The United States and Latin America: Shaping an elusive future

This article presents a regional overview of US‐Latin American security relations, focusing on those countries where US national security interests are most likely to be endangered over the next two decades. The author examines the current US strategy of ‘shaping’ the Latin security environment, with a view to assessing the strength and weaknesses of this approach. The article presents some policy recommendations, including the recommendation that the US do more to redress the historical imbalance in Latin American civil‐military relations by strengthening civilian institutions. It also argues that at the regional level a major effort be made to recapture momentum toward the creation of a Free Trade Association of the Americas.     

Dangerous Demographics? The Effect of Urbanisation and Metropolisation on African Civil Wars, 1961–2010

Whether urbanisation promotes or inhibits the risk of civil war is disputed: while case studies usually support the former, quantitative investigations have found either the latter or no significant correlation at all. I argue that this contradiction is due to a conceptual and operational over-aggregation of urbanisation, ignoring its intrastate variation. I claim that a high relative concentration of the urban population and political, economic and social institutions in the largest city – so-called metropolisation – can increase both the motivation for and the feasibility of rebellion in a country. Triangulating case study evidence with a quantitative cross-national time series design, I show that metropolisation significantly and robustly increases the risk of governmental conflict in particular and hence civil war in general.