Conflict & Conflict Resolution

Apekshya Prasai, a political science doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was recently named a 2023 Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation Emerging Scholar.   The Emerging Scholars (nine in all) are doctoral candidates who are in the final year of writing dissertations on the nature of and responses to violence around the world.

Peter Ajak is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Belfer Center’s International Security Program. A South Sudanese peace activist, a scholar, former political prisoner, and a former child soldier and Lost Boy of Sudan, Ajak’s life has been consumed with the commitment to bring freedom to his people.

Climate disasters shape the trajectory of internal conflicts in states highly vulnerable to changes in conflict dynamics. Conflict after a climate disaster escalates when the disaster induces shifts in relative power that enable one side to increase its military efforts. But when one actor is weakened by the disaster and the other lacks the capability to exploit that weakness, conflict intensity declines.

State support to non-state armed groups outside a state’s own territory is commonly seen as a direct relationship between a state sponsor and a rebel group. But powerful states can use a third state—a dealer or broker—as a conduit for military and other support. States that fail to identify an alignment of interests with these intermediary dealers and brokers face strategic failure.

In the past decade, myriad studies have explored the effects of nonviolent resistance (NR) on outcomes including revolutionary success (short-term and long-term) and democratization, and how nonviolent mobilization can play a similar role to violence in affecting social change in some settings. This special issue seeks to advance scholars' and policymakers' understanding of the role of nonviolence by tackling some key assumptions in existing work that are complicated by historical and contemporary realities of deepening polarization worldwide. This issue addresses four key areas within conflict and peace research that limit scholars' and policymakers' ability to make sense of NR: (a) the fragmented nature of civil resistance campaigns in terms of supporters and demands; (b) the increasing prevalence of authoritarian or anti-egalitarian nonviolent campaigns; and (c) the complicated nature of revolutionary success. Cutting across all three of these substantive areas is another key area, which is: (d) the United States as an increasingly salient site of conflict and contention.

Human rights abuse tends to increase during national crises, such as civil wars and mass nonviolent uprisings. Under what conditions does this abuse abate or persist? The author argues that violent challenges provoke much more coercive state responses, exposing more personnel within the security forces to extreme forms of repression and priming them (both leaders and followers) to reproduce these behaviors after the conflict has terminated. This effect is mitigated or avoided when challengers rely on nonviolent tactics instead of violence, leading to less post-conflict abuse.

The Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC)dataset measures reports of the conflict-related sexual violence committed by armed actors during the years 1989–2021. The dataset includes information about the prevalence, perpetrators, and forms of the reported sexual violence by each armed actor in each conflict-year. The information used to compile these data comes from three sources: the U.S. State Department, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. 

A new conceptual typology of participation in rebellion identifies four dimensions along which individuals are involved in noncombat labor: logistics, outreach, governance, and community management. These duties are gendered in ways that often make women’s experiences and opportunities uniquely advantageous for rebel organizations.

A state’s declining international status activates two sets of social psychological dynamics that contribute to domestic conflict, alienating some groups and intensifying others’ nationalism. These dynamics can contribute to center-periphery conflict in multinational states after acute status loss.

When winning rebels face intense security threats during civil wars, rebel field commanders are more likely to remain obedient during war-to-peace transitions because they have less incentive to challenge newly installed rulers and less capacity to mobilize supporters outside the postwar military hierarchy.