Country survey: Angola

This paper is a survey of Angola’s defence sector and policy from 1992, the year the civil war ended, to 2012. Angola achieved its independence upon the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) defeating National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. Since then, fuelled by its rich natural resources, the country has grown steadily. The MPLA military forces were a central factor behind independence and maintain their central role to this day. Moreover, Angola’s support for African peace with monitoring military missions is a clear indication that the country aims to intervene in African security and military issues, with its military capabilities funded by oil revenues.     

An Unlikely Alliance: Portuguese and South African Airpower in Angola, 1968–1974

The war that Portugal was obliged to fight in Africa began in 1961 and immediately stretched the resources of its armed forces. Nowhere was this thinness more apparent than in policing the vast territory of Angola. The east and southeast of Angola were particularly vulnerable, as the area was a vast, sparsely populated region characterised by enormous featureless plains or chanas covered in tall grass and broken by an extensive river system and mountainous forests. The only military solution to policing these immense spaces was aviation and specifically the helicopter that could carry troops into battle, protect them with a gunship and bring them home when the operation was concluded. The immediate problem for the Portuguese Air Force (Força Aérea Portuguesa or FAP) in Angola and elsewhere was a scarcity of helicopters. The solution was an alliance with South Africa, which had a strong inventory of Alouette IIIs, to help in policing the east. This move was likewise in the interest of South Africa, as its threat came from Zambia through south-eastern Angola. This article examines the strategic and tactical development of this unusual, cross-cultural alliance and the symbiotic relationship that resulted in destruction of the enemies of both in Angola.     

Buying Peace? Civil War Peace Duration and Private Military & Security Companies

Do Private Military and Security Companies (PMSCs) impact peace duration after civil war? I argue that the role these organisations play in a conflict can impact post-conflict stability. Specifically, I suggest that variance in services provided by PMSCs can influence rebels’ calculations about relative capabilities. These calculations then contribute to the probability for civil war recurrence. Building on the bargaining framework, with a focus on information and commitment problems, this article demonstrates that PMSCs participating in armed combat operations can jeopardise the stability of peace following civil war. Three case narratives (Angola, Sierra Leone and Croatia) are used to probe the theoretical argument and results are illustrative – PMSCs serving as force multipliers contribute to an increase in the probability for conflict recurrence.     

Conflict Studies and Causality: Critical Realism and the Nomothetic/Idiographic Divide in the Study of Civil War

The study of civil war has increased exponentially during the post-cold war period. This has not, however, resulted in greater levels of consensus with regard to the causes and nature of this phenomenon. In order to alleviate this situation the current article will draw on critical realist philosophy. It will argue (1) that critical realism provides conflict studies authors with a more sophisticated and coherent understanding of causality than has previously been available to them, and (2) that this understanding paves the way for an approach to social science which – rather than consistently abstracting from context – systematically engages with it.     

Z and other cinematic tales from the 30-year Greek civil war

Greek cinema has documented and debated the civil war and its repercussions under different angles, largely defined by censorship, the general political climate, and cinematic trends. This article, first, offers a retrospective that traces the evolution of Greek cinema's ‘takes’ on the civil war vis-à-vis the political changes. Second, it provides an in-depth analysis of Costas Gavras’s film Z, examining its relevance to Greece and how political conflict, in general, is cinematically depicted. The article argues that Z and Gavras’s cinema have been affected and have affected the Greek political situation. However, while Z has spearheaded an international cinematic genre (political thriller), it had minimal effect on the Greek cinema.     

Institutions,information, and commitment: the role of democracy in conflict

This paper explores the hypothesis that both the preexisting quality of democracy in a polity at the onset of conflict and the quality of democracy expected to emerge in the aftermath influence the likelihood of civil war. An empirical investigation of the hypothesis presents a challenge due to concerns of endogeneity and selection: the post-conflict level of democracy is endogenous to the pre-conflict level. Further, for a given time period, either a number of countries have not experienced civil war; or if they did, did not resolve the conflict. We overcome this selection bias by implementing a three-step extension to the Heckman procedure using an unbalanced cross-country panel of 77 countries over the period 1971–2005. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that a standard deviation improvement in the existing level of democracy reduces the probability of civil war by approximately 9 percentage points and a corresponding improvement in expected post-conflict democratization increases the probability of conflict by approximately 48 percentage points.     

THE AU MISSION IN BURUNDI

Abstract

Even though the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, MPLA) managed to take firm control of the state as the war ended in 2002, this article contends that its hegemony is not absolute. At the fringes of the state administration, emerging regional elites have established associations that seek to provide a remedy against the centralised system, which essentially deprives regions of political influence and sufficient economic resources. As in many other countries on the African continent, political identities that were legally enforced and institutionally reproduced in colonial times have hardly been transcended in the post-colonial period. Even if the associations' influence today does not yet reach further than bringing some insecurity to an otherwise secure polity dominated by the MPLA, the associations could play a role in reinforcing strong regional solidarity and give political expression to feelings of exclusion. Such sentiments could in turn lead to an increase of exclusivity ideas about citizenship, or even xenophobic violence. Much will depend on the strategies of the MPLA, and to what extent it will accommodate these emergent forces in the post-war era, not the least through the current sub-national state reforms.     

Civil wars and economic growth: A regional comparison

The paper examines the impact of civil wars on income per-capita growth at home and in neighbors for four regional groupings of countries: Africa, Asia, Latin America, and a pooled Asian and Latin American sample. Both macroeconomic and civil-war influences on growth differ by region. With the use of a distance measure, we demonstrate that the spatial reach from the negative consequences of a civil war are region and time period specific. Generally, there was less dispersion in Africa than in Asia and Latin America. Moreover, Africa demonstrates a greater ability to recover from the adverse effects of civil wars than the other regions tested.     

Anarchy’s anatomy: Two-tiered security systems and Libya’s civil wars

ABSTRACT

No issue deserves more scrutiny than the mechanisms whereby popular unrest unleashes civil wars. We argue that one institution – two-tiered security systems – is particularly pernicious in terms of the accompanying civil war risk. These systems’ defining characteristic is the juxtaposition of small communally stacked units that protect regimes from internal adversaries with larger regular armed forces that deter external opponents. These systems aggravate civil war risks because stacked security units lack the size to repress widespread dissent, but inhibit rapid regime change through coup d’état. Regular militaries, meanwhile, fracture when ordered to employ force against populations from which they were recruited.     

What Goes Up Must Come Down: Military Expenditure and Civil Wars

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of civil war on military expenditure. We employ two measures of military expenditure: the share of military expenditure in general government expenditure and the logarithm of military expenditures. We would reasonably expect a priori that military expenditure as a share of general government expenditure increases during a civil war and that such increases would taper off over the duration of a civil war. We also explore whether the termination of a civil war induces a decline in the share of military expenditure as a share of the general government expenditure in the short-run. We find evidence the of share of military expenditure increases during a civil war and falls in the year succeeding the end of a civil war, and, in particular, if a war ends in a peace treaty. The level of military expenditures, however, rises during civil wars and does not appear to decline in the short-term after the end of a civil war.     

Is Britain a force for good? Investigating British citizens’ narrative understanding of war

It is commonly assumed in the foreign policy literature that narratives are uniquely persuasive and thus integral to obtaining public support for war. Yet, empirical research on “strategic narrative” is often vague on both the concept of narrative and how it persuades. Moreover, the stories publics use to interpret war are rarely examined. This paper offers a novel approach to studying “from the ground up” the war stories of individual British citizens. It examines public interpretations of war through emplotment: the way people select and link events to create a coherent story. Examining the wars people include and those they silence, it illustrates how a diverse range of citizens morally evaluates Britain’s military role, be it as a Force for Good, a Force for Ill or a country Learning from its Mistakes. In doing so, the paper offers an alternative methodological approach to studying how individual citizens understand war.     

The Uneven Application of the ‘Civil War’ Label to Iraq

Many scholars and policy practitioners believe that the US invasion of Iraq triggered a civil war. Several major scholarly data-sets, however, do not code a civil war, due to the challenge of coding multiple simultaneous patterns of violence. Further, many political actors have resisted the term, due to obvious political and public relations concerns. This paper analyses these discrepancies in the use of the label, arguing that, for scholars, the coding problem could limit or even bias models of civil war, while for policymakers, the failure to see Iraq’s civil war as such has contributed to major policy failures, from the Bush administration’s state of denial early in the war to the Obama administration’s withdrawal and the subsequent reescalation of violence.     

A Review of Recent Advances and Future Directions in the Quantitative Literature on Civil War

This paper reviews the booming literature on civil war. It presents the major theoretical perspectives and key empirical results on the determinants of civil war. The paper identifies controversies in the field and suggests ways to improve and organize our research. The conclusion outlines possible future directions for research on civil wars.     

The Economic Consequences of the Libyan Spring: A Synthetic Control Analysis

Abstract

In 2011 a wave of revolutionary movements, the so-called Arab Spring, spread in the Middle East and North Africa. Libya was one of the most affected countries, ending Gaddafi’s dictatorship after an international intervention and a civil war. This paper assesses the effects that this revolution had on Libyan economy. The analysis is made by means of the synthetic control method. Our estimates for the 2011–2014 period show (i) a cumulative loss in the growth rate of per capita real GDP of 64.15%; (ii) a cumulative loss in per capita real GDP of 56,548 dollars; and (iii) a cumulative loss in the aggregate real GDP of 350.5 billion dollars.     

Holmes’ front: constructing a new face of battle for America’s Civil War

ABSTRACT

In his seminal study of the changing nature of warfare between Agincourt and the Somme, military historian John Keegan proposed that future historians might consider combatants’ emotions in their assessments of the impact and nature of conflict. Recent years have witnessed the emergence of the history of emotions as an analytical approach, but rarely, if ever, is this directed toward the study of military history, far less the history of insurgencies and counter-insurgencies. This paper examines America’s civil war (1861–1865) as a case study of the ways in which an emotional history approach might illuminate not the physical experiences of but rather the immediate and longer-term reactions to counter-insurgency conflict through a focus on one specific individual, the future Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. It proposes that Holmes, whilst not a man of the ranks, nevertheless can reveal the wider ramifications of civil war and its emotional impact, both individually and culturally. As a relatively limited internecine war, one not fought by professional armies but by volunteer forces, America’s civil war highlights the ways in which the soldier’s response points us toward the kind of emotional revolution that has, to date, mainly been located within the European nations.     

Why did Sudan Lose a small war in Southern Sudan?

ABSTRACT

When on the wrong end of an asymmetry in the projection of hard power, weaker sides countenance the grim arithmetic of avoiding direct and massed confrontations. Invariably, insurgents have over the ages tended to employ indirect tactical methods to render their stronger opponents ineffective. Ultimately – interest asymmetry, regime type, asymmetries of strategy, and external intervention – combine in a complex interplay and pattern, to militate against a strong side. In Sudan, these factors interacted throughout the civil wars to produce regional autonomy and finally an independent South Sudan in 2011. Similar strategic logic had confronted many large African states battling insurgencies in Ethiopia, Angola, Nigeria, Zaire, and apartheid-era South Africa. Oftentimes, weakening public resolve has caused these governments to accommodate, capitulate or withdraw even if they try not to blink. Notwithstanding the regime type, it can be concluded that the majority of strong actors are prone to fail in a protracted, asymmetric conflict. Hence, the notion of linking victory in counterinsurgency to the degree of openness (democratic polyarchies); or closeness (totalitarianism) – is still valid but highly contestable in the case of Africa’s large dysfunctional states.     

Educate or Adjudicate? Socioeconomic Heterogeneity and Welfare

I present a formal framework to explore the welfare and distributional effects of a government’s optimal choice over two types of public spending in a closed economy: domestic security (DS) and investment in social capital (SC). Production is characterized as a function of social and physical capital stocks that both vary across the regions. DS stands for total factor productivity, while SC stands for human capital and civic cooperativeness combined. SC accumulates via public spending on universal primary education, cultural, and civic events and such, and is exposed to regional spillover effects. Numerical simulations of the static solution of the government’s welfare maximization problem reveal that the optimal rate of spending on SC (m^*) is negatively related with the income share of physical capital, SC spillovers and fiscal decentralization. Simulations also show that SC homogeneity is positively associated with both the level and equitability of aggregate income. The maximum attainable levels of income, welfare and social cohesion and the most equitable incomes are all observed to realize at some intermediate range of m^* values. In case DS augments SC, however, social cohesion improves and welfare declines monotonously in m^*.     

TERRORIST THREATS AND TRANSITIONAL DYNAMICS IN AN OVERLAPPING GENERATIONS MODEL

Previous research has shown that the duration of a civil war is in part a function of how it ends: in government victory, rebel victory, or negotiated settlement. We present a model of how protagonists in a civil war choose to stop fighting. Hypotheses derived from this theory relate the duration of a civil war to its outcome as well as characteristics of the civil war and the civil war nation. Findings from a competing risk model reveal that the effects of predictors on duration vary according to whether the conflict ended in government victory, rebel victory, or negotiated settlement.     

How do wars end? A multidisciplinary enquiry

ABSTRACT

The cessation of military confrontations rarely coincides with the end of war. Legal and political matters continue after the last shot has been fired, civilians driven from their homes try to rebuild their houses and their lives, veterans need to adapt to their new role in civil society, and the struggle to define the history and the significance of past events only begins. In recent years, in particular, the changes in the character of contemporary warfare have created uncertainties across different disciplines about how to identify and conceptualise the end of war. It is therefore an opportune moment to examine how wars end from a multidisciplinary perspective that combines enquiries into the politics of war, the laws of war and the military and intellectual history of war. This approach enables both an understanding of how ‘the end’ as a concept informs the understanding of war in international relations, in international law and in history and a reconsideration of the nature of scientific method in the field of war studies as such.     

An integral equation for the second moment function of a geometric process and its numerical solution

In this article, an integral equation satisfied by the second moment function M₂(t) of a geometric process is obtained. The numerical method based on the trapezoidal integration rule proposed by Tang and Lam for the geometric function M(t) is adapted to solve this integral equation. To illustrate the numerical method, the first interarrival time is assumed to be one of four common lifetime distributions, namely, exponential, gamma, Weibull, and lognormal. In addition to this method, a power series expansion is derived using the integral equation for the second moment function M₂(t), when the first interarrival time has an exponential distribution.