Håvard Strand | University of Oslo (original) (raw)

Papers by Håvard Strand

... 1962 1970 W ar O man P FLO 1972 1975 M inor S aud i Arab ia JS M 1979 1979 M inor S outh Y em... more ... 1962 1970 W ar O man P FLO 1972 1975 M inor S aud i Arab ia JS M 1979 1979 M inor S outh Y emen Y em en ite So cialist P arty - Ismail faction 1986 1986 W ar S yria M uslim Brotherh o o d 1979 1982 W ar M ilitary faction loyal to A tassi and Zeayen 1966 1966 M inor ...

Page 1. The Conflict Trap ∗ H˚avard Hegre1,2, H˚avard Mokleiv Nyg˚ard2, H˚avard Strand1, Scott Ga... more Page 1. The Conflict Trap ∗ H˚avard Hegre1,2, H˚avard Mokleiv Nyg˚ard2, H˚avard Strand1, Scott Gates1,3, and Ranveig D. Flaten2 1 Centre for the Study of Civil War, PRIO 2Department of Political Science, University of Oslo ...

In addition to the problem of simply defining civil war, conflict researchers who are interested ... more In addition to the problem of simply defining civil war, conflict researchers who are interested in studying the duration of civil war must address a number of measurement problems, which can lead to selection bias. Moreover, the characteristics of the data on civil war complicate duration analysis, including: repeated events, competing risks, non-proportionality, unmeasured heterogeneity (a general problem related to

Samuel Huntington's (1991) thesis of democratic waves has come under strong criticism from sc... more Samuel Huntington's (1991) thesis of democratic waves has come under strong criticism from scholars such as Renske Doorenspleet (2000) and Adam Przeworski and his colleagues (2000). We take issue with all of these authors' (including Huntington's) use of a blunt dichotomous measure of democracy, which we believe creates the potential for inaccurate analysis of democracy and democratic/autocratic tran- sitions. Using a set of more refined measures of democracy we find substantial support for Huntington's wave thesis, and little support for the position of his critics who argue that there are no democratic waves. We find clear identifiable trends in the evolution of democratic governance throughout the world during the past century that correspond roughly to the waves and reverse-waves identified by Huntington, but we do not find any support for the explanation hypothesized by Huntington. Using multinomial logit analyses of political transitions, we find this wave-like...

There is a large pool of rigorous empirical studies investigating the relationship between ethnic... more There is a large pool of rigorous empirical studies investigating the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and armed conflict. A general finding is that ethnicity matters, although not as much as portrayed in popular media. But a largely neglected aspect of these quantitative studies is how changes in the relative strength of groups affect conflict. argues that differential growth may destabilize heterogeneous democracies internally. In democratic societies, political power is distributed according to popular support in elections. A changing balance between groups may thus alter the distribution of power and potentially lead to political instability and ultimately violent conflict. We argue that the relationship between differential growth and instability and violence may be even more important in semidemocracies with electoral systems, but with weak and inconsistent political institutions. In a cross-national time-series study we do a first empirical test of this notion. Starting from the premise that for differential growth to become a potential driver of conflict and instability, information of such change has to be recorded with a national census and actually published. Not yet having completed a reliable dataset on actual change between censuses, this paper investigates whether countries publishing identity data from consecutive censuses are at a greater risk of experiencing violence and political instability. Investigating the census data in two models of civil war and regime duration, we find no empirical support for the expectation that publishing identity data increases the risk of violent conflict and political instability.

ABSTRACT Many studies report lower academic productivity among women. But are women less likely t... more ABSTRACT Many studies report lower academic productivity among women. But are women less likely to get their research published in the first place? The evidence for potential gender bias in publication and impact is mixed. This article examines the gender dimension of scientific publication in international relations (IR) based on submission data for Journal of Peace Research for the period 1983–2008. It examines the gender gap in submissions and explores whether the perceived merit of a research paper is affected by the gender of the authors and reviewers. It also investigates whether the gender of the first author influences citation counts. The data show a clear but declining gender gap. They do not indicate any significant gender bias in publication success or citations.

The paper predicts changes in global and regional incidences of armed conflict for the 2008-2050 ... more The paper predicts changes in global and regional incidences of armed conflict for the 2008-2050 period. The predictions are based on a dynamic multinomial logit model estimation on a 1970-2008 cross-sectional dataset of changes between no armed conflict, minor conflict, and major conflict. Core exogenous explanatory variables in the estimation model are population size, infant mortality rates, demographic composition, neighborhood characteristics, and education levels. Predictions are obtained through simulating the behavior of the conflict variable implied by the estimates from this model. For the demographic variables, we use projections from the UN World Population Prospects. For education, we use a projection of education data developed by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. The education projection covers the the 2005-2050 period, and is age-and gender-specific. We treat conflicts, recent conflict history, and neighboring conflicts as endogenous variables. The out-of-sample validation of prediction performance indicates the simulations are able to predict about half of all conflicts eight years in advance and generate a small number of false positives. We predict a continued decline in the proportion of the world's countries that have internal armed conflict, and that the remaining conflict countries increasingly are concentrated in East, Central, and South Africa and in East and South Asia. We also investigates two alternative forecast scenarios for the predictor variables.

World Development, 2012

ABSTRACT This paper conducts the first analysis of the effect of armed conflict on progress in me... more ABSTRACT This paper conducts the first analysis of the effect of armed conflict on progress in meeting the United Nation's Millennium Development Goals. We also examine the effect of conflict on economic growth. Conflict has clear detrimental effects on the reduction of poverty and hunger, on primary education, on the reduction of child mortality, and on access to potable water. A medium-sized conflict with 2500 battle deaths is estimated to increase undernourishment an additional 3.3%, reduce life expectancy by about I year, increases infant mortality by 10%, and deprives an additional 1.8% of the population from access to potable water.

Review of Social Economy, 2007

... and Older Male Labor-Force Participation Rates 551 15.4 Public Expenditure on Labor-Market Me... more ... and Older Male Labor-Force Participation Rates 551 15.4 Public Expenditure on Labor-Market Measures ... Nurses and Midwives and Real Health (circa 1980) 592 16.3 Types of Political Economy, Public Share ... Public Spending and Affluence Each Enhances Health Performance ...

Journal of Peace Research, 2002

In the period 1946-2001, there were 225 armed conflicts and 34 of them were active in all of or p... more In the period 1946-2001, there were 225 armed conflicts and 34 of them were active in all of or part of 2001. Armed conflict remains a serious problem in the post-Cold War period. For three decades, the Correlates of War project has served as the main supplier of reliable data used in longitudinal studies of external and internal armed conflict. The COW datasets on war use the relatively high threshold of 1,000 battle-deaths. The Uppsala dataset on armed conflict has a lower threshold, 25 annual battledeaths, but has so far been available for only the post-Cold War period. This dataset has now been backdated to the end of World War II. This article presents a report on armed conflict based on this backdate as well as another annual update. It presents the procedures for the backdating, as well as trends over time and breakdowns for the type of conflict. It assesses the criteria for measuring armed conflict and discusses some directions for future data collection in this area.

Journal of Peace Research, 2014

Journal of Peace Research, 2012

Contributions to the quantitative civil war literature increasingly rely on geo-referenced data a... more Contributions to the quantitative civil war literature increasingly rely on geo-referenced data and disaggregated research designs. While this is a welcome trend, it necessitates geographic information systems (GIS) skills and imposes new challenges for data collection and analysis. So far, solutions to these challenges differ between studies, obstructing direct comparison of findings and hampering replication and extension of earlier work. This article presents a standardized structure for storing, manipulating, and analyzing high-resolution spatial data. PRIO-GRID is a vector grid network with a resolution of 0.5 x 0.5 decimal degrees, covering all terrestrial areas of the world. Gridded data comprise inherently apolitical entities; the grid cells are fixed in time and space, they are insensitive to political boundaries and developments, and they are completely exogenous to likely features of interest, such as civil war outbreak, ethnic settlement patterns, extreme weather events, or the spatial distribution of wealth. Moreover, unlike other disaggregated approaches, gridded data may be scaled up or down in a consistent manner by varying the resolution of the grid. The released dataset comes with cell-specific information on a large selection of political, economic, demographic, environmental, and conflict variables for all years, 1946-2008. A simple descriptive data assessment of population density and economic activity is offered to demonstrate how PRIO-GRID may be applied in quantitative social science research.

Journal of Development Studies, 2011

All parts of a country are rarely equally affected by political violence. Yet statistical studies... more All parts of a country are rarely equally affected by political violence. Yet statistical studies largely fail to address sub-national conflict dynamics. We address this gap studying variations in ‘routine’ and ‘episodic’ violence between Indonesian provinces from 1990 to 2003. Within a grievance framework, the article focuses on the violence potential of resource scarcity and population pressure, as well as inter-group dynamics related to polarisation and horizontal inequality. Demographic pressure and inequality seem to have little effect in isolation. However, in provinces where population growth is high, greater levels of inequality between religious groups appear to increase the violence risk.

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2005