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Publications (563)
Working Paper
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Cross-border traders face a choice between official and unofficial border crossings. The latter allow them to evade taxes, but expose them to other risks, such as bribes, fines, and arrest. We investigate the perceptions of cross-border traders about the risks of trading officially vs unofficially...
Journal Article
– Evidence from India
ARTICLE ON EARLY VIEW | This study analyses whether living in a locality with high crime against women affects the probability of early marriage — that is, marriage before the legal age of marriage of girls. Using a nationally-representative longitudinal dataset and tackling the potential...
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This paper leverages a novel panel dataset covering the histories of 306 chiefs and 256 episodes of village governance and taxation by armed groups in 106 villages in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo in order to analyse the relationship between the governance of armed groups and the power of...
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Following the abolition of slavery, various forms of compulsory labour were adopted by colonial powers to develop their economies. This paper analyses the contemporary consequences of compulsory cotton production—a forced labour system that operated in colonial Mozambique from 1926 to 1961. During...
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– Challenges and lessons from Ukraine
Collecting public opinion data is challenging in the shadow of war. And yet accurate public opinion is crucial. Political elites rely on it and often attempt to influence it. Therefore, it is incumbent on researchers to provide independent and reliable wartime polls. However, surveying in wartime...
– A closer look
Terrorist violence has a profound influence on social attitudes, including trust in governmental institutions and attitudes towards migration and civil freedoms. Acts of terrorism cause citizens to experience a complex range of negative emotions, including anxiety, anger, sorrow, and a sense of...
Blog
Fragile and least developed countries have had their development assistance cut drastically, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. For instance, net official development assistance to sub-Saharan African countries has shrunk by 7.8% compared to 2021. And...
According to a recent OECD Report, borderlands experience a greater intensity of violence, especially violence targeted against the state. While there is an expanding literature on the causes of civil conflict, we do not yet fully know why state peripheries are more prone to violence. Our research...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Armed violence in post-war Abkhazia
This article examines the complex local dynamics of armed violence in post-war Abkhazia. Drawing on in-depth interviews with the Abkhaz participants and non-participants in this violence and a range of secondary materials, it adapts the conceptual and analytical tools developed in civil war studies...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– High poverty and low trust
As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, sub-Saharan African countries faced the dilemma of how to minimize viral transmission without adversely affecting the poor. This study proposes an index of lockdown readiness, taking into account housing conditions and income security, and analyses how this...
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We examine whether frontier rule, which disallows frontier residents from a recourse to formal institutions of conflict management and disproportionately empowers tribal elites, provides a more fragile basis for maintaining social order in the face of shocks. Combining a historical border separating...
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We analyse how inward foreign direct investment (FDI) received amid ongoing violence shapes armed conflict. We argue that FDI affects patterns of violence by influencing the state’s counterinsurgency strategy. To prevent disinvestment, governments strive to capture territory linked to investment...
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Medicine theft is a leading cause of inadequate healthcare. Audits of public health supply chains suggest that up to a third of medicines go missing in low-income countries, disproportionately affecting those facing greater health risks and poverty. Despite much investment, policy-makers struggle to...
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– Explaining elite political alignments in a deeply divided society
The role of ethnicity in political behaviour remains unsettled theoretically. Instrumentalist theories emphasize cognitive processes, arguing that political actors strategically employ ethnicity to attain certain goals, while expressivist theories highlight affectual forces, arguing that actors are...
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Although the provision of security to all their citizens is a state’s fundamental duty, over 50 countries experienced armed conflict in 2021. The international development community has identified armed conflict as an impediment to development and provides considerable resources to reduce armed...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
ARTICLE ON EARLY VIEW | Terrorism elicits strong public reactions immediately after the attack, with important implications for democratic institutions and individual well-being. Are these effects short-lived? We answer this question using a natural experiment design and combining data on terrorist...
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Violent conflicts affect the lives and livelihoods of almost one quarter of the world’s population. But the effects of violent conflict are not uniform. This study assesses the differential effects of violent conflict on young people’s education, job prospects, and forms of civic engagement and...
Journal Article
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This article introduces the Mapping Attitudes, Perceptions and Support (MAPS) dataset, which provides rich survey data from more than 12,000 respondents in Colombia. Our panel survey – carried out in two separate waves in 2019 and 2021 – is representative at the level...
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We investigate the impact of childhood exposure to organized criminal violence on sociopolitical attitudes in Mexico, where an entire generation of youths has been raised amid the country’s most violent conflict over the past century. We fielded an in-person survey to nearly 3,000 urban youths...
Many displaced people around the world are in limbo—unable to return home or go anywhere else. Our surveys show that displaced people have lived in their current location for 6.9 years on average, significantly longer than the five-year threshold for what is typically considered a ‘protracted’...
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We investigate the impact of the political representation of minority groups on the incidence of ethnic conflict in India. We code data on Hindu-Muslim violence and Muslim political representation in India and leverage quasi-random variation in legislator religion generated by the results of close...
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Aid is still an important feature of the development landscape. Fragile states, in particular, have the greatest development needs but due to their poor governance they are the least likely countries to use aid effectively to meet their development challenges. In this paper, we explore which fragile...
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This paper sheds light on the complex recovery governance in Ukraine by providing a snapshot of the evolving national recovery actors’ networks and examining them within a multi-level governance framework, using interviews, social network analysis, and a sense-making workshop. It highlights the...
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– Evidence from South Africa
How do states rebuild nations after a major conflict? Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) have emerged as one of the most common interventions to achieve this objective. Despite their popularity, little is known about their efficacy to foster reconciliation and nation building. We fill this...
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– The case of Germany’s P4P programme
Bridging the gap between humanitarian assistance and development cooperation has been a contentious issue in academia and development practice for decades. Drawing on an evaluation of Germany’s ‘Partnership for Prospects’ initiative, this paper argues that, whilst the supplement of ‘peacebuilding’...
Russia’s military involvement in Ukraine began in March 2014 with the annexation of Crimea, but it wasn’t until February 2022 that Russia shocked the world with a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, starting Europe’s biggest war since WWII. Defeating expectations that Russian military forces would...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
– Micro evidence from Colombia
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | A growing literature has documented widespread variation in the extent to which insurgents provide public goods, collect taxes, and regulate civilian conduct. This paper offers what is, to our knowledge, the first study of the long-term economic legacies of rebel...
Blog
UK economic forecasts have improved markedly since the September 2022 mini-budget. The economic recession may now be more shallow and public borrowing lower than previously expected. However, faced with persistently high inflation and continued uncertainty caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine...
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Affirmative action, or positive discrimination favouring the members of marginalized populations, is a key policy approach for addressing group-based inequalities along ethnic, religious, and racial lines (e.g. horizontal inequalities). It is adopted in dozens of countries around the world in the...
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– COVID-19 and climate change
Terrorist and other types of armed groups often exploit natural and human-made disasters and emergencies to advance their causes. This paper studies how some armed groups have responded to two recent global emergencies—climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines the messaging and actions...
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The principle of inclusive development lies at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and in particular Goal 16, with its focus on inclusive societies backed by inclusive institutions. Yet despite its ubiquity across the SDGs, inclusivity not only remains ill-defined, but is both...
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– Evidence from the 2019 uprisings in Lebanon and Iraq
Scholarly logic holds that revolutionary movements are unlikely to break out in democracies, where citizens may simply remove unpopular leaders through elections. And yet the twenty-first century has witnessed a global series of uprisings against regimes that are nominally democratic—in that they...
Displaying 32 of 563 results