Stefano Costalli | Università degli Studi di Firenze (University of Florence) (original) (raw)

Papers by Stefano Costalli

Journal of Peace Research, Nov 1, 2012

The impact of ethnicity for the onset of conflicts has often been dismissed in the cross-country ... more The impact of ethnicity for the onset of conflicts has often been dismissed in the cross-country empirical literature on civil wars. Recently, however, several studies using disaggregated data have reached different conclusions and highlight the importance of the configuration of ethno-national groups. This article follows the latter approach and investigates a different phenomenon: the impact of ethnic heterogeneity on the severity of violence. Using disaggregated data at municipality level in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we perform a quantitative analysis to assess the impact of various indices of heterogeneity on the number of casualties that occurred in the 1992–95 war in the 109 municipalities composing the country. We argue that in a context where ethnicity plays a key role in shaping rivalry among groups, ethnic polarization, in particular, creates strategic incentives for severe violence as armed groups try to create ethnically homogenous territories in the first phase of the war. By also including the temporal dimension in the analysis, we show that ethnic polarization loses its impact as the war evolves over time; therefore, the geographic location of the municipalities becomes the best predictor of severe clashes because as the war goes on, ethnic groups shift their objective from creating internally homogenous municipalities to consolidating wider areas. As such, municipalities located on politically and militarily relevant frontlines experience the highest levels of violence.

Political Geography, 2020

WIDER Working Paper

provides economic analysis and policy advice with the aim of promoting sustainable and equitable ... more provides economic analysis and policy advice with the aim of promoting sustainable and equitable development. The Institute began operations in 1985 in Helsinki, Finland, as the first research and training centre of the United Nations University. Today it is a unique blend of think tank, research institute, and UN agency-providing a range of services from policy advice to governments as well as freely available original research. The Institute is funded through income from an endowment fund with additional contributions to its work programme from Finland and Sweden, as well as earmarked contributions for specific projects from a variety of donors.

$Research paper thumbnail of La guerra in Libia. Un\u2019analisi sulle conseguenze dell\u2019intervento militare sulla guerra civile$

La guerra contro Gheddafi verr\ue0 osservata da una duplice prospettiva: come (ennesimo) esempio ... more La guerra contro Gheddafi verr\ue0 osservata da una duplice prospettiva: come (ennesimo) esempio di intervento militare esterno, non dissimile quindi da altre esperienze recenti (come il Kosovo); come caso di conflitto civile, che vede gruppi organizzati su base etnica e/o tribale ricorrere alla violenza in seguito a un vuoto di potere. Il contributo del saggio mira a fornire generalizzazioni sulla relazione che corre tra le modalit\ue0 di intervento ed esercizio della forza da una parte, e lo sviluppo politico del paese dopo la fine delle ostilit\ue0. Quali sono le condizioni che spingono in direzione di un sistema politico pacificato e quelle invece che contribuiscono al formarsi di gruppi terroristici e/o di organizzazioni criminali su vasta scala che in certi casi pongono in dubbio la sovranit\ue0 dello stato

What causes civilian victimization in conventional civil wars and in conventional wars that exper... more What causes civilian victimization in conventional civil wars and in conventional wars that experience insurgencies? We argue that a key driver of civilian victimization is an incumbent's vulnerability, specifically when the conflict's frontline is shifting. Vulnerability is a function of informational and logistical challenges: when the frontline is shifting incumbents face increased informational uncertainty and unstable supply chains that augment the vulnerability of the incumbent. Thus, the incumbent will increase its use of civilian victimization in response to a scarcity of high-quality information on the location and identity of insurgents, in order to limit possible information leaks, and to contain supply disruption and logistics support to adversaries. We support our argument using matched difference-in-differences analyses of original subnational data on Nazi-Fascist violence in WWII Italy (1943-1945) and qualitative evidence.

Supplemental material, Costalli_Ruggeri_replication_files for The Long-Term Electoral Legacies of... more Supplemental material, Costalli_Ruggeri_replication_files for The Long-Term Electoral Legacies of Civil War in Young Democracies: Italy, 1946-1968 by Stefano Costalli and Andrea Ruggeri in Comparative Political Studies

Online appendix for Costalli, Stefano, and Andrea Ruggeri, "Indignation, Ideologies, and Arm... more Online appendix for Costalli, Stefano, and Andrea Ruggeri, "Indignation, Ideologies, and Armed Mobilization: Civil War in Italy, 1943–45," International Security, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Fall 2015), pp. 119–157

Istituto Affari Internazionali, 2019

In recent years the international security environment within and around NATO perimeter has seen ... more In recent years the international security environment within and around NATO perimeter has seen instability increasing and spreading in various ways, ranging from enduring conflicts and state failures, to sudden shifts in the strategic posture of relevant countries. Given the increasing connection between the local and international dynamics, the regional dimension of stability has gained importance for both experts and practitioners. At this level, interested states may find common ground in order to foster joint efforts to stabilisation, or at least to mitigate diverging national agendas which in turn contribute to instability. Focusing on the broad regional security complex encompassing Sahel, North Africa and Middle East, it is evident that it is increasingly unstable, as it represents the physical space where multiple forms of instability coalesce at local, national regional and global level. In order to understand such web of instabilities, the view on the relevant actors should be broadened by looking at both states and non-states, local and international ones including NATO and EU-and their role in terms of stabilisation/destabilisation. This publication is the result of the sixth academic conference organised in Bertinoro (Forlì) on 24-26 October 2018 by the NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT), the University of Bologna and the Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI).

Political Geography, 2021

Comparative Political Studies, 2018

Are there long-term legacies of civil wars on the electoral geography of post-conflict democracie... more Are there long-term legacies of civil wars on the electoral geography of post-conflict democracies? We argue that parties derived from armed bands enjoy an organizational advantage in areas where they fought and won the war. Former combatants can create a strong local party organization that serves as a crucial mobilization tool for elections. Parties have strong incentives to institutionalize this organizational advantage and retain electoral strongholds over time. We test our theory on the case of Italy (1946-1968). Our findings indicate that, on average, the communist party managed to create a stronger organization in areas where its bands fought the resistance war against Nazi-Fascist forces—and left-wing parties had a better electoral performance in those areas in subsequent elections. A stronger party organization is correlated with a positive electoral performance for many years, while the direct effect of civil war on electoral patterns decays after few years.

International Security, 2015

Ideas shape human behavior in many circumstances, including those involving political violence. Y... more Ideas shape human behavior in many circumstances, including those involving political violence. Yet they have usually been underplayed in studies of the causes of armed mobilization. Likewise, emotions have been overlooked in most analyses of intrastate conflict. A mixed-methods analysis of Italian resistance during the Fascist regime and the Nazi occupation (1943–45) provides the opportunity to theorize and analyze empirical evidence on the role of indignation and radical ideologies in the process of armed mobilization. These nonmaterial factors play a crucial role in the chain that leads to armed collective action. Indignation is a push factor that moves individuals away from accepting the status quo. Radical ideologies act as pull factors that provide a new set of strategies against the incumbent. More specifically, detachment caused by an emotional event disconnects the individual from acceptance of the current state of social relations, and individuals move away from the status...

Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 2021

A primary challenge for researchers that make use of observational data is selection bias (i.e. t... more A primary challenge for researchers that make use of observational data is selection bias (i.e. the units of analysis exhibit systematic differences and dis-homogeneities due to non-random selection into treatment). This article encourages researchers in acknowledging this problem and discusses how and – more importantly – under which assumptions they may resort to statistical matching techniques to reduce the imbalance in the empirical distribution of pre-treatment observable variables between the treatment and control groups. With the aim of providing a practical guidance, the article engages with the evaluation of the effectiveness of peacekeeping missions in the case of the Bosnian civil war, a research topic in which selection bias is a structural feature of the observational data researchers have to use, and shows how to apply the Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM), the most widely used matching algorithm in the fields of Political Science and International Relations.

Political Geography, 2020

Abstract: There is a consensus that civil wars entail enormous economic costs, but we lack reliab... more Abstract: There is a consensus that civil wars entail enormous economic costs, but we lack reliable estimates, due to the endogenous relationship between violence and socio-economic conditions. This paper measures the economic consequences of civil wars with the synthetic control method. This allows us to identify appropriate counterfactuals for assessing the national-level economic impact of civil war in a sample of 20 countries. We find that the average annual loss of GDP per capita is 17.5 percent. Moreover, we use our estimates of annual losses to study the determinants of war destructiveness, focusing on the effects of ethnic heterogeneity. Building on an emerging literature on the relationships between ethnicity, trust, economic outcomes, and conflict, we argue that civil war erodes interethnic trust and highly fractionalized societies pay an especially high “price”, as they rely heavily on interethnic business relations. We find a consistent positive effect of ethnic fraction...

Le guerre civili costituiscono un tipo di conflitto difficile da regolare sul piano giuridico, ed... more Le guerre civili costituiscono un tipo di conflitto difficile da regolare sul piano giuridico, ed anzi sono sempre state associate al disordine, alla cieca violenza ed alla barbarie. L’alto tasso di politicizzazione, il coinvolgimento diretto e sistematico delle popolazioni civili, l’asimmetria delle motivazioni che spingono gli attori ed il rifiuto reciproco a riconoscersi come “eguali” sono tutti fattori che rendono difficile l’applicazione anche di molte delle norme sociali che nei secoli si sono sviluppate intorno ai conflitti internazionali. Inoltre, gli strumenti e le tecniche di combattimento che vengono spesso utilizzati nelle guerre civili concorrono ad erodere anche quel minimo di certezza inerente la guerra quale unita compiuta di spazio e tempo, spingendo invece nella direzione di uno stato generalizzato di violenza indiscriminata. Tuttavia, anche nelle guerre civili e possibile rintracciare delle logiche di comportamento e delle regolarita, attinenti principalmente alla...

What is the position of Italy in contemporary international politics? How does Italy compare with... more What is the position of Italy in contemporary international politics? How does Italy compare with its neighbors or with the so-called great powers in terms of power? What are the most influential factors to be considered when evaluating Italian foreign policy? Contemporary international politics is multidi-mensional and multifaceted and positioning a country in the international system involves looking at various and diverse domains. These domains and trajectories have experienced substantive changes and, in turn, the role and relative position of Italy have dramatically changed. This article aims to pro-vide empirical trends in Italy’s positioning in international relations, showing the existence of some unsolved issues and the reasons for specific underlying tensions in Italian foreign policy.

This special issue has been conceived to address the role of Italy in twenty-first century intern... more This special issue has been conceived to address the role of Italy in twenty-first century international politics, presenting a series of essays that could possibly be interesting for an audience that goes beyond the academic community, including policy makers and commentators. The main aim of these essays is not to advance a theoretical interpretation of Italian foreign policy, a task that has already been successfully achieved by more purely academic initia-tives (e.g. Isernia and Longo 2017). The main goal of this collection is rather to try to clarify the current challenges, identifying the available options for Italy’s foreign policy, while considering major risks and opportunities. Italy is directly involved in many of the global dynamics mentioned above, primarily for geopo-litical reasons. It seems, therefore, crucial to identify its current position in the stormy seas of contemporary international politics and to understand its possi-ble contribution.

Journal of Peace Research, Nov 1, 2012

Political Geography, 2020

WIDER Working Paper

$Research paper thumbnail of La guerra in Libia. Un\u2019analisi sulle conseguenze dell\u2019intervento militare sulla guerra civile$

Istituto Affari Internazionali, 2019

Political Geography, 2021

Comparative Political Studies, 2018

International Security, 2015

Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 2021

Political Geography, 2020

Are there long-term legacies of civil wars on the electoral geography of post-conflict democracie... more Are there long-term legacies of civil wars on the electoral geography of post-conflict democracies? We argue that parties derived from armed bands enjoy an organizational advantage in areas where they fought and won the war. Former combatants can create a strong local party organization that serves as a crucial mobilization tool for elections. Parties have strong incentives to institutionalize this organizational advantage and retain electoral strongholds over time. We test our theory on the case of Italy (1946-1968). Our findings indicate that, on average, the communist party managed to create a stronger organization in areas where its bands fought the resistance war against Nazi-fascist forces—and leftwing parties had a better electoral performance in those areas in subsequent elections. A stronger party organization is correlated with a positive electoral performance for many years, while the direct effect of civil war on electoral patterns decays after few years.

This paper theorizes and provides empirical evidence on the role of indignation and radical ideol... more This paper theorizes and provides empirical evidence on the role of indignation and radical ideologies in the process of armed mobilization. We argue that these non-material factors play a crucial role – in addition to that played by material factors – in the chain that leads to armed collective action. Indignation is a push-factor that moves individuals away from accepting the status of the incumbent power. Ideology acts as a pull-factor that provides a new set of strategies against the incumbent. Our empirical analysis focuses on the Italian civil war (1943–45). First, we provide a national statistical analysis where the Italian provinces are the analytical units. Secondly, we offer a within-province analysis focusing on just two of them, using municipalities as the units of analysis. Finally, we provide a qualitative analysis based on historical micro-narratives and interviews with ex-partisans. The empirical data support our theoretical arguments.

Why use historical data to study armed conflict? Quantitative studies of armed conflict, and more... more Why use historical data to study armed conflict? Quantitative studies of armed conflict, and more specifically civil wars, have grown exponentially
in the past few years (Cederman and Vogt 2017). However, so too, has the use of historical data to study armed conflict. The use of historical cases to study armed conflict is well established (Tilly 1978; Skocpol and Theda 1979; Petersen 2001) with other areas of Comparative Politics experiencing a “historical turn” nearly ten years ago (Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010).

How does violent mobilization affect post-conflict elections? This article studies the impact tha... more How does violent mobilization affect post-conflict elections? This article studies the impact that violent collective mobilization has on local electoral behavior after domestic conflict. We argue that post-conflict democratic politics at the local level can be dramatically affected by local experience of civil war. The use of violence during the war and especially local political entrepreneurs who have emerged from the conflict can influence post-violent politics. We use as case-study the civil war that took place in Italy during the last phase of World War II. Using new spatially disaggregated data on armed groups’ location and violent episodes, we assess the impact of the violent mobilization on the 1946 elections, which took place after the conflict. We find that partisans’ mobilization and, more weakly, Nazi–Fascist violent acts influenced local politics, shifting votes towards more radical positions. Our findings hold across numerous robustness checks.

The advent of radical Islamist groups, the birth of Isis and several violent events in the last f... more The advent of radical Islamist groups, the birth of Isis and several violent events in the last fifteen years have shown that ideologies and emotions are strictly associated with political violence. However, have these intangible factors concrete roles in the process of armed mobilization and in the management of armed groups? Or are they simply epiphenomena? Even though classical studies on revolutions often acknowledged the ideological implications of those phenomena and research on armed groups performed during the Cold War was mainly focused on Marxist insurgencies, most contemporary social science literature on armed mobilization, civil wars and terrorism neglects the role of emotions and ideologies, developing behavioral models that mostly focus on material factors. Journalists and policy-makers tend to assume that emotions, ideologies and political violence are somehow intertwined, but rigorous scholarly work on this very topic is still underdeveloped. This symposium aims to go beyond structural and material explanations of conflict and mobilization. The following contributions focus more on agency and provide diverse angles on the relations between emotions, ideologies and political violence. We argue that including emotions and ideologies in our theoretical frameworks will allow us to unpack the decision making process that leads individuals from the acceptance of the status quo to mobilize and opting for political violence. It will also help us understand the behavior of armed actors once individuals have been mobilized. Moreover, we suggest that ideologies and emotions should be studied together and researchers should further theorize their possible feedback and interactions.

Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana Di Scienza Politica, 2021