War Abroad and Homicides at Home: Evidence from the Untied States (original) (raw)
Related papers
Continuity and Change, 2021
Over the last decades social scientists have alleged that violence has decreased in Europe since late medieval times. They consider homicide rates a valid indicator for this claim. Thorough source criticism, however, raises serious doubts about the decline thesis having any substantial empirical foundation. Forms and contents of the sources are immensely heterogeneous and a closer look at the alleged richness of the data uncovers remarkable gaps. Furthermore, medieval and early modern population estimates are highly unreliable. Thus, we argue that historical research on violence should return to focus on specific historical constellations, accept the need for painstaking source criticism and pay careful attention to the contexts of violence.
New Incentives and Old Organizations: The Production of Violence After War
Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy, 2000
The immediate aftermath of an armed conflict is a key window of opportunity to build sustainable peace and security. Whether and how violence arises during that time has profound effects on a country's political and economic development. Yet, defining and conceptualizing post-conflict violence has remained elusive. This paper contributes to a more comprehensive theory of postconflict violence with a theory-grounded typology, which classifies different postwar violent scenarios and shows that specific logics drive different types of violence in different settings. The axes, on which I build this typology, are: strategic aims (predatory, constructive) and organization (directed, coordinated, spontaneous). This classification is the first step toward a more rigorous understanding of post-conflict violence. Post-conflict violence emerges as a combination of new political incentives and opportunities from the war legacy. The premise of this theoretical effort is that with a more solid grasp of the mechanisms driving post-conflict violence and its variation we can design more suitable policies to lower its incidence. Ultimately, this analytical framework can illuminate the growing practice of international interventions in post-conflict settings.
Moral Norm Dynamics and the 20th Century Recovery of Just War
How does a lesser-known ethical concept become normative for broader society? In the late 20 th century, the just war tradition transcended the bounds of theological academy to become [part of] the lingua franca of the entire field of the ethics of warfare. This paper examines this transition of ethical ideas from academic conceptualization to socio-political normativity and practical usage. Using just war, I argue that this transition typically follows a three step norm lifecycle: (1) norm emergence and persuasion by norm entrepreneurs; (2) norm cascade following a -tipping point‖ of norm acceptance; and (3) internalization by society at large.
Bring a gun to a gunfight: Armed adversaries and violence across nations
Social Science Research, 2014
We use homicide data and the International Crime Victimization Survey to examine the role of firearms in explaining cross-national variation in violence. We suggest that while gun violence begets gun violence, it inhibits the tendency to engage in violence without guns. We attribute the patterns to adversary effects-i.e., the tendency of offenders to take into account the threat posed by their adversaries. Multi-level analyses of victimization data support the hypothesis that living in countries with high rates of gun violence lowers an individual's risk of an unarmed assault and assaults with less lethal weapons. Analyses of aggregate data show that homicide rates and gun violence rates load on a separate underlying factor than other types of violence. The results suggest that a country's homicide rate reflects, to a large extent, the tendency of its offenders to use firearms.
How Violence Breeds Violence: Some Utilitarian Considerations
Politics, 2002
Recent philosophical writing about war has focused upon just war theory, especially how best to construe the ius ad bellum and ius in bello tenets, and whether the distinction between combatants and non-combatants can be made in the modern world. Historically and politically, calls to war have often appealed to utilitarian considerations. In this article, I discuss important long-range consequences rarely mentioned in utilitarian defences of particular decisions to engage states in war. When consequences are weighed fully not only in the short term but with an eye to the future, bearing the destiny of all people in mind, it emerges that belligerent approaches to international conflict resolution will not maximise utility.
Understanding the relation between war economies and post-war crime
Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal
a GiGa German institute of Global and area studies, hamburg, Germany; b department of Political science, universidad de los andes, Bogotá, colombia ABSTRACT Even when armed conflicts formally end, the transition to peace is not clear-cut. Mounting evidence suggests that it is rather 'unlikely to see a clean break from violence to consent, from theft to production, from repression to democracy, or from impunity to accountability' . The transition out of war is a complex endeavour, interrelated in many cases with other transformations such as changes in the political regime (democratisation) and in the economy (opening of markets to globalisation). In addition, in the same way as wars and conflicts reflect the societies they befall, post-war orders may replicate and perpetuate some of the drivers of war-related violence, such as high levels of instability, institutional fragility, corruption, and inequality. Thus, even in the absence of a formal relapse into war and the remobilisation of former insurgents, many transitional contexts are marked by the steady and ongoing reconfiguration of criminal and illegal groups and practices.
Handbook on the Economics of Conflict, 2011
This chapter considers macroeconomic aspects of violence. It moves beyond the usual focus on war to argue the economic importance of all forms and aspects of armed and unarmed violence. Violence refers to acts of self-harm, interpersonal violence, and collective violence. Self-harm includes suicide; interpersonal violence includes organized criminal violence as well as domestic and workplace violence. Collective violence generally denotes political entities that are in, or at risk of, internal or external violent conflict as well as those that are in an insecure postwar predicament or wracked by pervasive armed criminal violence. In the past these different aspects of violence have been studied by different academic disciplines, with political scientists and defense economists tending to study the causes, consequences, and, lately, potential remedies of large-scale collective violence; and criminologists, public health experts, and crime economists tending to study interpersonal violence and self harm. Recognizing the economic importance of all aspects of violence means that macroeconomic policy cannot be considered in isolation from microeconomic developments or from regional, sectoral, distributional, and other economic policies, nor from the social contexts in which violence takes place. The increasing complexity and interrelatedness of the various aspects of the economics of violence means that any discussion of the macroeconomic issues has to consider the cost of conflict and violence more broadly conceived. The chapter reviews violence, measures and measurements of the cost of violence, the economic causes and consequences of violence, some macroeconomic aspects of recovery from violence and postwar reconstruction, and some of the necessary framework conditions for recovery from violence.