Does exposure to violence affect attitudes toward peace? Civilians living in war zones see peace agreements as an opportunity to improve their security prospects. However, in multiparty conflicts, this does not automatically translate into support for peace. Support hinges on the interplay between which faction has victimized civilians in the past and which faction is sitting at the negotiation table. If civilians have been victimized by the group that is involved in the peace agreement, they will be likely to support peace. On the contrary, if they have been victimized by another faction, they will be likely to refrain from supporting peace if they believe that this can trigger retaliatory violence against them. This article explores this argument empirically in the context of the 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC; both quantitative and qualitative data yield support to the study’s theoretical expectations.
Is there a link between levels of terrorism and the presence of organised crime groups? Which factors does terrorism affect that could impact the presence and expansion of organised crime groups? This study aims to empirically analyse this link. Dealing with potential endogeneity bias using matching methods, we provide quantitative evidence showing that terrorist attacks increase the future levels of organised crime group activities.Using Structural Equation Modeling techniques (SEM), we also show that the main mechanisms through which this causal relation seems to occur are through the effects of terrorism on state capacity and state legitimacy. Thus, organised crime groups seem to take advantage of the turbulent situation created by terrorist attacks in order to expand their activities. The findings provided in this paper aim to increase our knowledge on the so-called crime-terror nexus.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.