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Despite widespread agreement that status matters, there is relatively little in the way of focused research on how and when it matters. Relying on the assumption that it “matters” has provided few extant theories of variation in states’ concern for status and little understanding of its specific implications for international conflict. I introduce a theory of status dissatisfaction (SD) that clarifies who forms the basis for status comparisons in world politics, when status concerns should be paramount, and how they are linked to international conflict. I demonstrate the viability of conflict as a strategy for status enhancement: both initiation and victory bring substantial status benefits over both five- and ten-year periods. Using a new, network-based measure of international status, I demonstrate that status deficits are significantly associated with an increased probability of war and militarized interstate dispute (MID) initiation. Even internationally, status is local: I use “community detection” algorithms to recover status communities and show that deficits within those communities are particularly salient for states and leaders.

This article reviews the existing theoretical arguments and empirical findings linking renewable and non-renewable natural resources to the onset, intensity, and duration of intrastate as well as interstate armed conflict. Renewable resources are supposedly connected to conflict via scarcity, while non-renewable resources are hypothesized to lead to conflict via resource abundance. Based upon our analysis of these two streams in the literature, it turns out that the empirical support for the resource scarcity argument is rather weak. However, the authors obtain some evidence that resource abundance is likely to be associated with conflict. The article concludes that further research should generate improved data on low-intensity forms of conflict as well as resource scarcity and abundance at subnational and international levels, and use more homogenous empirical designs to analyze these data. Such analyses should pay particular attention to interactive effects and endogeneity issues in the resource–conflict relationship.

Mediation, as a means to end armed conflicts, has gained prominence particularly in the past 25 years. This article reviews peace mediation research to date, with a particular focus on quantitative studies as well as on significant theoretical and conceptual works. The growing literature on international mediation has made considerable progress towards understanding the conditions under which mediation processes help bring armed conflicts to peaceful ends. Still, the field of international mediation faces a number of problems. In this article, we aim to identify findings on mediation frequency, strategies, bias, and coordination as well as on trends in defining success. Although previous research has generated important insights, there are still unresolved issues and discrepancies which future mediation research needs to explore. Many of the challenges that the field faces could be managed by giving greater attention to accumulative knowledge production, more disaggregated analysis, and a closer dialogue between policy and research.

How do domestic institutions affect autocratic leaders’ decisions to initiate military conflicts? Contrary to the conventional wisdom, I argue that institutions in some kinds of dictatorships allow regime insiders to hold leaders accountable for their foreign policy decisions. However, the preferences and perceptions of these autocratic domestic audiences vary, with domestic audiences in civilian regimes being more skeptical of using military force than the military officers who form the core constituency in military juntas. In personalist regimes in which there is no effective domestic audience, no predictable mechanism exists for restraining or removing overly belligerent leaders, and leaders tend to be selected for personal characteristics that make them more likely to use military force. I combine these arguments to generate a series of hypotheses about the conflict behavior of autocracies and test the hypotheses using new measures of authoritarian regime type. The findings indicate that, despite the conventional focus on differences between democracies and nondemocracies, substantial variation in conflict initiation occurs among authoritarian regimes. Moreover, civilian regimes with powerful elite audiences are no more belligerent overall than democracies. The result is a deeper understanding of the conflict behavior of autocracies, with important implications for scholars as well as policy makers.

This article presents ViEWS – a political violence early-warning system that seeks to be maximally transparent, publicly available, and have uniform coverage, and sketches the methodological innovations required to achieve these objectives. ViEWS produces monthly forecasts at the country and subnational level for 36 months into the future and all three UCDP types of organized violence: state-based conflict, non-state conflict, and one-sided violence in Africa. The article presents the methodology and data behind these forecasts, evaluates their predictive performance, provides selected forecasts for October 2018 through October 2021, and indicates future extensions. ViEWS is built as an ensemble of constituent models designed to optimize its predictions. Each of these represents a theme that the conflict research literature suggests is relevant, or implements a specific statistical/machine-learning approach. Current forecasts indicate a persistence of conflict in regions in Africa with a recent history of political violence but also alert to new conflicts such as in Southern Cameroon and Northern Mozambique. The subsequent evaluation additionally shows that ViEWS is able to accurately capture the long-term behavior of established political violence, as well as diffusion processes such as the spread of violence in Cameroon. The performance demonstrated here indicates that ViEWS can be a useful complement to nonpublic conflict-warning systems, and also serves as a reference against which future improvements can be evaluated.

Because they are chiefly domestic conflicts, civil wars have been studied primarily from a perspective stressing domestic factors. We ask, instead, whether (and how) the international system shapes civil wars; we find that it does shape the way in which they are fought—their “technology of rebellion.” After disaggregating civil wars into irregular wars (or insurgencies), conventional wars, and symmetric nonconventional wars, we report a striking decline of irregular wars following the end of the Cold War, a remarkable transformation of internal conflict. Our analysis brings the international system back into the study of internal conflict. It specifies the connection between system polarity and the Cold War on the one hand and domestic warfare on the other hand. It also demonstrates that irregular war is not the paradigmatic mode of civil war as widely believed, but rather is closely associated with the structural characteristics of the Cold War.

Foreign investment in Africa's mineral resources has increased dramatically. This paper addresses three questions raised by this trend: do commercial mining investments increase the likelihood of social or armed conflict? If so, when are these disputes most prevalent? And, finally, what mechanisms help explain these conflicts? I show, first, that mining has contrasting effects on social and armed conflict: while the probability of protests or riots increases (roughly doubling) after mining starts, there is no increase in rebel activity. Second, I show that the probability of social conflict rises with plausibly exogenous increases in world commodity prices. Finally, I compile additional geo-spatial and survey data to explore potential mechanisms, including reporting bias, environmental harm, in-migration, inequality, and governance. Finding little evidence consistent with these accounts, I develop an explanation related to incomplete information—a common cause of conflict in industrial and international relations. This mechanism rationalizes why mining induces protest, why these conflicts are exacerbated by rising prices, and why transparency dampens the relationship between prices and protest.

Understanding the causes of interstate conflict continues to be a primary goal of the field of international relations. To that end, scholars continue to rely on large datasets of conflict in the international system. This paper introduces the latest iteration in the most widely used dataset on interstate conflicts, the Militarized Interstate Dispute (MID) 4 data. In this paper we first outline the updated data-collection process for the MID4 data. Second, we present some minor changes and clarifications to the coding rules for the MID4 datasets, as well as pointing out how the MID coding procedures affect several notable \"close call\" cases. Third, we introduce updates to the existing MID datasets for the years 2002–2010 and provide descriptive statistics that allow comparisons of the newer MID data to prior versions. We also offer some best practices and point out several ways in which the new MID data can contribute to research in international conflict.

In recent years the European Union (EU) has played an increasingly important role as a manager of global conflicts. This book provides a comprehensive assessment of how the EU has performed in facilitating mediation, conflict resolution and peacebuilding across the globe. Offering an accessible introduction to the theories, processes and practice of the EU's role in managing conflict, the book features a broad range of case studies including Afghanistan, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Cyprus, Israel-Palestine, Macedonia and Moldova and examines both the institutional and policy aspects including the common foreign, security and defence policy. Drawing together a wide range of contributors, this will be of great interest to students of European Foreign Policy, the EU as a global actor and conflict resolution and management.

The international community often calls for negotiations in civil wars. Yet, we have limited understanding of when and why specific rebels enter into negotiations. The emergence of a new leader in a rebel group can provide an opportunity for the state seeking to end war, but this is conditional on how leaders take power. Rebel leaders who come to power through a local selection process (such as an election) provide information to the state about the likely cohesion of the rebel group. This affects state perceptions of the viability of a rebel group as a bargaining partner in civil war negotiations. Using original data on rebel leaders in civil wars, we show that new leaders coming to power through a local selection process are more likely to get to the negotiating table than leaders coming to power in other ways. We find that the election of a rebel group leader has a particularly strong and positive effect on the chance of getting to the table. Rebel leaders that founded their own group or brought together disparate rebels to create a single group are less likely to get to the negotiating table. This article advances our understanding of conflict dynamics by offering a novel argument of rebel leader ascension and its impact on conflict bargaining and has critical implications for parties external to the conflict interested in conflict resolution. External actors seeking to facilitate lasting peace may benefit from observing patterns of rebel leadership.