When the prices of cereal grains rise, social unrest and conflict become likely. In rural areas, the predation motives of perpetrators can explain the positive relationship between prices and ...conflict. Predation happens at places and in periods where and when spoils to be appropriated are available. In predominantly agrarian societies, such opportune times align with the harvest season. Does the seasonality of agricultural income lead to the seasonality of conflict? We address this question by analyzing over 55 thousand incidents involving violence against civilians staged by paramilitary groups across Africa during the 1997–2020 period. We investigate the crop year pattern of violence in response to agricultural income shocks via changes in international cereal prices. We find that a year‐on‐year one standard deviation annual growth of the price of the major cereal grain results in a harvest‐time spike in violence by militias in areas where this cereal grain is grown. This translates to a nearly 10% increase in violence during the early postharvest season. We observe no such change in violence by state forces or rebel groups—the other two notable actors. By further investigating the mechanisms, we show that the violence by militias is amplified after plausibly rich harvest seasons when the value of spoils to be appropriated is higher. By focusing on harvest‐related seasonality of conflict, as well as actors more likely to be involved in violence against civilians, we contribute to the growing literature on the economic causes of conflict in predominantly agrarian societies.
Many analysts are concerned about territories subject to state failure becoming safe havens for terrorists. In this article, I apply this logic to maritime piracy syndicates and their ship hijacking ...operations, and argue that a focus on the geographies of state failure can help us explain why pirates' behavior varies between failed and weak states. Analysis of a dataset of hijacking incidents suggests that state failure is associated with less sophisticated attacks, while state weakness encourages more sophisticated attacks. Through case studies of the process by which pirates carry out their attacks in East Africa and Southeast Asia, I argue that it is the differences in political and economic landscapes that influence how pirates embed their operations across territory, and thus how they carry out their operations. Notably, because they do not have to worry about enforcement, pirates in failed states can engage in time-intensive kidnappings for ransom, while only weak states provide the markets and transportation infrastructure necessary for operations where ships and cargo are seized and sold for profit. These findings suggest that weak states might actually be more problematic for international security in some respects than failed states.
North Korean trade networks have adapted to international sanctions through a variety of strategies to solve the problem of operating in a hostile environment at both the global level, and at the ...local level. At the global level, they have engaged in obfuscation of the nature of trade and actors, use of state prerogatives and resource, and arbitraging the countries in which they operate. At the local cross-border level, North Korean trade networks maintain relationships with brokers that obfuscate their true nature, and engage in smuggling across the Chinese border by land, river, and sea. How North Korean trade networks have adapted to sanctions has implications for denuclearization. First, the sanctions-evading strategies used by North Korea in many respects originated in the changes wrought in the North Korean economy since the 1990s, and as such, they are likely to continue even if sanctions are loosened. Second, while North Korean trade networks have adapted to sanctions, this is not necessarily their optimal scenario for economic development, which has implications for Kim Jong-un's denuclearization strategy. Finally, the trade networks themselves can continue to be used as part of a hedging strategy by North Korea even if denuclearization is continuing apace, but this strategy requires the cooperation of non-North Korean businesses.
The growth of markets in North Korea has spurred discussion about the prospects for social change in the country. This article explores whether and how marketisation increases social trust among ...market participants and its implications for everyday politics in North Korea. We draw insights from the literature on social trust as well as empirical evidence from interviews conducted with Chinese business entrepreneurs operating in North Korea to better understand the relationship between market activity and trust in North Korea. We argue that market participants rely on a variety of strategies to navigate North Korea's ambiguous political and economic climate. These strategies are often adopted to increase transparency, access information, reduce uncertainty, and resolve business disputes between parties. Ultimately, each of these strategies is linked to building trust among North Koreans. At the same time, the North Korean state has also inserted itself into trust networks to extract additional resources from markets and (re)establish political control. Thus, in the everyday politics of North Korea, participation in informal markets reflects socialisation into norms and behaviours that increase trust while simultaneously providing support to the state.
Maritime Insurgency Asal, Victor; Hastings, Justin V.; Rethemeyer, Karl
Terrorism and political violence,
08/2022, Letnik:
34, Številka:
6
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Why do some insurgent organizations launch maritime attacks? To examine why organizations would engage in this behavior we draw on a new dataset of insurgencies to investigate the organizational ...characteristics associated with maritime attacks. We find that there are two types of maritime attacks by insurgencies. While both types of attacks are associated with the trappings of a state, beyond those factors, maritime revenue-raising attacks take place in a milieu of criminal activity, while maritime non-revenue-raising attacks are associated with an insurgency's organizational sophistication and capacity.
Abstract
How integrated are agricultural markets in conflict-affected states? We answer this question by examining the dynamics of monthly price series of rice, maize and sorghum across eleven cities ...(markets) of Somalia. Using conflict as a source of transaction costs between spatially connected markets, we examine its role in price transmission between the markets in a panel smooth transition regression framework. We find that in the case of rice—an imported cereal grain—conflict tends to reduce the speed of price transmission between markets. By contrast, we find no evidence of conflict-related transaction costs in the case of maize and sorghum—commodities that are locally produced, particularly in the central and southern parts of Somalia. In all instances, we find that there is some degree of spatial integration among cereal markets around the country, perhaps partly due to informal institutions that can bridge the divides created by conflict, distance and internal political fragmentation. These findings add crucial detail to the literature concerned with the role of commodity prices on poverty and food security in conflict-affected states.
If North Korea's economic transformation has been largely informal and contested at the level of the state, to what extent is North Korea's economic transformation reflected in North Korean economic ...research? In this article, we analyze a dataset of North Korean domestic journal articles on economics from 2000 to 2019. We trace trends over time in the topics covered by economics research in North Korea, and compare them with formal changes in North Korean economic policy under Kim Jong-il and, particularly, Kim Jong-un. Research in potentially economic transformation-related topics tends to increase in response to formal economic policy changes. Kim Jong-un's rule has seen the development of an integrated economic research networks, and a shift to articles that have focused on the practicalities of implementing policies. We close with implications for unification and engagement.
Previous studies have explored the determinants of the nuclear proliferation levels (Explore, Pursue, and Acquire). However, these studies have weaknesses, including endogeneity and multicollinearity ...among the independent variables. This resulted in tentative predictions of a country's nuclear program capabilities. The objective of this study is to develop a tool to predict future nuclear proliferation in a country, and thus facilitate its prevention. Specifically, we examine how applying deep learning algorithms can enhance nuclear proliferation risk prediction. We collected important determinants from the literature that were found to be significant in explaining nuclear proliferation. These determinants include economics, domestic and international security and threats, nuclear fuel cycle capacity, and tacit knowledge development in a country. We used multilayer perceptrons in the classification model. The results suggest that detecting a country's proliferation behavior using deep learning algorithms may be less tentative and more viable than other existing methods. This study provides a policy tool to identify a country's nuclear proliferation risk pattern. This information is important for developing efforts/strategies to hamper a potential proliferating country's attempt toward developing a nuclear weapons program.
Despite ongoing political tensions and sanctions, North Korea and South Korea have made some progress in forestry cooperation. To explain the persistence of this cooperation, we draw upon a local ...approach to environmental peacebuilding. By tracing inter-Korean forestry cooperation from 2000 to 2018, this study finds that cooperation persists because of a North Korean desire for cooperation specifically on the environment, and because non-governmental organisations (NGOs) with close ties to the South Korean government provided an alternative way to implement inter-Korean forestry cooperation through periods of tension. Our findings also highlight the benefits of using environmental cooperation as a way to engage with North Korea in a depoliticised and sanction-free context. This finding has far-reaching implications for environmental peacebuilding. First, NGOs can pave the way for engaging conflict parties even in the face of ongoing hostility. Second, environmental cooperation provides an opportunity for a win-win strategy for conflict parties.
Why do Chinese traders along the China–North Korea border turn to informal trade, and what does it provide for them? Using a unique set of interviews with Chinese formal and informal traders ...operating in North Korea, we argue that the strategies of informal trade are a calculated response to certain types of risk. In doing so, we introduce a typology of risks and the mechanisms by which informal trade allows traders to mitigate those risks. Because informal traders bypass trade regulations and border checkpoints, they are able to mitigate risk more cheaply than formal traders in some cases and can overcome barriers that can cause failure in formal trade. Informal traders can thus maintain trade in many circumstances, including across North Korean personnel instability and policy reversals, Chinese sanctions enforcement, and delays and smuggling crackdowns on both sides of the border.
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