An authoritative source of information on violent conflicts and peacebuilding processes around the world, Peace and Conflict is an annual publication of the University of Maryland's Center for International Development and Conflict Management and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Geneva).

The contents of the 2018 edition are divided into three sections:

» Global Patterns and Trends provides an overview of recent advances in scholarly research on various aspects of conflict and peace, as well as chapters on armed conflict, violence against civilians, non-state armed actors, democracy and ethnic exclusion, terrorism, defense spending and arms production and procurement, peace agreements, state repression, foreign aid, and the results of the Peace & Conflict Instability Ledger, which ranks the status and progress of more than 160 countries based on their forecasted risk of future instability.

» Special Feature spotlights work on measuring micro-level welfare effects of exposure to conflict.

» Profiles has been enlarged to survey developments in instances of civil wars, peacekeeping missions, and international criminal justice proceedings that were active around the world during 2015.

Frequent visualizations of data in full-color, large-format tables, graphs, and maps bring the analysis to life and amplify crucial developments in real-world events and the latest findings in research.

The contributors include many leading scholars in the field from the US and Europe.

EDITORS

1. David A. Backer is a Research Associate Professor and Assistant Director of the Center for International Development and Conflict Management, as well as Director of the Minor in International Development and Conflict Management, at the University of Maryland. His research focuses on conflict dynamics and post-conflict processes. He is Co-Director of the West Africa Transitional Justice Project and the Constituency-Level Elections Archive.
2. Ravi Bhavnani　is a Professor at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies (Switzerland). His research explores the micro-foundations of violence, examining the endogenous relationships among the characteristics, beliefs, and interests of relevant actors, as well as social mechanisms and emergent structures that shape attitudes, decision making, and behavior. He uses agent-based modeling and disaggregated empirical data to link theoretical conjectures to concrete evidence, thereby identifying processes that tend to generate specific outcomes.
3. Paul K. Huth is a Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland and Director of the Center for International Development and Conflict Management. He is also editor of the Journal of Conflict Resolution. He has published books and widely in journals on subjects related to the study of international conflict and war, including deterrence behavior, crisis decision making, territorial disputes, the democratic peace, international law and dispute resolution, and the civilian consequences of war.

1. Caroline Bergeron is the Partnership Associate at AidData and a mediator, certified by the Commonwealth of Virginia. Her academic interests include conflict analysis, conflict resolution methods, conflict prevention, negotiation and transitional justice in the international system. She holds a BA in Psychology from the University of Virginia.
2. Nils-Christian Bormann is a Lecturer at the University of Exeter. Research interests include ethnic coalitions, horizontal inequality, and civil wars. His work has been published with or is forthcoming in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, the Journal of Peace Research, and Electoral Studies. He received his PhD from ETH Zürich in 2014.
3. Tilman Brück is Professor and Team Leader - Development Economics at IGZ - Leibniz Institute for Vegetable and Horticultural Crops near Berlin. He is also the Founder and Director of the ISDC - International Security and Development Center in Berlin, Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Households in Conflict Network (HiCN), a global research network. His research interests focus on the economics of household behavior and well-being in conflict-affected and fragile economies, including the measurement of violence and conflict in household surveys and the impact evaluation of peace-building programs in conflict-affected areas and of humanitarian assistance. He studied economics at Glasgow University and Oxford University and obtained his PhD in economics from Oxford University.
4. Halvard Buhaug is Research Professor at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO); Director of PRIO's Conditions of Violence and Peace department; Professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU); and Associate Editor of the Journal of Peace Research. He leads and has directed research projects on security dimensions of climate change and geographic aspects of armed conflict. Recent publications include the co-authored Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and journal articles in Global Environmental Change, International Security, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Geography, and PNAS. He is the recipient of the 2015 Karl Deutsch Award and an ERC Consolidator Grant.
5. Lars-Erik Cederman is Professor of International Conflict Research, ETH Zürich. His interests include nationalism, ethnic conflict, democratization, and state formation. He is the (co-)author of Emergent Actors in World Politics: How States Develop and Dissolve (Princeton University Press, 1997), Inequality, Grievances and Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and recent articles in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, and World Politics.
6. Deniz Cil is a PhD candidate in Government and Politics at the University of Maryland and a Research Assistant on a project, funded by the Minerva Initiative of the US Department of Defense, to study the effect of foreign aid on different phases of civil conflict. Her main research focuses on the implementation of peace agreements following civil wars, and explores variation in the degree of implementation and the factors that incentivize parties to continue implementation. She also works on peace process outcomes, peace duration, and civilian organization in wartime.
7. David E. Cunningham is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland and a Research Associate at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. His research focuses on civil war, conflict bargaining, conflict management and international security. He is the author of Barriers to Peace in Civil Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2011), as well as articles in the American Journal of Political Science, the British Journal of Political Science, International Organization, and the Journal of Conflict Resolution.
8. Karsten Donnay is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. His research uses detailed, disaggregated data on empirical violence and a range of statistical and computational modeling techniques to study micro-level conflict processes. Focusing mainly on asymmetric intrastate conflict, he has worked on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--Jerusalem in particular--and the conflict in Iraq.
9. Laura Dugan is a Professor in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. She is a Co-Principal Investigator for the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and the Government Actions in Terrorist Environments (GATE) dataset. Her research examines the consequences of violence and the efficacy of violence prevention/intervention policy and practice. She received an MS/PhD in Public Policy and Management and an MS in Statistics from Carnegie Mellon University.
10. Hanne Fjelde is an Associate Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. Her research focuses on the relationship between political institutions and organized violence, civil war dynamics, and violence against civilians. Her recent publications include articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, British Journal of Political Science, and Political Geography.
11. Aude-Emmanuelle Fleurant is Director of the Arms and Military Expenditure (AMEX) Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) in Sweden. Before joining SIPRI in 2014, she directed the Arms and Defense Economics research group at Paris-based Military Academy Strategic Research Institute. Previously, she headed the market intelligence brand on defense and security issues for Technopole Défense & Sécurity, She has authored several articles on the arms industry and military expenditure and taught undergraduate and graduate classes in international relations and global defense political economy. She received her PhD in Political Science from the Université du Québec à Montréal
12. Mark Gibney is the Carol Belk Distinguished Professor at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and the inaugural Raoul Wallenberg Visiting Chair at the Faculty of Law at Lund University (Sweden) and the Raoul Wallenberg Institute. Recent book projects include International Human Rights Law: Returning to Universal Principles (2015); The SAGE Handbook of Human Rights (2014); Litigating Transnational Human Rights Obligations (2014); and Watching Human Rights: The 101 Best Films (2013).
13. Kristian Skrede Gleditsch is Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Essex and a Research Associate at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). His research interests include conflict and cooperation, democratization, and spatial dimensions of social and political processes. Recent publications include Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2013, with Lars-Erik Cederman and Halvard Buhaug) and articles in the American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of Peace Research, and World Politics.
14. Peter Haschke is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of North Carolina Asheville and a principal investigator with the Political Terror Scale project. His current research explores mechanisms of state perpetrated violence in democracies. He teaches courses in comparative politics, electoral systems, conflict, violence, and human rights, as well as political methodology. He received his PhD from the University of Rochester.
15. Lisa Hultman is an Associate Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. Her research focuses in particular on the protection of civilians by international actors and her broader interests include topics related to peacekeeping and violence against civilians. Her recent publications include articles in American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Journal of Peace Research.
16. Madhav Joshi is a Research Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the Peace Accords Matrix Project at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His current research explores peace processes, peace agreement design and implementation in civil wars, quality peace and the Maoist insurgency in Nepal. He has published articles in journals such as the Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Conflict Resolutions, International Interactions, International Studies Perspective, and International Peacekeeping, International Studies Quarterly, and Social Science Quarterly. He received his PhD from University of North Texas.
17. Patricia Justino convenes the Conflict and Violence cluster at the Institute of Development Studies (UK). She is co-founder and co-director of the Households in Conflict Network (www.hicn.org) and was the Director of MICROCON (www.microconflict.eu). She is a development economist specializing in applied microeconomics. Her current research work focuses on the impact of violence and conflict on household welfare and local institutional structures, the microfoundations of violent conflict and the implications of violence for economic development.
18. Roudabeh Kishi is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Sussex, affiliated with the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project as well as the Geographies of Political Violence Across African States project. In addition, she is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also an associated researcher with the Aiding Resilience project at the University of Maryland. Her work focuses on conflict patterns in Africa and the impact of foreign aid on conflict dynamics.
19. Anupma Kulkarni is a Fellow at the Stanford Center for International Conflict and Negotiation. Her research focuses on the impact of truth commissions, international and national war crimes prosecutions, and reconciliation policies in Africa. She co-directs the West African Transitional Justice Project and the Liberia Reconciliation Barometer Initiative. She is currently working on two book projects: and The Arc of Transitional Justice: Violent Conflict, Its Victims & Redress in Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone (with David Backer) and Demons and Demos: Truth, Accountability and Democracy in Post-Apartheid South Africa. She received her PhD in Political Science from Stanford University.
20. Gary LaFree is Director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and a Distinguished Scholar and Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland. He is currently a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) and a member of the National Academy of Science's Crime, Law and Justice Committee. He has served as President of the ASC and of the ASC's Division on International Criminology. Much of his ongoing research is on the causes and consequences of violent crime and terrorism.
21. Andrew M. Linke is a faculty member in the Department of Geography at the University of Utah. His research investigates violent conflict, political geography, and the effects of environmental change in Kenya using GIS and spatial analysis, large population surveys, and qualitative fieldwork. His recent articles have been published in Global Environmental Change, Political Geography, International Interactions, International Studies Review, and other peer-reviewed academic journals. He completed his PhD in Geography at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2013.
22. Brad Parks is the Co-Executive Director of AidData and Research Faculty at the College of William and Mary's Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations. His research is focused on aid allocation and impact, development policy and practice, and the design and implementation of policy and institutional reforms in low income and lower-middle income countries. His publications include Greening Aid? Understanding the Environmental Impact of Development Assistance (Oxford University Press) and A Climate of Injustice: Global Inequality, North-South Politics, and Climate Policy (MIT Press). Brad holds a PhD in International Relations and an M.Sc. in Development Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
23. Yannick Quéau is executive director of OSINTPOL, a think tank based in Paris. He is a senior researcher on armaments, his fields of interest covering conventional arms production, acquisition processes, transfers and control and nuclear deterrence. He is an associate researcher with the Research and Information Group on Peace and Security (Groupe de recherche et d'information sur la paix et la sécurité - GRIP) based in Brussels. Previously, he taught international relations, defense policies and military history at the Canadian Defence Academy. He holds diplomas from the University of Québec in Montréal (Canada) and the University of Bradford (UK).
24. Jason Michael Quinn (PhD, Comparative Politics, North Texas, 2010) is a Research Assistant Professor at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Quinn is a researcher for the Peace Accords Matrix Project and his research and teaching centers on civil conflict management, peace agreement implementation, the duration of peace after civil wars. He has published research on these topics in Journal of Conflict Resolution, the　Journal of Peace Research,　Negotiation Journal,　Defense and Peace Economics, International Studies Perspectives　and　International Interactions.
25. Clionadh Raleigh is a Professor of Political Geography and Conflict at the University of Sussex. She is the creator and Director of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset project, an affiliate of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo (PRIO), and an associated researcher with the Minerva CCAPS project at the University of Texas. Her work focuses on African conflict patterns, the social and political consequences of climate change, and the political geography of developing states. She currently manages a European Research Council project on "Conflict Landscapes and Life Cycles," which tracks, models, and predicts local political violence patterns across Africa.
26. Idean Salehyan is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas - Dallas and Co-Director of the Social Conflict Analysis Database. His research interests include civil and international conflict, refugee migration, and environmental security. He is the author of Rebels without Borders: Transnational Insurgencies in World Politics (Cornell University Press, 2009) and his articles appear in journals such as the American Journal of Political Science, World Politics, and International Organization. He received his PhD from the University of California, San Diego.
27. Margareta Sollenberg is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University. Her research has focused on the relationship between foreign aid and armed conflict and various topics relating to conflict data collection. She has been involved in the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) for the past two decades and has published on UCDP data in Journal of Peace Research and SIPRI Yearbook among a range of venues.
28. Håvard Strand is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo and Senior Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO). His research topics include the relationship between political institutions and armed conflict, conceptual problems in the study of armed conflict, and consequences of civil wars. His research is published in, inter alia, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Development Studies, Security Dialogue, and World Development.
29. Michael J. Tierney is the George and Mary Hylton Professor of Government and the Director of the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations at the College of William and Mary. He teaches courses on international relations, international development, and international organizations. Dr. Tierney has published two books and over 25 journal articles. His current research focuses on public support for the use of military force, subnational effects of development finance, the rise of new donors, such as China, Russia, and Brazil, and the conditions under which research in international relations shapes the real world of international relations. He completed his PhD from the University of California at San Diego.
30. Philip Verwimp holds the Marie and Alain Philippson Chair in Sustainable Human Development at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, Université Libre de Bruxelles, where he is also a fellow of ECARES. He specializes in studying economic causes and consequences of conflict at the micro level. He is currently engaged in longitudinal studies of health, schooling and nutrition in Burundi, where he is the lead researcher in a partnership between his university and UNICEF-Burundi, involving impact evaluation. He has also done quantitative work on the death toll of the genocide and on the demography of post-genocide Rwanda. He obtained his PhD in Economics from the University of Leuven. In 2004, he received the Jacques Rozenberg Award from the Auschwitz Foundation for his dissertation.
31. Manuel Vogt is a visiting post-doctoral research associate at Princeton University (2015-2016). He is the executive manager of the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) Core dataset. His research interests include ethnic conflict, mobilization, and inequality in multi-ethnic societies, (post-conflict) democratization, and Latin American and African politics. He has conducted field research in Ecuador, Gabon, Guatemala, and Ivory Coast. His academic publications have appeared or are forthcoming in the Journal of Conflict Resolution and Latin American Politics and Society. He received his PhD from ETH Zürich.
32. Reed M. Wood is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University. His is also co-manager of the Political Terror Scale (PTS), an index of state violations of physical integrity rights. Among his areas of specialization are human rights, state repression, civil conflict, and conflict management. His current research focuses primarily on the dynamics of violence during internal armed conflict, including female recruitment into insurgent movements and their roles within these groups. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.