It is commonly believed that torture is an effective tool for combating an insurgent threat. Yet while torture is practiced in nearly all counterinsurgency campaigns, the evidence documenting torture’s effects remains severely limited. This study provides the first micro-level statistical...

Can local organizations give civilians the capacity to protect themselves from civil war violence? Civilians have traditionally been considered powerless when facing armed groups but new research suggests organized communities may promote security through nonviolent strategies such as resolving...

Although policymakers, NGOs, and academics have all expressed interest in accounting for mass killing, it is still unclear why states perpetrate massacres against their citizens. The present article identifies how strategic incentives can motivate states to commit massacres in particular...

With more than 12,000 deaths in nine years, a homegrown Maoist insurgency, reinforced by ethnic and socioeconomic cleavages, has resulted in high levels of political violence and human rights violations in Nepal. With fresh district-level data and drawing on theoretical insights from both the...

We propose that emigrants affect the likelihood of civil war onset in their state of origin by influencing the willingness of individuals to join rebel movements and the probability that the state and rebels will be unable to reach a mutually acceptable bargain to avoid conflict in three ways....

This paper reviews how the Spanish civil war was financed. We present new evidence to show that the two combatant parties, the Republican government and the Franco administration followed similar financial strategies. In both cases money creation, rather than new taxes or the issue of debt, was...

Recent research on violence against civilians during wars has emphasized war-related factors over political ones. For example, factors such as control of territory or characteristics of the armed groups have been prioritized at the expense of factors such as ideological alignments or local...