) interact with rebel fighting capacity and together play a crucial role in determining the duration of...

Civil war is fought between two political organizations, the state and a rebel group. Myriad theories of civil war have examined the role of state institutions and state strength, but little attention has been devoted to theorizing about rebel organizations themselves. The organizational...

This article introduces the Polity IIId (“d†is for dates) data set. The Polity IIId project codes the precise dates of changes in political structure identified by Polity III for all independent countries in the international system from 1800 to 1994. By moving from annual...

After the nonbinding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, many global and regional human rights treaties have been concluded. Critics argue that these are unlikely to have made any actual difference in reality. Others contend that international regimes can improve respect for human rights in...

Substantial variation in recognition rates for asylum claims from the same countries of origin subjects refugees to unfair and discriminatory treatment. This article demonstrates the extent of variation and lack of convergence over the period from 1980 to 1999 across Western European destination...

The hypothesis that political violence deters tourism is mainly based on case study evidence and a few quantitative studies confined to a small sample of countries. Two estimation techniques—a fixed-effects panel estimator with contemporaneous effects only and a dynamic generalized method...