Last summer we asked our readers to submit their questions about political violence for our contributors to take a crack at. We’d now like to do the same, again. Got a question about political violence and conflict? Submit your questions in the comments, and our team of contributors will try and answer. We will post the answer to the first question we’ve chosen next week.
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Weekly Links
- November 25, 2013
By Taylor Marvin PVG contributor Oliver Kaplan is interviewed by Colombia Reports on grassroots political participation and nonviolence in the country:…
Weekly links
- April 26, 2015
By Sarah Bakhtiari Fighting authoritarianism without violence: annually, the North Korea Strategy Center smuggles thousands of USB drives…
Weekly Links
- June 24, 2013
By Taylor Marvin Demonstrations and violent police response — “officers with their name tags removed firing stun grenades and…
Weekly Links
- July 30, 2017
By Patrick Pierson. Morocco’s King Mohammed VI pardoned more than 1100 people over the weekend. Spanish police detained…
Weekly Links
- January 15, 2017
By Patrick Pierson. US citizens in Haiti have been attacked after a Haitian senator-elect was extradited to the…
Gender & Posts @PVGlance
- October 2, 2015
By Will H. Moore Back in 2013, Taylor Marvin and Barbara F. Walter asked Where Are All the…
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1. What reforms should policy makers enact according to the peace and conflict literature you think is the most convincing in order to save greatest number of innocents’ lives?
2.What peace and conflict research do you think is the most groundbreaking of the last decade, and why?
How true is the assertion that drones actually have lower civilian death rates than more traditional methods? Is it even fair to make the comparison because it is so much easier for drones to hit targets than ground forces?
Why do different public agencies define terrorism differently? Would we be better off having a single definition?
Why does war not break out in cases in which, according to existing theories of civil war onset, violence technically should break out? In other words: why is there peace when we would expect war? (Other than GDP/per capita)
Does the level of ethnic fragmentation within a country affect the level of violence when conflict breaks out? Using the Arab Spring revolutions as case studies, can this possible association explain the varying degrees of conflict (from nonvoilent in some countries to very violent in others) witnessed throughout the Middle East and North Africa?
Along similar lines, does a minority group in a position of power predict higher levels of violence in suppressing popular anti-government revolutions? Was Syria’s initially nonviolent revolution thus doomed from the start? In such cases, I would think that high-level defections of important pillars of support for the ruling coalition (business elites, military officials, etc.) would be fewer and farther between, due to enhanced fear of reprisals from other ethnic groups not in power. Violent repression would thus persist and even increase on behalf of the government as it desperately hangs on to power, and the opposition would never truly benefit from military defections that could swing the chances of successful revolution in their favor.