Since 1999, China has spent RMB 50 billion (about US$7 billion) to implement the "Grain for Green" programme, the largest land retirement programme in the developing world. From 1999 to 2003, over 7.2 million hectares of agricultural land were retired under the programme. However, many farmers...

We still have limited knowledge about the long-term effects of fascism on European democracies. European countries experienced cycles of violence between the 1960s and 1980s. Can such violence be explained by legacies of mobilization during fascism? We study whether and how the Italian fascist...

Although the provision of security to all their citizens is a state's fundamental duty, over 50 countries experienced armed conflict in 2021. The international development community has identified armed conflict as an impediment to development and provides considerable resources to reduce armed...

As the world moves towards its so-called urban 'tipping point',urbanization in the global South has increasingly come to be portrayed as the portent of a dystopian future characterized by ever-mounting levels of anarchy and brutality. The association between cities, violence, and disorder is not...

This paper aims at understanding the dynamics of sectarian violence in the city of Beirut, by looking at the early phase of violence in the Lebanese civil war (1975-90), and the process of dividing Beirut into various sectarian enclaves controlled by the warring militias. The paper aims to show...

The concept of scapegoating is frequently used to explain how opportunistic elites attempt to deflect blame onto vulnerable ethnic minorities, particularly during times of social turmoil. However, the notion of scapegoating is undertheorized in the conflict literature and the question of why...

In this working paper we provide an overview of two recent special journal issues on violent conflict and entrepreneurship. These are the special issue of the Journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (2011) and the special issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution (2013), devoted to the...

How do changes in socio-economic inequality between ethnic groups affect interethnic ties in a divided society? I analyse the evolution of cross-ethnic marriages in a society affected by violence along ethnic boundaries and make three principal findings. First, as inequality between ethnic...

We survey selected parts of the growing literature on the microeconomics of violent conflict, identifying where academic research has started to establish stylized facts and where methodological and knowledge gaps remain. We focus our review on the role of civilian agency in conflict; on wartime...

Recent literature has shown that crosscutting social cleavages reduce the likelihood of civil war. This article argues that the same logic does not apply to lower-scale group violence such as riots, which differ in such a way that crosscutting social cleavages should often have the opposite...