Purpose - This paper examines the role that conflict management styles play in the relationship between interpersonal conflict and workplace bullying. Design - A survey study was conducted among 761 employees from different organizations in Spain. Findings - Results suggest that an escalation of the conflict process from task-related to relationship conflict may explain bullying situations to some extent. Regarding conflict management, attempts to actively manage conflict through problem solving may prevent it escalating to higher emotional levels (relationship conflict) and bullying situations; in contrast, other conflict management strategies seem to foster conflict escalation. Research limitations/implications – The correlational design makes the conclusions on causality questionable, and future research should examine the dynamic conflict process in more detail. On the other hand, to the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study empirically differentiating interpersonal conflict and workplace bullying. Value – This study explores how conflict management can prevent conflict escalating into workplace bullying, which has important implications for occupational health practitioners and managers.

Tese de Doutoramento em Psicologia Área de Especialidade Psicologia Cognitiva; O conflito surge quando trocas entre objectivos incompatíveis têm de ser realizadas. Abordamos a questão de como a quantidade de conflito está relacionado com o tamanho dessas trocas. O modelo de dupla-mediação (Scholten & Sherman, 2006), um modelo de geração de conflito na formação de preferências, postula que a relação entre tamanho de troca e conflito é mediada por duas fontes de conflito em direcções opostas: O conflito originado pela preocupação com o sacrifício que decorre de escolhermos uma opção em detrimento de outra, que aumenta com o tamanho de troca, e o conflito originado pela preocupação com a argumentação que pode ser construída a favor de uma opção, que diminui com o tamanho de troca. O modelo também prevê como a relação entre tamanho de troca e conflito é afectada por terceiras variáveis do contexto de escolha. Embora Scholten e Sherman (2006) tivessem aplicado o modelo de dupla-mediação ao conflito na escolha sem risco, muitas das escolhas que fazemos pertencem ao domínio do risco (i.e., envolvem consequências incertas). A escolha arriscada tem sido intensamente estudada; porém, a maioria da investigação foca as escolhas que as pessoas fazem e não o conflito que sentem ao fazerem essas escolhas. Assim...

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.; Despite recent methodological improvements and higher data availability, the Climate Change (CC) and Armed Conflict (AC) studies are suffering from poor data and inappropriate research designs (e.g., Incompatibilities of scale). This study fills the gaps by taking the climate conflict analyses into a different scale (e.g., 55 km x 55 km sub-national cell/year) and uses high resolution Geo-referenced data sets. This study presents the results from 10 years (1991-2000) of observations and a rigorous modelling methodology to understand the effects of climate change on the conflict occurrence in the Eastern Africa. The main objective of the study is to identify and understand the conflict dynamics, verify the pattern of conflict distribution, possible interaction between the conflict sites and the influence of climatic covariates of conflict outbreak. We have found that if the climate related anomaly increases, the probability of armed conflict outbreak also increases significantly. To identify the effect of climate change on armed conflict we have modeled the relationship between them, using different kinds of point process models and Spatial Autoregressive (SAR) Lag models for both spatial and spatio-temporal cases. In modelling...

This paper investigates the effectiveness of post-conflict aid at the project level and aims to identify post-conflict situations as a window of opportunity for project success. The Independent Evaluation Group dataset provides extensive information on the characteristics of World Bank projects including an independent rating of their success, supervision and evaluation quality. The paper estimates the probability of success of aid projects depending on the characteristics of the intervention and looks for possible special patterns in post civil war situations. The results suggest that the probability of success of World Bank projects increases as peace lasts. Supervision appears to be a crucial determinant of the success of projects, especially during the first years of peace. Although the results of the sector-level analysis need to be taken with caution, the authors find that projects in the transport sector and in the urban development sector appear more successful in post-conflict environments. On the contrary...

No systematic study has examined the effect of post-conflict justice on the duration of peace on a global basis. This paper attempts to fill that void by building on a newly constructed dataset (Binningsbo, Elster, and Gates 2005), which reports the presence of various forms of post-conflict justice efforts (trials, purges, reparation to victims, and truth commissions) as well as processes associated with abstaining from post-conflict justice (amnesty and exile). It investigates the long-term effects of post-conflict justice on the duration of peace after conflict. It uses a Cox proportional hazard model to analyze the influence of the various types of post-conflict justice on the length of the peace period before the recurrence of violent conflict. Post-conflict trials as well as other types of justice do lead to a more durable peace in democratic as well as non-democratic societies, but the results are weak and are therefore difficult to generalize. Forms of non-retributive justice (that is, reparations to victims and truth commissions)...

Several studies of civil war have concluded that economic inequality between individuals does not increase the risk of internal armed conflict. This is perhaps not so surprising. Even though an individual may feel frustrated if he is poor compared with other individuals in society, he will not start a rebellion on his own. Civil wars are organized group conflicts, not a matter of individuals randomly committing violence against each other. Hence, we should not neglect the group aspect of human well-being and conflict. Systematic inequalities that coincide with ethnic, religious, or geographical cleavages in a country are often referred to as horizontal inequalities (or inter-group inequalities). Case studies of particular countries as well as some statistical studies have found that such inequalities between identity groups tend to be associated with a higher risk of internal conflict. But the emergence of violent group mobilization in a country with sharp horizontal inequalities may depend on the characteristics of the political regime. For example...

This paper is a policy review of the role of investment climate in post-conflict situations. It summarizes the broad range of ways in which conflict negatively affects the investment climate, from macroeconomic instability to a degraded regulatory framework. It stresses that attention needs to be paid to the broader "enabling environment," including institutions, governance, capacity, and social capital. It suggests that a vibrant private sector underpinned by a good investment climate is particularly important in the post-conflict recovery phase for three reasons: it generates employment, provides public services where the state has retrenched, and builds social capital. By addressing these important "greed and grievance" factors, the private sector helps reduce the likelihood of a return to conflict. The paper concludes by distilling key lessons relating to the management of the post-conflict reform process. Despite the importance of a good investment climate, greater effort is needed to ensure that private sector development reforms are included in the first round of post-conflict policymaking. Local ownership of reforms and enhanced local capacity to implement them is key to sustainable improvements in the investment climate. Development partners have an important role to play in facilitating dialogue and promoting partnerships between public and private sector stakeholders. At the same time...

Major intrastate conflicts, such as civil wars, and the resulting set-backs for economic and political development, have received increasing research attention in recent years. A growing literature has sought to investigate conditions that affect the probability of countries experiencing large-scale violence, in particular the likelihood of civil war. However, many developing countries are affected by high levels of communal and inter-communal conflict that does not take the form of a civil war, but nonetheless results in significant casualties, destruction of livelihoods and property. Pervasive and widespread local conflict is not only a barrier to development but in some cases threatens to escalate into larger incidents of unrest or even fully-fledged violent conflict. Countries undergoing difficult political and economic transitions appear especially vulnerable.This paper defines local conflict in Indonesia in terms of its incidence and impact measured within a locality, while the causes of local conflict may be endogenous or extra-local. The Indonesia statistical agency has adopted a definition of local conflict beyond some threshold of violence within a given locality in the past year...

Those of us helping countries to build capacity to manage reconstruction after a conflict has ended need to be fully aware of the context in which we operate. Apart from the obvious destruction of infrastructure, presence of armed groups and difficult working conditions, there are several other characteristics of post-conflict conditions that we need to appreciate. First, civil conflicts seldom end in clear cut victories for one side. Post-conflict conditions are inherently unstable. There are winners and losers. The winners may have settled for less than they sought to achieve. Even if one side appears to have won, how the winner treats the defeated party will be critical to whether national reconciliation takes place and the sustainability of peace. A new government may be an unstable alliance of competing parties or consist of an uneasy collection of former fighters and technocrats who sat out the war in relative comfort abroad.

Recent research undertaken by the Bank and others, suggest that developing countries face substantially higher risks of violent conflict, and poor governance if highly dependent on primary commodities. Revenues from the legal, or illegal exploitation of natural resources have financed devastating conflicts in large numbers of countries across regions. When a conflict erupts, it not only sweeps away decades of painstaking development efforts, but creates costs and consequences-economic, social, political, regional-that live on for decades. The outbreak of violent domestic conflict amounts to a spectacular failure of development-in essence, development in reverse. Even where countries initially manage to avoid violent conflict, large rents from natural resources can weaken state structures, and make governments less accountable, often leading to the emergence of secessionist rebellions, and all-out civil war. Although natural resources are never the sole source of conflict, and do not make conflict inevitable...

Countries emerging from civil war attract both aid and policy advice. This paper provides the first systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post-conflict growth process. It is based on a comprehensive data set of large civil wars and covers 27 countries that were in their first decade of post-conflict economic recovery during the 1990s. The authors first investigate whether the absorptive capacity for aid is systematically different in post-conflict countries. They find that during the first three post-conflict years, absorptive capacity is no greater than normal, but that in the rest of the first decade it is approximately double its normal level. So ideally, aid should phase in during the decade. Historically, aid has not, on average, been higher in post-conflict societies, and it has tended to taper out over the course of the decade. The authors then investigate whether the contribution of policy to growth is systematically different in post-conflict countries, and in particular...

In this paper, the conditions under which the spending patterns of oil resources may mitigate the risk of violent domestic conflict are studied. Some recent research suggests that more government spending either in general or specifically in welfare and military may reduce the risk of civil conflict onset (Hegre and Sambanis, 2006; Basedau and Lay, 2009; Fjelde and de Soysa, 2009; Taydas and Peksen, 2012). While oil wealth has begun to be considered in the study of civil conflict as an important source of revenue for governments, there has not been a systematic analysis of whether oil-rich countries can increase public spending or alter the particular allocation of such spending to social sectors or the military as a way to mitigate the risk of conflict. We use time-series cross section data (148 countries, 1960-2009) to test the hypothesis that oil has a conditional effect on civil conflict depending on the size of government expenditure and the allocation of government spending. Our dependent variable is the onset of small and large civil conflict (Gleditch et al....

The need to support a Strategic Conflict Assessment (SCA) was agreed by donors in December 2001, and supported by President Obasanjo. The central guiding principle was that the SCA process should be led by the national Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution (IPCR), in the Presidency. Local ownership and capacity building were considered key to achieving credibility and sustainability. Technical and financial support was provided to IPCR and local stakeholders by some of Nigeria's major international donors: DFID; UNDP; USAID; and the World Bank, who formed an SCA Advisory Group to IPCR. The Advisory Group proved to be a vital structure for collective decision-making. This approach was chosen over the more traditional single-donor approach to draw upon a wide range of international expertise and experience, to share resource costs and to mitigate political risk to donors. Donor cooperation and collaboration meant that donors were able to cover areas where partners may not have had the capacity or mandate. This was the first time...

The role of parliament in conflict-affected countries becomes even more evident when the correlation between poverty and conflict is considered. This book is pioneering in that it considers what parliaments in conflict-affected countries can do, while performing their normal everyday functions, to not only contribute directly to conflict prevention but also aid peace building by combating poverty. By addressing issues of poverty, equitable distribution of resources, and economic development, parliamentarians can attempt to guard against the creation of an enabling environment that is prone to the escalation of conflict. In line with their respective missions, the World Bank Institute and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association have examined issues facing parliamentary development in the hope of strengthening parliaments' capacity to tackle the diverse challenges they face. Among those challenges is meeting growing community expectations of the contribution parliaments make to resolving important issues and addressing community demands. In recognition of the rising number of parliaments that are operating in conflict-affected societies...

The Kyrgyz Republic is a landlocked mountainous country of 5.5 million and home to several ethnic groups. Nevertheless, economic stagnation, rising corruption, and inter-ethnic tensions have posed risks to the country's stability. Following the revolution and ethnic disturbances in 2010, the World Bank introduced a conflict filter for its Kyrgyz Republic operations in 2011 as a screening tool to ensure that Bank projects do not exacerbate conflict risks. The objectives of the conflict filter were: (i) assisting task teams to be cognizant of the context in which they operate in the Kyrgyz Republic; (ii) assisting task teams in identifying and managing the conflict and fragility risks in the World Bank-supported activities; (iii) supporting task teams and the client in identifying measures to help strengthen trust, social inclusion, and social cohesion in the context of World Bank supported activities and in targeted project areas; and (iv) assisting task teams and the clients in applying good practices for conflict management and citizen engagement in fragile environments. The application of the conflict filter has evolved over time in three distinct stages: in the first stage...

This paper explores the conditions under which public spending could minimize violent conflict related to oil wealth. Previous work suggests that oil can lead to violent conflict because it increases the value of the state as a prize or because it undermines the state's bureaucratic penetration. Yet, little has been said on how oil wealth could be used to prevent the onset of violent conflict through public spending by buying off citizens and elites, increasing state legitimacy by providing basic services, or strengthening the military and security apparatus. The empirical analysis (148 countries over 1960-2009) shows that higher levels of military spending are associated with lower risk of small- and large-scale conflict onset in countries rich in oil and gas. By contrast, in economies with little natural resources, increases in military spending are associated with a higher risk of conflict. Welfare expenditure is associated with lower risk of small-scale conflict, irrespective of the level of oil revenue. However...

This paper revisits and expands the evidence on the impact of trade shocks on intra-state conflict with a large sample of developing countries in the 1960-2010 period. The results suggest that increases in the prices of a country's exported commodities raise the country's risk of civil conflict and its duration. The effect on conflict risk is mainly driven by the price of point-source commodities, in line with the rapacity effect theory of conflict. However, the paper does not find support for the opportunity cost theory via exported commodities. The analysis also finds that intense trading with contiguous countries is associated with lower duration of intra-state conflict, consistent with the idea that such trade reduces the incentive of contiguous countries to fuel conflict in their neighbor. Trading with neighbors is also associated with a lower risk of conflict, when such trade occurs under trade agreements. By contrast, neither imported commodity prices nor the economic cycle in export markets appears to exert any influence on the probability or duration of conflict. The paper identifies several conditions under which changes in the value of exported commodities cease to matter for conflict probability.

Dissertação apresentada à Universidade Fernando Pessoa como parte dos requisitos para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Ciências Empresariais; This research project explores the nature of conflict, the conflict process, conflict resolution skills and conflict management techniques in the case of workplace conflict in Centro Comunitário S. Cirilo. Conflict is a normal and natural aspect of life. Conflict becomes a problem in organizations when excessive levels of destructive conflict occur. Problematic levels of workplace conflict occur in approximately 10% of organizations. Attempts to address problem levels of destructive conflict are proving ineffective. Even in the US, Portugal and other parts of the world, where there has been widespread implementation of ADR based workplace conflict management systems, levels of destructive workplace conflict are raising. As ADR includes all the options to solve conflicts, this is a troublesome trend. A partial explanation for this is that there are many problematic areas in the theoretical framework on workplace conflict. For example, conflict theorists are focusing efforts on trying to consistently achieve win-win outcomes with conflicts that have become escalated and destructive...

Conflict between states in an anarchic international system is generally the result of an inability among state leaders to successfully negotiate perceived power imbalances within the system. Interstate conflicts are relatively rare events and are generally short in duration; international pressures to quickly and permanently resolve conflicts before their effects are felt outside the region of conflict are often intense. In an increasingly global community, an international order in turmoil ripples through the global financial system, often leading to a weakening of state power within it.

Violent conflicts within state borders have been historically more common, with causative issues ranging from polity dissatisfaction or inequities in the economic structure of the state to disputes over territorial integrity and autonomy. Pressure to rapidly resolve conflict within states is differentially applied cross-regionally; however, where strategic interests of major-power states are involved, such conflicts are usually quickly addressed. Where no such interests exist, these conflicts can and do persist for decades, at often huge costs to state resources.

In the mid-1990s the number of ongoing subnational conflicts appeared to be trending upward and increasingly between dissimilar people groups; Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis posited that future conflict at the subnational and international levels would be increasingly between groups of differing civilizational origin. This study disputes this claim...

Overview Global climate change is predicted to increase the number and severity of natural disasters and other severe weather events. Concern about how this change will affect the livelihoods, resources, and security of people, particularly those in developing and unstable nations, has led to a debate over the relationship between climate and the risk of conflict. To date, a clear link between climatic events and conflict has not been found. Results have been highly sensitive to issues of data selection and model specifications. In this paper I estimate two new models in an attempt to clarify any climate conflict relationship that may exist Data and Methods First, I test a global climate-conflict-aid relationship using country-year observations of violent civil conflict, natural disasters, official development assistance, and humanitarian assistance. This model is similar to much of the existing literature, but includes additional controls for international aid and aid’s interactive effects with disasters. Second, using geocoded conflict, rainfall, and development project data from East Africa I examine local, rather than national, conflict behaviors. I test if proximity to aid projects is a contributing factor to conflict frequency in Ethiopia...