Guest post by Costantino Pischedda and Andrew Cheon Drone strikes targeted Moscow last week. Though much remains unknown about it, the episode appears to be part of a series of unclaimed coercive attacks that US officials attributed to Ukrainian government personnel, including the killing of the daughter of a Russian nationalist, the sabotage of the North Stream pipelines, and drone attacks on the Kremlin. With unclaimed coercion, perpetrators impose costs on adversaries to signal their resolve to prevail in disputes while denying involvement or simply not making any claim about responsibility ..read more

By Michael Barnett A recent headline from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz describes a familiar event: “West Bank Palestinian Village Residents Flee Amid Ongoing Settler Violence.” In many respects, this is old news. Settlers have been terrorizing Palestinian residents for decades, and 2023 appears to be a particularly horrific year. In response to these criminal acts, the Israeli army and government have tended to look the other way. The military is often slow to react or a no-show when settlers take to the streets and rampage through Palestinian villages or uproot olive trees. The Israeli gover ..read more

Guest post by Alexander Noyes On May 17, the president of Ecuador, Guillermo Lasso, dissolved the country’s legislature in the midst of impeachment proceedings against him. Did Ecuador just have a self-coup? Opposition leaders say yes. But the answer is no, at least for now. This matters greatly for the country’s democratic trajectory and for the international community’s response. The Rise of Self-Coups After a recent lull, coups and coup attempts are front-page news again, from Sudan to Brazil to the United States. This surge in coup activity prompted Antonio Guterres, the United N ..read more

Guest post by Vilde Lunnan Djuve and Carl Henrik Knutsen In March 2020, COVID-19 generated a major emergency in countries across the world with public fear of the virus, lockdowns, and economies going into a tailspin. Yet, observers and citizens in many countries were worried about one additional thing, namely that their leaders would use the ongoing crisis as a window of opportunity for concentrating power in their own hands and thereby (further) undermine democracy. This was the case in Hungary, for example, where Viktor Orban’s government was granted the power to rule by decree. Such fears ..read more

Guest post by Patricia L. Sullivan During her recent trip to Africa, US Vice President Kamala Harris announced a $100 million commitment over ten years to West African Nations to fend off the increasing threat of extremist groups. The announcement followed President Biden’s pledge of $55 billion to the continent for the next three years. While these promises reveal a US commitment to greater engagement with African states, the often-dodged question is whether citizens of these states will benefit. Will US security aid improve human security in fragile and conflict-affected African states? How ..read more

Guest post by Sabine Carey, Marcela Ibáñez, and Eline Drury Løvlien On April 10, 1998, various political parties in Northern Ireland, Great Britain, and the Republic of Ireland signed a peace deal ending decades of violent conflict. Twenty-five years later, the Good Friday Agreement remains an example of complex but successful peace negotiations that ended the conflict era known as The Troubles. Since the agreement, Northern Ireland has experienced a sharp decline in violence. But sectarian divisions continue as a constant feature in everyday life. Peace walls remain in many cities, separating ..read more

Guest post by Alexandre Christoyannopoulos, Molly Wallace, and Ned Dobos Ukraine has received tens of billions of dollars worth of military aid since the Russian invasion began one year ago. The international consensus seems to be that supporting Ukraine means financing its war effort. But a few dissenting voices have emerged of late, more ambivalent about the prudence—and ethics—of the current policy. Colonel Douglas MacGregor, a former advisor to the US Secretary of Defence, has warned that the choice of cure could turn out to be worse than the disease. At least 7,000 Ukrainian civilians hav ..read more

Guest post by María José Méndez This post is part of a series on illicit economies, organized crime, and extra-legal actors and came out of an IGCC-sponsored conference hosted in October 2022 by the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy. In 2019, a 19-year-old woman detonated a grenade on a public bus in an extortion attempt in Guatemala City. Three years later, another woman was arrested for trying to smuggle ammunition and cell phones into a maximum-security prison in Honduras. Accounts of criminal violence tend to portray women as passive vic ..read more

Founded in 2012, Political Violence @ a Glance is an award-winning, peer-reviewed online magazine that explores timely topics and scholarly research on political violence and its alternatives. PV@Glance has an international readership, with thousands of subscribers and hundreds of thousands of annual page views. It is among the premier venues through which scholars of political violence communicate the relevance of their findings to a wider scholarly and public audience. The current editors of PV@Glance, Erica Chenoweth, Barbara Walter, and Joseph K. Young, seek applications for a new editoria ..read more

Guest post by Brandon Bolte On April 15, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) surprised many Western observers when it launched an assault against the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) in Khartoum. Led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemeti”), the RSF previously fought for the Sudanese regime against rebels for years. In 2019, it participated in a coup alongside General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the SAF that ousted Sudan’s long-time dictator, Omar al-Bashir. Both generals have since been on a transitionary council meant to shape a new government before popular elections take place. In the 11 days ..read more