Throughout the twentieth century, the Brazilian military has gone to great lengths to conceal its use of terror. The armed forces have kidnapped journalists, cen­ sored newspapers, and threatened authors. Such censorship and silencing have not only limited criticism from powerful social groups, but have also enabled the military to defend political myths that are in its interest. To date, howev...

Humans are a coalitional, parochial species. Yet, extreme actions of solidarity are sometimes taken for distant or unrelated groups. What motivates people to become solidary with groups to which they do not belong originally? Here, we demonstrate that such distant solidarity can occur when the perceived treatment of an out-group clashes with one's political beliefs (e.g., for Leftists, oppressi...

The theory of flow argues that subjective well-being results from absorption in an activity that strikes a good balance between challenges and skills. This absorption has been termed flow. Such absorption is often reported in combat situations, in which it contributes both to the subjective well-being and to the efficiency of soldiers. This article suggests that combat flow may have been centra...

Political violence, armed conflicts and human rights violations are produced by a variety of political, economic and socio-cultural factors. Conflicts can be analyzed with an interdisciplinary approach to obtain a global understanding of the relative contribution of risk and protective factors. A public health framework was designed to address these risk factors and protective factors. The fram...

UN Interventions: The Role of Geography This paper argues that UN military interventions are geographically biased. For every 1,000 kilometers of distance from the three Western permanent UNSC members (France, UK, US), the probability of a UN military intervention decreases by 4 percent. We are able to rule out several alternative explanations for the distance finding, such as differences by co...

The NGO-Military Contact Group (NMCG) Conferences provide a platform for civil-military relations and discussion of operational approaches and dilemmas. The distinguished speakers and audience members bring strong experience and analysis to the discussions. Dialogue on the day, particularly around operations in West Africa, Mali, and the Middle East, focussed on the practical. The conflict anal...

The Boer War acted as a catalyst for military reform, including reform of the Army Medical Services (AMS). The subsequent medical debate was centred on the value of sanitation as a provision for war. This article looks at the forces, political, military and economic, that propelled the provision of sanitation to a prominent position in the reforms of the army, and the effect this had on the sta...

We examined, first, differences in dispositional and situational coping, and psychological distress between political ex-prisoners and their matched controls, and second, coping effectiveness in protecting mental health from impacts of imprisonment and military trauma. Thirdly, we tested the hypothesis that compatibility ("goodness of fit") between dispositional and situational coping would pre...

political islam is the only active religion discourse in the world claiming to have program for religion and the muslim world and to achieve this goal it must gain political power. from its existence the dialogue has triggered different experiences in islamic countries. the most important victory of the islamic revolution in iran in 1979 and egypt's muslim brotherhood movement was to seize...

We use the ratio of growth in global military expenditures to gross domestic product (GDP) to capture ex ante expectations of political instability and explore the relation between this measure and returns. In a standard global asset pricing framework with 44 countries, this measure helps to explain cross-country return differences. Furthermore, emerging countries have greater exposure to inter...