In spite of the inexorable march of democracy around the globe, just how democratic
institutions affect human well-being is open to debate. The evidence that democracy …

We argue that the academic literature, both qualitative and quantitative, has mislabeled most
episodes of large-scale violence in Africa as civil wars; these episodes better fit our concept …

A main justification for press freedom is that free media will act as a watchdog over the
government. While we would expect democracies to have free media and autocracies to …

The previous several decades have witnessed a growth in empirically based theories of
international conflict. To those of us actively doing research and writing in this field, as …

In this chapter, we investigate the question of the democratic civil peace–ie the democratic
peace at the intrastate level. We use interchangeably the terms civil war and intrastate …

Does warfare affect the environment? This question has received some theoretical and
empirical attention, but none of the extant studies has employed large-N statistical models …

The assassination of a political leader is among the highest-profile acts of political violence,
and conventional wisdom holds that such events often have substantial political, social, and …

What exactly is it about democracy that enables it to protect human rights? As part of the
research program addressing that important question, this article examines the relationship …

This paper examines the effects of non-derogability status for seven human rights during
declared states of emergency from 1996 to 2004 in 195 countries. For this purpose, we …

Existing theories of regime transitions suggest that new democracies are more prone to
political violence than consolidated democracies. We contend that this risk varies based on …