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Armed conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza are very visible reminders of the severe negative impacts that armed conflicts have on the environment. Yet, despite knowledge of singular environmental issues and specific country contexts, the magnitude, temporal, and multiscalar impact of armed conflict on broader environmental performance has not been quantified. This knowledge gap limits the ability to design broad and targeted measures of environmental protection during armed conflict as well as rehabilitation in the post-conflict period. Here, we conduct the first global study on the environmental impacts of armed conflict. Our analysis shows that countries with an armed conflict have a significantly worse environmental performance. Armed conflict length and severity are both negatively affecting the environmental performance of countries. Even after an armed conflict ends, countries need about 20 to 30 years to recover in terms of environmental performance. This finding is particularly concerning when considering the risk of conflict recurrence due to environmental stress and bad natural resource management. Taken together, this demonstrates the urgency of measures to protect the environment during armed conflicts and in post-conflict settings.

This article presents new data on the individuals who mediate (M-IND) in all active UCDP dyads and lethal MIDs, 1989—2019. The dataset contributes to the systematic study of conflict management in several important respects: it covers both international and internal conflicts, it covers low-intensity violence, and it provides information on individual mediators, who appointed him/her, and type of mediation. Besides presenting the data collection and descriptive statistics, the article engages with the literatures on multiparty mediation and women, peace and security. M-IND shows that women more commonly are appointed as mediators by non-governmental organizations than by states and international organizations. Our analysis suggest that greater equality in mediation efforts correlate with the use of more varied mediation strategies and are associated with a greater chance of reaching peace agreements.

The risk of war is greater in post-conflict settings than in stable and peaceful societies, meaning that this is where prevention of conflict is more challenging and more important. This chapter introduces a theoretical distinction between (i) the issues/outcomes and (ii) the behavior by warring sides during/after previous conflict and the risk of new violence. This approach account for multiple relevant dimensions of the post-conflict context including the military balance of power, economic recovery, demobilization, governance, and reconciliation in combination rather than studying them as separate processes. Following an overview of quantitative and qualitative empirical research on post-conflict risks after international and intrastate wars, the settings with issue and actor fragmentation and absence of transparency are at greatest risk of renewed violence. Prevention should focus on the actions of violent entrepreneurs rather than unsolved issues of the previous conflict.

Research on the formation of transnational social movements primarily view these as either exile support of a local movement or mobilization around an international issue. This article presents a different argument for transnational activism drawing on the logic of the repression-dissent nexus when considering the combination of online and offline performances of contemporary social movements. The starting point is that membership in online communities constitutes a social identity for potential protest participants that can be activated and politicized when states’ seek to repress access and content to online interaction. Since online communities are borderless by nature, we suggest that when regimes employ online repression due to local protests then we will see a backlash that will facilitate the formation of a transnational social movement. We illustrate our argument with an empirical discussion about how the anti-government protests in Thailand in 2020 became part of and facilitated a growing transnational social movement of youth discontent with regimes in Southeast and East Asia. The example shows that the impetus for increasing transnational co-operation throughout the process was in response to growing repression by the Thai authorities both of online content and on the street.

This chapter explores why and when non-state activism becomes violent and empirically discusses the factors that can explain the strategy of contention of Southeast Asian civil society. Research on armed groups and social movements has concluded that non-state actors are prone to violence if this helps them secure funding, if other means have been unsuccessful, and/or when faced with violent repression. In contemporary Southeast Asia, the countries with the most visible violent non-state actors are Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia. These countries also have a vibrant nonviolent civil society and occasionally repressive regimes, but the chapter finds that it is rare that organisations shift between violent and nonviolent strategies. Instead, the chapter identifies some incidences of collaboration across the violent/nonviolent divide, which seems to be more common in response to increased state repression. Furthermore, it also finds that parts of the state apparatus have encouraged and supported several cases of violent activism and uncivil society, indicating the need for further disaggregated study of the networks behind violent contentious politics.

Private military and security companies (PMSCs) and mercenaries are a common feature in civil wars, yet little systematic analysis of PMSC involvement and conflict dynamics exists. This article explores whether civil conflicts that feature PMSC forces in combat are more likely to recur. We contend that the presence of PMSCs in fighting exacerbates the postwar credible commitment problem, as belligerents will be concerned about the possibility to redeploy such forces in the future. Belligerents pay more attention to more recent and more visible information, meaning that the effects should be greatest if PMSCs feature extensively in combat and at the end of the conflict. A duration analysis of data from the Private Security Events Database and Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 1990–2014, offers robust support for these claims. Our results suggest that conflict management should consider aspects beyond the local context as risk factors for civil war recurrence.

Civil war is the predominant form of armed conflictin the world today, and the risk that a civil war will recur ismuch greater than of a new conflict beginning in a society thathas not experienced one. This paper explores the importanceof respect for human rights in post-conflict countries as a fac-tor that reduces this risk of recurrence. When governments donot respect the citizens’ right to life, liberty, and security, asdeclared in Article 3 of the Universal Declaration of HumanRights (UDHR), then a country will not be able to re-establishthe necessary trust in politics and between former enemiesto consolidate a stable peace. An analysis of all civil wars be-tween 1946 and 2013 shows that the risk that peace fails issubstantively greater when human rights are violated, and thisis consistent across a large range of post-conflict scenarios.The implication of these findings is that the protection of hu-man rights is not only a positive end in itself, but also a meansto prevent large-scale violence.

¿Qué componentes de los procesos de desarme, desmovilización y reintegración (DDR) son claves para asegurar la paz tras unaguerra civil? Aunque prácticamente todos los procesos de paz en el mundo incluyen algún tipo de programa de DDR para ayudara los excombatientes a convertirse en civiles después de una guerra civil, las razones por las cuales son exitosos en unos casos y noen otros son poco conocidas. Centrándose en tres factores abordados habitualmente por estos procesos #oportunidades políticas,judiciales y económicas para los excombatientes más allá de las ofrecidas en la sociedad en general#, este estudio analiza cinco casosen los que la paz prevaleció durante más de una década, y cinco más donde no fue este el caso. El análisis revela la importancia deun equilibrio entre lo ofrecido a los excombatientes y el dividendo de paz para la sociedad en su conjunto, y señala que garantizarel acceso político de los antiguos grupos beligerantes es menos exitoso que permitirles competir en el proceso electoral.

Which components in the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) are key to ensure the peace after a civil war?Although almost every peace process worldwide includes any sort of DDR programme to help ex fighters to become civilians after a civil war, the reasons why in some cases they succeed and in some other they do not, are quite unknown. Focusing on three factorsusually addressed throughout these processes #political, legal and economic opportunities for ex fighters beyond the ones offered by the general society, this work analyses five cases when the peace prevailed for more than one decade and five cases when it did not. The analysis shows how important is a balance between the offers for ex fighters and the peace gain for the society as a whole. It also indicates that ensuring the political access for those former warring groups is less successful than allow them to compete in the election processes.

Mistrust between conflict parties after civil war is a major hurdle to sustainable peace. However, existing research focuses on elite interactions and has not examined the trust relationship between government and rank-and-file members of armed groups, despite their importance for postconflict stability. We use the unexpected decision of the Colombian government to extradite top-level former paramilitary leaders to the United States in 2008 to identify how a peace deal reversal influences ex-combatants’ trust in government. In theory, they may lose trust for instrumental reasons, if they suffer personal costs, or for normative reasons, if they think the government is failing its commitments. Using quasi-experimental survey evidence, we find that extradition decreases trust substantially among ex-paramilitaries, but not in a comparison group of ex-guerrillas not part of the same peace deal. Even though paramilitaries are seen as particularly opportunistic, our evidence suggests that normative rather than instrumentalist considerations led to trust erosion.

Previous studies on natural resources and civil wars find that the presence of natural resources increases both civil conflict risk and duration. At the same time, belligerents often cooperate over resource extraction, suggesting a temporal variation in the contest over this subnational space. This study argues that parties fight over natural resources primarily when they expect that the conflict is about to end, as the importance of controlling them increases in the post-conflict setting. In contrast, belligerents that anticipate a long war have incentives to avoid fighting near natural resources since excessive violence will hurt the extraction, trade, and subsequent taxation that provide conflict actors with income from the resource. We test our argument using yearly and monthly grid-cell-level data on African civil conflicts for the period 1989–2008 and find support for our expected spatial variation. Using whether negotiations are underway as an indicator about warring parties’ expectations on conflict duration, we find that areas with natural resources in general experience less intense fighting than other areas, but during negotiations these very areas witness most of the violence. We further find that the spatial shift in violence occurs immediately when negotiations are opened. A series of difference-in-difference estimations show a visible shift of violence towards areas rich in natural resources in the first three months after parties have initiated talks. Our findings are relevant for scholarship on understanding and predicting the trajectories of micro-level civil conflict violence, and for policymakers seeking to prevent peace processes being derailed.