Institutions that Manage Violent Conflict

The Mershon Center's third area of focus in international security studies is the institutions that manage violent conflict. This includes projects that deal with organizational structures that manage conflicting interests, such as:

• Comparative National Election Project, a multi-year examination of democratic processes in democracies around the world.
• Indonesian National Election Project, a study of the 1999, 2004 and 2009 elections in Indonesia.
• Voting for Peace: Do Post-Conflict Elections Help or Hinder Recovery?, which looks at elections in countries coping with the aftermath of a civil war.
• Managing Urbanization and Development in China During Crisis, which studies how the Communist government has managed the growth of cities in China.
• The Performance of International Organizations, which looks at why some IOs perform better than others and develops frameworks for performance.
• Designing Effective Climate Change Mechanisms for Developing Countries, which examines resource transfers and greenhouse gas offsets to help bridge the gap between developed and developing nations on responses to climate change.
• Sanctuary and the Devolution of Immigration Enforcement after 9/11, which looks at U.S. immigration policy in the country's interior.
• Politics and Primacy: How Dictatorship and Development Set the Stage for Democratization, which fills in theory on how societies move from dictatorship to democracy.
• Presidential-Congressional Conflict in Domestic and Foreign Policy Making, which seeks to understand the dynamics of the relationship between the U.S. president and congress
• World Handbook of Political Indicators IV, which uses machine coding to boil down a decade of world events into a series of cross-national statistics.
• Change in Personnel and Policy and the Legitimacy of the Supreme Court, which studies how ordinary Americans regard the Supreme Court.
• Political Asylum Policy and International Security, examines how humanitarian concerns for refugees come into conflict with security concerns in the United States and Britain.
• Dissent/Repression Nexus in the Middle East, which examines the cycle of dissent and repression in several key countries in the Middle East.
• Issues in Multi-Dimensional Legislative Bargaining, which experiments with ways legislators bargain between national goods and their district's interests.
• The Effect of Group Leaders, examines how leaders effect group behaviors and how groups may or may not reflect the will of a leader.
• Violent Conflict, Environmental Degradation, and Food Security, which expands on previous research to examine the complex relationships between armed conflict, environmental degradation, human trafficking, and child hunger.

To learn more, please click on the links above.