Case study evidence suggests that inequality between regions in federations affects the risk of secessionist conflict. However, the conventional quantitative literature on civil war has found little support for a link between economic inequality and civil war. We argue that this seeming...

We highlight how efforts to collect systematic data on conflict have helped foster progress in peace and conflict research. The Journal of Peace Research has played a key role in these developments, and has become a leading outlet for the new wave of disaggregated conflict data. We survey...

A growing number of datasets collect information reflecting the behavior and characteristics of contentious and violent organizations. Most of these datasets are not arranged so that they can be easily combined for analytical purposes. In particular, there is a lack of common identifiers for...

Whereas optimists see the so-called Arab Spring as similar to the revolutions of 1989, and likely to bring about democratic rule, skeptics fear that protest bringing down dictators may simply give way to new dictatorships, as in the Iranian revolution. Existing research on transitions has...

Existing research has related civil war primarily to country-specific factors or processes that take place within individual states experiencing conflict. Many contemporary civil wars, however, display a transnational character, where actors, resources, and events span national boundaries. This...

Theories of mobilization suggest that groups are more likely to resort to violence in the presence of political opportunity structures that afford greater prospects for extracting concessions from the government or better opportunities to topple ruling govemments. However, existing efforts to...

Prediction is an important goal in the study of international conflict, but a large body of research has found that existing statistical models generally have disappointing predictive abilities. We show that most efforts build on models unlikely to be helpful for prediction. Many models...

In this overview of a new database and approach to measuring distance among historical and contemporary independent nation-states, we review the utility of space to theory and empirical research in international studies. We identify weaknesses in existing empirical data on distances and...