No abstract

While piracy may evoke romanticized visions of swashbuckling, rum swigging, and skirt chasing pirates hoisting the Jolly Roger, maritime piracy has changed substantially by taking advantage of modernization and substantial upgrading of the weapons, vessels, and weapons it employs. In addition, as documented by the International Maritime Bureau (IMB), the frequency of pirate attacks has increased significantly, with more than 2,600 piracy incidents occurring since 2004. The authors argue that piracy is a result of permissive institutional environments and the lack of legal forms of employment in states' fishing sectors. The authors investigate these arguments empirically using data for all countries with coastlines in the 1995-2007 period. The empirical analyses show that state weakness and reductions in fisheries production values affect piracy as expected. These findings suggest that international efforts in combating piracy should center on improving the institutional environments and labor opportunities driving maritime piracy.

Recent elections in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, Iraq, Kenya, Nigeria, and Pakistan have displayed substantial contestation and violence. A growing literature explores the causes and consequences of electoral contention and violence, but researchers lack comprehensive, disaggregated data establishing a substantive link between elections and violence. The Electoral Contention and Violence (ECAV) dataset conceptualizes electoral contention as nonviolent or violent events of contestation by state or non-state actors related to national elections. The data contain more than 18,000 events of election-related contention covering 136 countries holding competitive national elections between 1990 and 2012. This article describes the scope of ECAV, presents the project’s definition of electoral contention and the variables included, and outlines the coding procedure. We then compare ECAV to other datasets on electoral contention. Cross-national and subnational analyses of electoral competition and violence show that the data are useful for assessing the global and subnational implications of existing theories. ECAV addresses current data limitations by focusing on election-related contention, by using clear criteria to determine whether events are election-related, and by identifying the timing, geocoded location, and actors involved.

Elections are held in nearly all countries in the contemporary world. Yet despite their aim of allowing for peaceful transfers of power, elections held outside of consolidated democracies are often accompanied by substantial violence. This special issue introduction article establishes electoral violence as a subtype of political violence with distinct analytical and empirical dynamics. We highlight how electoral violence is distinct from other types of organized violence, but also how it is qualitatively different from nonviolent electoral manipulation. The article then surveys what we have learned about the causes and consequences of electoral violence, identifies important research gaps in the literature, and proceeds to discuss the articles included in the special issue. The contributions advance research in four domains: the micro-level targeting and consequences of electoral violence, the institutional foundations of electoral violence, the conditions leading to high-stakes elections, and electoral violence in the context of other forms of organized violence. The individual articles are methodologically and geographically diverse, encompassing ethnography, survey vignette and list experiments and survey data, quantitative analyses of subnational and crossnational event data, and spanning Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

The question of how terrorist campaigns end has only recently started to attract scholarly interest. In this paper, we present a cross-national analysis of terrorist group duration that includes information on the characteristics of terrorist groups and the countries in which groups operate. In addition, we develop an argument that expects that the effect of repression on group duration is contingent on countries" regime type. We argue that repression produces a backlash effect in democracies, subsequently lengthening the duration of terrorist organizations. In authoritarian regimes, however, coercive strategies are expected to deter groups" engagement in terrorism, thus reducing the lifespan of terrorist groups. Using data on terrorist groups from the RAND-MIPT database and presented in Jones and Libicki (2008), we find empirical support for the expected effect of repression and democracy on terrorist campaign duration for the 1976-2006 period. Robustness tests for alternative measures of repression and democracy confirm these results. "But then Bloody Sunday happened and again this incredible sense of outrage.. .. And following along Bloody Sunday I decided that what I was doing.. . was wanting to go home more and more. And as soon as I came home, I got into Sinn Fein, and it was a natural progression from there. Because my beliefs were fairly well formulated at the time. The British were killing our people, they were locking them up, and they were nothing more than Stormont." 3