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This paper evaluates the federal reparations program for fatal victims of political violence in Brazil. The Brazilian reparations program was born of an amnesty movement for political prisoners, followed by the discovery of mass graves exposing atrocities of the State. In response to pressure from civil society groups and the media, President Cardoso signed the 1995 Law of Victims of Political Assassination and Disappearance. The paper explores the limitations of the law, its exclusion of many victims of political violence, and the charge that the law transferred the burden of proof to victims’ families. It examines the Commission’s structure and operation, as well as the voting patterns of its members. It provides data concerning the cost of the entire reparations process, and sheds light on the surprising truth-telling function the Commission acquired in a country in which official truth-telling about the years of the dictatorship has yet to take place.

This chapter attempts to integrate two different strands of research on political violence, developing a theoretical model to analyze the common roots of repression and civil war. Under specific assumptions about the conflict technology, it shows that peace, repression (one-sided violence), and civil war (two-sided violence) become ordered states depending on a common underlying latent variable, which is shifted by shocks to the value of public goods, wages, aid, and resource rents. But these effects only emerge when political institutions do not provide sufficient checks and balances on the ruling group or adequate protection for those excluded from power. The chapter also shows how to start bridging the gap between theoretical modeling and econometric testing. Under specific assumptions on what can be observed, the predictions from the model can be taken to the data by estimating either an ordered logit or the conditional probability of transition from peace to violence or from non-civil war to civil war. The empirical strategy here is much sharper than in earlier chapters and shows that the kind of theory we are building can help us approach the data in a specific way.

An examination is made of various aspects of justice and legitimacy in the transition from authoritarianism to democracy in South Africa. The major part of the chapter discusses the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). The different sections of the chapter are: Introduction; Race, Nationalism, and Political Violence – a discussion of the causes of the massive levels of political violence in the recent history of South Africa; The Negotiations for a Transition; Negotiating an Amnesty; and the TRC as a Liminal Institution; and Concluding Remarks.

Chapter 2 is a historical account of the politics of the northern Uganda conflict, placing it in its local, national, and international contexts. It begins with the colonial period and follows Acholi political history to the present to demonstrate how internal and national political crises of the Acholi combined to underlie the inception and continuation of the war. The chapter examines the new forms these crises have taken since the government’s mass internment of the Acholi peasantry began in 1996. It argues that a sustainable resolution to the violence will have to be predicated upon a democratic resolution of these two crises, which can only proceed through the inclusive political organization and action of Acholi themselves. The chapter also shows the detrimental impact that the international context has had on the war: Uganda has used international support to intensify the war, increase its militarization, and repress democratic domestic politics.

This chapter takes some steps toward integrating endogenous political reform into the core model. A general finding is that forces that lead to political stability generally reduce the motives of ruling groups to undertake political reforms toward greater cohesiveness. It sketches some micropolitical foundations for the main macropolitical parameters in the core model, political cohesiveness, and (peaceful) political turnover, and tried to relate them to real-world tangible political institutional rules and regulations. As in the case of tax compliance in Chapter 2, it notes that cohesiveness in political life may reflect not only formal institutions, but also informal rules of behavior, trust, and social norms. This is in line with studies that focus on the role of social capital. The chapter also considers political reform in a predatory state and gives reasons for resistance toward reforms that promote common-interest politics. This discussion reinforces the observation that reform may be particularly problematic in such states.

This chapter summarizes a multifaceted program of research on youth in Israel and Palestine. It outlines a model for the study of the effects of political violence on children and presents a summary of data derived with the use of this paradigm, which includes contrasting effects for Israeli and Palestinian youth. This political life events model enables the examination of the differing severity of exposure for children divided along different demographic categories such as age, gender, residential location, and religious adherence. Further, the scale used allows for the study of the consequences to children's mental health from exposure to differing levels of severity and for the detection of those factors that enhance resilience in coping with exposure to political violence.

Despite the claims of recent critics, the transformation of warfare proves, rather than negates, the continuous relevance of Clausewitz's thinking. Clausewitz provides the means for a conceptualization of political violence, which enables us to describe changes in war, those of today as much as those of the past. His thinking embraces the emergence of guerrilla warfare and of terrorism. He offers theoretical insights into the dynamics of defence and offence, which help to explain why asymmetrical strategies and tactics are applied. And he allows us to reflect on the effects of war on both actors and structures, and helps to explain why big states often lose small wars.

This chapter reviews many of the central issues of concern related to youth and their experiences with political violence, and calls for expanding the scope of inquiry in order to better capture the intricacy of youth experience with political conflict. The evaluation includes coverage of both sides of the equation: assessment of both the experience with conflict and the breadth of indices of youth functioning thought to be impacted by their experiences with political violence. It discusses issues of mediation and moderation of the impact of conflict, and wrestles with how to juxtapose the evidence of both negative and positive elements of functioning in conflict youth populations. Additionally, the chapter positions subsequent chapters in the book as evidence of how to approach the intricate and complex study of these youths.

The final years of the Weimar Republic were dominated by two factors: the economic crisis with its surge in mass unemployment; and the development of the Nazi party into a mass movement. How did politicians respond to the challenges of a media democracy? This chapter studies the intensive news coverage of political violence, and examines the increasingly authoritarian nature of government press management. But even at this point, the Nazi press was unsuccessful in attracting a wider readership. So why did voters choose to support the Nazis? This book demonstrates that the economic crisis as such was insufficient in mobilizing voters to vote for the NSDAP. Rather, press presentation of increasing Communist violence and the perceived threat of civil war, together with the media image of an indecisive government, turned the Nazis into an attractive choice for voters desperate for decisive action.

This chapter presents an assessment of the available evidence in the research literature on how youth experience political violence. It focuses not only in evaluating the evidence for the empirical associations between exposure and/or involvement in political violence and aspects of adolescent functioning, but in how the research literature has chosen to measure conflict experiences and youth functioning. It begins with a detailed overview of past and current quantitative, empirical efforts to study political violence and its associations with youth functioning, and provides a review of 95 qualifying studies. It argues that the current state of research remains relatively simplistic both in scope (i.e. narrow definitions of conflict and functioning) and in findings, and offers recommendations for how research on this topic could provide a better understanding of the complexities inherent in youth experiences with political violence.

This chapter summarizes the lessons from Chapter 4 in the form of a function that describes endogenous political turnover. This preliminary allows us to study equilibrium investments in fiscal and legal capacity in the comprehensive core model. Section 5.2 develops the model by adding private capital formation along the same lines as in Section 3.2.3, but in a setting where the risk of civil war affects the expected return to private investment. Section 5.3 discusses the empirical implications of our comprehensive framework and how it can be used to interpret observed patterns in the data. Section 5.4 puts the typologies of investment states and violence states together into an Anna Karenina principle of development, an allusion to the Tolstoy quote at the beginning of the chapter. It also briefly revisits the possibility of a predatory state and observes how this enriches our understanding of nonprosperity.

From the previous chapter, conflict in this chapter is related to trust: specifically to the trust of the non-elite group (the ‘people’) in the fairness of the allocation of resources between themselves and the elite, to ‘military centrality’ or provocation by government; and to the level of unemployment and poverty. This chapter explores this idea in two steps. First it explains the level of ‘riot-type violence’ – that is violence which falls short of the standard definition of 1,000 civilian deaths per annum, and thence the escalation of riot-type conflict, in some places, into full-scale civil war. It shows, with the help of both panel data and case studies especially of Bolivia and Indonesia, that both riot-type violence and its growth into civil war can be restrained through policies and institutions which promote trust. This can be done by sending signals of trustworthiness – for example in the sense of more equitable public expenditure, more equitable taxation or forums capable of defusing latent social conflicts. The chapter interprets such policies as social efficiency wage policies – just as in the efficiency-wage policies of labour economics, a wage above the equilibrium level can increase stability in the labour force, so in this context, judicious increases in the social wage can make the political system more stable and less fragile.

Given that there has been very little explicit attention to policy concerns in the research literatures on youth and political violence, this chapter uses a policy lens to focus on existing empirical data in an attempt to understand the relationship between young Bosnians' wartime experiences and their post-conflict behaviors. It also documents some of the socioemotional or psychosocial characteristics whereby the effect of violence exposure was transmitted to these negative outcomes. Important policy implications are evident.