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Violence after civil war is a challenge to sustainable peace. Many armed conflicts today are recurrences of previous wars and much of the literature on violence after war explains why armed groups return to the battlefield. But even if peace prevails, many other types of violence take place in postwar environments. This postwar violence is likewise...
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Since February 2022, the situation in Russia and Ukraine has changed dramatically, with the outbreak of an armed conflict on a scale that has attracted widespread international attention. As a representative of Chinas mainstream media biased towards internationalization, Pengpai is naturally extremely concerned about the Russia-Ukraine conflict. To...
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... 35 The destruction of physical infrastructure combined with the loss of former economic, political, and social institutions creates a vacuum in which both renewed and transformed violence foment. 36 Wartime violence also creates inertia with respect to conflict resolution. On an individual level, authors note that the physical and psychological effects of war engender predispositions towards violent conflict resolution in the post-war period. ...
Our research juxtaposes terrorism with intrastate wars. We start from the assumption that terrorism is politically motivated and examine the persistence of these motivations following one-sided civil war victories. Using a difference-indifference (DID) model and benchmark sensitivity analysis, we analyse over 70 terrorist groups active during civil wars from 1970-2014. We find that one-sided insurgent victories are both less frequent and less stable than one-sided incumbent wins. Post-conflict terrorism is purposeful in the sense that actors employ this form of violence to express dissatisfaction with war outcomes. In general, terrorism by pro-government actors drops off sharply in the post-conflict period; yet terrorism by anti-government actors tends to increase. This increase is particularly noteworthy following one-sided insurgent victories; the regime change inherent in such victories does little to quell the motivation for terrorist violence among ancillary nonstate actors in the postwar period.
... Violence and peace are fundamental concepts that have been studied extensively in the academic literature. Violence may be understood as the use of physical force, coercion or power to cause harm, injury or destruction (Galtung 1990;Bara et al. 2021). It encompasses a wide range of behaviours, from interpersonal violence to structural violence, and can manifest in various forms, including physical, psychological and symbolic (Galtung 1990). ...
The concept of human dignity postulates that every individual inherently possesses intrinsic worth. This means that upholding human dignity demands an end to war and violence. Rooted in Catholic social teachings, human life is sacred, and the dignity of the human being is the foundation of a moral vision for society. This becomes instrumental in educating students about the imperative nature of respect, empathy and compassion towards all, irrespective of sociocultural backgrounds and individual beliefs. Given the profound implications held by the concept of human dignity, through their influence on their students, Catholic educational institutions can wield substantial influence in fostering peacebuilding initiatives and mitigating conflict. This research article presents a comparative study between California and Slovenia, highlighting variations in the autonomy of Catholic high schools in terms of teaching and curriculum development and implementation. Qualitative research into private Catholic high schools in these two states shows that those with greater autonomy tend to foster a more comprehensive grasp of human dignity. These schools also demonstrate students’ enhanced ability to swiftly detect violations of human dignity, even when such breaches are not immediately evident. These observations emphasise the crucial role Catholic educational settings thereby play in the realm of peacebuilding and conflict deterrence, underscoring the need to embed a profound comprehension of human dignity in the educational framework.
... We understand war as the systematic use of armed force between actorsout of which at least one is a statewith political and/or territorial ambitions that results in large-scale destruction and loss of civilian and noncivilian lives (cf. Bara et al., 2021;Sambanis, 2004). This understanding of warwhich does not include structural violence such as denial of healthcare, group-based marginalization, or povertyhelps avoid relativizing the scale, brutality, and forms of violence in war (Gusic, 2020a). ...
... Inherent in this definition is that the postwar is a fluid state with overlaps between and elements of both war and peacee.g. postwar societies can (and often do) feature destruction and loss of lives (Bara et al., 2021) while at the same time containing pockets of peace where the socio-political order is uncontested (Gusic, 2022). ...
Postwar cities are often dangerous, poorly functioning, and hurdles for peace. Current research on postwar cities, however, is largely based on a limited number of "paradigmatic" cases, without a shared understanding of the broader population of cases to which these belong. Important insights therefore remain uncontextualized vis-à-vis broader trends and have an unclear scope of generalizability. The purpose of this article is to promote a global comparativist research agenda that enables systematic research across a spectrum of research foci. First, we conceptualize the postwar city as a city which has experienced war, no longer does, but where fully consolidated peace is not yet present. Second, we operationalize and map postwar cities since 1989, identifying 273 such cities in 45 war-affected states. Third, we provided a typology of contestation in postwar cities. We end by highlighting how our approach advances the research agenda by enabling systematic study of postwar cities, capturing postwar cities more equally across the globe, bringing to the fore numerous understudied cases, and providing a stronger foundation for comparative analysis.
... What is less discussed though is the way different forms of violence continue unabated even when there is a formal conclusion of the war. Existing mainstream theoretical frameworks rarely account for various forms of violence other than war (Bara et al., 2021). Mainstream social science conceptualizations of violence often elide the analysis of how different systems of oppression intersect simultaneously to create multiple vulnerabilities for women and marginalized social groups (Collins, 2009). ...
This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the multifaceted dimensions of violent extremist groups in South Asia, attending especially to the relationships between the local and regional forces influencing their emergence and activities. In addition, research in the book shows how political, security-sensitive events and processes are framed, and the factors responsible for such framing. Similarly, it discusses prevalent discourses on anti-violent extremism policy and the on-the-ground militarized preventive/reactive interventions they guide, which are inspired by ideologies that increasingly reflect controversial understandings of the experiences of people within conditions of state fragility. In doing so, the book balances attention to local conditions that frame the rise and fall, or persistency, of incidences of violent extremism. The systems-based ecological framing of issues in the book is influenced by a concern for the broader questions of securitization, global governance, poverty, (under)development, and armed conflicts in South Asia.
That said, this book is distinctive in as much as it constitutes the first-ever attempt to analyze South Asian countries through the lens of the state fragility framework and to examine how issues of state fragility contribute to violent extremism. Through case studies drawn from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, this collection suggests that fragile states have not only created conditions for extremist groups but that some states at times also adopt violent populist policies to marginalize minorities, pushing those minorities to resort to
violent means.
... The problem with this argument is two-fold: 1) cited sources populations. Yet, the more Doe's violence escalated, the more documents arose noting the initial conditions for genocide [96], although Liberia's Second Civil War likely evolved into the employment of insurgency violence [131] in the aftermath of the coup and First Civil War. In the First Civil War, rape as a tactic of war was frequently a means of financial exploitation, gang rape as a hypermasculine experience of supposed warriors, and more formally, a means of supplementing troop payments that could not always be paid monetarily, via the 'pay yourself' method, mainly started by Taylor with his child soldiers and young insurgents. ...
According to Kaldor's 'new war' theory, post-Cold War conflicts often involve higher levels of violence targeting civilians than in previous wars. The Liberian conflict (1980-2003) involved the systematic raping of female civilians. Yet an extensive qualitative literature review of media, formal reports, and top-cited digital scholarship indicates that armed forces used rape as a weapon of war for different purposes. Under the Doe regime, rape was often used for political suppression, territorial gain, and ethnic targeting of Americo-Liberians, Gio and Mano peoples. Comparatively, while the use of rape continued to be used for ethnic targeting of Krahn and Mandingo populations by Taylor's forces, increasingly sexual violence was used for financial and resource exploitation, sexual slavery, supplemental payment for rebels, and hypermasculine bonding. By the Second Civil War, rape as a weapon became an endemic problem for nearly all Liberians. As state legitimacy over violence deteriorated, the division in insurgent factions escalated the level of depravity of human rights violations. This study highlights the importance of exploring in-depth the different shared experiences of war rape among different generations to understand its complexity and to adapt service provisions to individualized needs of survivors.
... On the effects of international humanitarian law on civil war dynamics, see, for example, Stanton (2016) and Sutton (2021). 15 For an integrated approach to civil war recurrence and post-war violence, see Bara et al. (2021). combatants' return to violence. ...
What accounts for overarching trajectories of civil wars? This article develops an account of civil war as a social process that connects dynamics of conflict from pre- to post-war periods through evolving interactions between non-state, state, civilian, and external actors involved. It traces these dynamics to the mobilization and organization of nascent non-state armed groups before the war, which can induce state repression and in some settings escalation of tensions through radicalization of actors, militarization of tactics, and polarization of societies, propelled by internal divisions and external support. Whether armed groups form from a small, clandestine core of dedicated recruits, broader networks, social movements, and/or fragmentation within the regime has consequences for their internal and external relations during the war. However, not only path-dependent but also endogenous dynamics shape overarching trajectories of civil wars. During the war, armed groups develop cohesion and fragment in the context of evolving internal politics, including socialization of fighters, institution-building in the areas that they control, which civilians can collectively resist, competition and cooperation with other non-state and state forces, and external influence. After the war, armed groups transform to participate in continuing conflict and violence in different ways in interaction with multiple actors. This analysis highlights the contingency of civil wars and suggests that future research should focus on how relevant actors form and transform as they relate to one another to understand linkages between conflict dynamics over time and on continuities and discontinuities in these dynamics to grasp overarching trajectories of civil wars.
... Second, we contribute to literature on post-conflict violence. Previous studies have mainly looked at crime, 12 but less at community violence in the wake of conflict. 13 Community violence is a particularly suitable thermometer for the evolution of local forms of immoral behavior can also be seen as a collective threat, in particular when they relate to a group's sacred values, which hold "importance far beyond the utility they possess." ...
Lynching is a surprisingly prevalent form of collective violence. We argue that two conditions can cause lynching: a shared morality based on salient collective threats, providing justification, and weak authority, creating opportunity. We examine this argument with the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. In Aceh, the province most impacted, the tsunami was a shock to morality (producing a religious revival) and authority (creating a situation of institutional flux). Using World Bank data, we find that Aceh saw an increase of lynchings, while lynchings stayed on average the same in other parts of Indonesia. Within Aceh, the increase was most pronounced where authority was most undermined and where locals had high levels of shared morality. These findings have implications for research on collective violence and the prevention of lynching.
... In this sense, our work builds on that of Chrissie Steenkamp (2011) who highlights the salience of political, social, and economic violence that can occur at different levels during the implementation of peace accords, but does not offer an explicit typology for cross-case comparison. There are also similarities between the categories included within our typology and those identified in Bara et al.'s (2021) conceptual framework. Our typology, however, is more aggregated, comprising five as opposed to eight categories, and does not assess the presence or character of political incompatibilities. ...
Quantitative research on the “durability” of peace following civil wars typically captures the breakdown or survival of “peace” in a binary manner, equating it with the presence or absence of civil war recurrence. In the datasets that underpin such studies, years that do not experience full-scale civil war are implicitly coded as “peaceful.” Yet, post-civil war environments may remain free from war recurrence, while nevertheless experiencing endemic violent crime, state repression, low-intensity political violence, and systematic violence against marginalized groups, all of which are incongruent with the concept of peace. Approaches to assessing post-civil war outcomes which focus exclusively on civil war recurrence risk overestimating the “durability” of peace, implicitly designating as “peaceful” a range of environments which may be anything but. In this article, we discuss the heterogeneity of violent post-civil war outcomes and develop a typology of “varieties of post-civil war violence.” Our typology contributes to the study of post-civil war peace durability, by serving as the basis for an alternative, categorical conceptualization of “peace years” in conflict datasets.
