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"VIOLENT CONFLICT"
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Resolving Conflicts in Africa’s Democratic Setting
Elections have become an indispensable aspect of Africa’s democracy and a strategy for choosing the people to govern states. Unfortunately, due to certain factors, including the quest for political power, which gives access to the treasury and the resource-endowment of the commonwealth, political actors, supported by their political parties have frequently resorted to violence during elections. The paper seeks to interrogate the multifaceted issues around elections and very importantly, electoral violence in Africa’s democratic environment. To achieve this objective, the paper will make a case study of Nigeria and Kenya as classical models of electoral violence. The choice is driven by the understanding that primordial imperatives are often mobilised as drivers of political violence in Africa’s democratic practice. To assemble its resources, the paper used the content analysis of relevant materials in the social sciences and humanities. In conclusion, the paper suggests the active participation of the African Union in the resolution of Africa’s security challenges.
Journal Article
Climate Security and Policy Options in Japan
Climate security has been discussed in both academia and policy documents in the West. A key point that surfaces from these discussions is that the cooperation of non-military organizations is essential for effective responses to climate change-related threats. This overlaps considerably with debates on security in Japan, where the use of force is constitutionally restricted. Therefore, it is possible to localize the concept of climate security to the genealogy of Japan’s security policy that, in the 1980s and 1990s, sought a non-traditional security strategy that did not rely solely on military power in the name of “comprehensive security,” “environmental security,” and “human security.” In Japan, the perspective of climate security is rare. However, the introduction of a unique climate security concept into security policy enables the maintenance of national security and environmental conservation. Additionally, struggling with climate change alongside neighboring countries contributes to mutual confidence building and stability in international relations in Northeast Asia. To achieve this objective, we first show that climate security includes many kinds of security concerns by surveying previous studies and comparing Western countries’ climate security policies. Second, we follow the evolution of Japan’s security policy from 1980 to 2021. Finally, we review Japanese climate security policies and propose policy options.
Journal Article
ONCE BITTEN TWICE SHY? EXPERIENCE MANAGING VIOLENT CONFLICT RISK AND MNC SUBSIDIARY-LEVEL INVESTMENT AND EXPANSION
Research summary: Researchers have increasingly emphasized the need to better understand how context affects the value of experiential learning. We address this gap by investigating when corporate-level experience ca be leveraged across borders and when experience needs to be country-specific to be valuable. We test our hypotheses using a unique multi-source panel dataset of 379 large MNCs from 29 home countries and their subsidiaries in 117 host countries over a 10-year period, 1999–2008. In contrast to prior research, we find that the ability of a firm to leverage its experience with political risk across borders is limited by the type of risk involved. Experience with nonstate violent conflicts may be transferrable, but only country-specific experience appears to yield measureable benefits for conflicts involving the host country government. Managerial summary: Violent conflicts not only increase social unrest but also impose added costs of doing business. For managers who find themselves in the midst of violent conflicts or who wish to survive and potentially gain a competitive advantage in operating in such challenging environments, is it possible to learn to manage such a seemingly \"unmanageable\" problem? In contrast to studies that have examined other types of political risk, we find that the ability of a firm to leverage its experience with violent conflict risk across borders is limited. Specifically, only country-specific experiential knowledge about how the host government prepares and manages such conflict risks yields measureable economic benefits for MNCs and their subsidiaries operating in countries during conflict.
Journal Article
The timing and mode of foreign exit from conflict zones: A behavioral perspective
We examine the timing and mode of firm exits from host-country conflict zones. We argue that timing and mode are interdependent decisions where decision ordering matters, and show that a firm’s prioritizing of either exit timing or mode is dependent on the relative salience of two behavioral stimuli: (1) the firm’s own experience (i.e., its performance shortfall), and (2) the experience of peer firms (i.e., their exits). Using instrumental variables modeling on a sample of 101 Japanese MNE exits from 11 conflict-afflicted countries between 1991 and 2005, we demonstrate that, when mode is prioritized over timing, partial exits tend to occur earlier and whole exits later. However, when timing is prioritized over mode, the decision choices reverse: earlier exits tend to be whole and later exits partial. The outcome of one decision therefore affects that of the other in a unique and predictable manner, such that the ordering of the decisions both produces and precludes strategic choices. Our findings, based on a multidecision problem that has traditionally been treated as a single decision (i.e., foreign exit), delineate expanded boundary conditions for satisficing, as well as reconcile optimizing and satisficing behaviors.
Journal Article
Utopias in Conflict
This compact, incisive study by a senior scholar explores two
sources of violent conflict in India: religion and nationalism.
Showing how the political aspects of religion and the ideological
character of nationalism have led inexorably to struggle, Ainslie
T. Embree argues that the tension between competing visions of the
just society has determined the social and political life of India.
In India, as elsewhere in the world at the end of the twentieth
century, religions legitimized violence as people struggled for
what they regarded as their legitimate claims upon the future. As
examples of the tension between religious and nationalist visions
of the good society, Embree examines two explosive cases-one
involving Muslim-Hindu communal encounters, the other, the
separatist movement of the Sikhs. Thought-provoking and searching,
Utopias in Conflict should interest anyone concerned about
fundamentalism, the problems of national integration, and politics
and religion in the Third World. This title is part of UC Press's
Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California
Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and
give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to
1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship
accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title
was originally published in 1990.
eBook
Climate change, violent conflict and local institutions in Kenya's drylands
Many regions that are endowed with scarce natural resources such as arable land and water, and which are remote from a central government, suffer from violence and ethnic strife. A number of studies have looked at the convergence of economic, political and ecological marginality in several African countries. However, there is limited empirical study on the role of violence in pastoral livelihoods across ecological and geographical locations. Yet, case studies focusing on livelihood and poverty issues could inform us about violent behaviour as collective action or as individual decisions, and to what extent such decisions are informed or explained by specific climatic conditions. Several case studies point out that violence is indeed an enacted behaviour, rooted in culture and an accepted form of interaction. This article critically discusses the relevance of geographical and climatic parameters in explaining the connection between poverty and violent conflicts in Kenya's pastoral areas. These issues are considered vis-à-vis the role institutional arrangements play in preventing violent conflict over natural resources from occurring or getting out of hand. The article uses long-term historical data, archival information and a number of fieldwork sources. The results indicate that the context of violence does not deny its agency in explanation of conflicts, but the institutional set-up may ultimately explain the occurrence of the resource curse.
Journal Article
Environmental peacebuilding
Environmental peacebuilding represents a paradigm shift from a nexus of environmental scarcity to one of environmental peace. It rests on the assumption that the biophysical environment’s inherent characteristics can act as incentives for cooperation and peace, rather than violence and competition. Based on this, environmental peacebuilding presents cooperation as a win-win solution and escape from the zero-sum logic of conflict. However, there is a lack of coherent environmental peacebuilding framework and evidence corroborating the existence of this environment-peace nexus. Building on a multidisciplinary literature review, this article examines the evolution of environmental peacebuilding into an emerging framework. It unpacks the concept and explains its main building blocks (conditions, mechanisms and outcomes) to develop our understanding of when, how and why environmental cooperation can serve as a peacebuilding tool. It assembles these building blocks into three generic trajectories (technical, restorative and sustainable environmental peacebuilding), each characterised according to their own causality, drivers and prerequisites, and illustrated with concrete examples. Finally, this article draws attention to the remaining theoretical gaps in the environmental peacebuilding literature, and lays the foundations for an environmental peacebuilding research agenda that clarifies if and how environmental cooperation can spill over across borders, sectors and scales towards sustainable peace.
Journal Article
Climate Change and Violent Conflict in East Africa
How does climate change affect the risk and dynamics of violent conflict? Existing research shows that climate change can increase the risk of violent conflict and significantly alter the dynamics of existing conflicts. Less is known about the exact mechanisms through which climate change affects violent conflict. In this article, we address this lacuna in light of the first systematic review of both quantitative and qualitative scholarship. Through an analysis of forty-three peer-reviewed articles on climate-related environmental change and violent conflict in East Africa published 1989–2016, we evaluate to what extent the literature provides coherent explanations that identify relevant mechanisms, actors, and outcomes. In addition, we discuss the expected temporal and spatial distribution of violence and the confounding political factors implied in the literature. Against this background, we offer a number of suggestions for how future climate-conflict research can theorize and explore mechanisms. Future research should distinguish between explanations that focus on causes and dynamics of climate-related violent conflict, theoretically motivate when and where violence is most likely to occur, systematically examine the role of state policies and intervention, and explore the implications of each explanation at the microlevel.
Journal Article
Climate Wars? A Systematic Review of Empirical Analyses on the Links between Climate Change and Violent Conflict
Global climate change has been connected to myriad societal and environmental consequences, including the potential for a rise in violent conflict. To advance understanding of violent conflict as a threat, we undertake a systematic review of peer-reviewed, empirical analyses examining the potential links between climate change and violent conflict. The review reveals three key findings. First, the reviewed studies offer mixed and varied evidence for links between climate change and violence. A majority of studies find evidence that climate variables are associated with higher levels of violent conflict. However, this general pattern masks many subtleties and countertrends that complicate moving to a simple conclusion that the link between climate change and violence is robust. Second, most studies hypothesize an indirect relationship between climate change and violent conflict mediated by and/or interacting with a complex set of intervening variables; however, these causal pathways have only weak empirical support. Third, the empirical basis of the literature has important limitations. Study findings appear to be sensitive to differing methodological choices, making systematic assessments inconclusive.
Journal Article