This article reviews and assesses, in terms of availability, reliability and transparency, existing policy and outcome indicators that have been found to be linked both directly and indirectly to economic growth and living standards. Indicators aiming at capturing the political and social situation of countries, as well as governance-related issues, are examined (e.g., political system, politic...

Work on ethnic and nationalist violence has emerged from two largely nonintersecting literatures: studies of ethnic conflict and studies of political violence. Only recently have the former begun to attend to the dynamics of violence and the latter to the dynamics of ethnicization. Since the emergent literature on ethnic violence is not structured by clearly defined theoretical oppositions, we ...

This study, with a focus on Central and Southern Africa, offers an overview of best practices and theoretical debates in the anthropology of violence, including the ethnography of situations where violence is pervasive and active efforts are made to deal with it. Although the multiple sites of recent violence in this region are unique in their scale, intensity, and cause, the literature review ...

In this comparative conclusion, the authors consider some of the most influential trends in the historiography of political and paramilitary violence, with particular reference to the relationship between wartime and post-war violence. The heuristic value of the ‘aftershocks’ metaphor is considered, as are the advantages (and potential pitfalls) of the contributors’ transnational approach. Fina...

This paper, which is one chapter of a larger study, focuses on the development of a theory of the conditions of political arousal and quiescence of the poor, with particular attention to race riots in American cities. The research is intended to enlarge and refine our knowledge of the-expressive meanings for particular publics of public policies, language forms, political and governmental gestu...

Since the early 1990's, Zimbabwe has been enmeshed in a major economic crisis that has seriously eroded the status of women in that country. For the past three years, the economic crisis has been joined by a political crisis which marks the first major challenge to the Mugabe regime since independence. In addition to the very harsh toll that the economic and political problems have had on poor ...

Researchers have studied the effects of exposure to long-term political violence on children largely in terms of adverse mental health outcomes, typically measured in relation to symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. This study argues that for children, the important aftereffects of exposure to political violence extend beyond emotional distress to influence the development of morality. I...

Conflict researchers are divided on what explains the massive victimisation and murdering of civilians and unarmed combatants, but largely agree that many of these acts are intentional and that the main perpetrators rely on them for economic or political gain. The terror strategies against civilians, which the scholarly literature has recently dubbed one-sided violence, take for instance the fo...

The presumption that international relations theory can help explain internal conflict is widely shared and accounts for the hubris of many who came late to the topic of domestic violence and civil war from the study of international politics. There has been some useful arbitrage with theories of interstate war providing insights into the causes of intrastate war. But the belief that internatio...

Throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century, black people in New York City encountered white violence, especially police brutality in Manhattan. The black community used various strategies to curtail white mob violence and police brutality, one of which was self-defense. This article examines blacks’ response to violence, specifically the debate concerning police brutality and s...