A jury consisting of Mats Hammarström (Uppsala University), Caroline Hartzell (Gettysburg College), and Eric Neumayer (LSE) has awarded the 2014 Journal of Peace Research 'Nils Petter Gleditsch Article of the Year Award' to Corinne Bara (ETH Zurich). In its assessment of all research articles published in JPR's 51st volume, the jury paid attention to theoretical rigour, methodological sophistication and substantive relevance. According to the jury, the prize-winning article, 'Incentives and opportunities: A complexity-oriented explanation of violent ethnic conflict', Journal of Peace Research 51(6): 696–710, '...offers a novel input into the long-standing debate on whether incentives or opportunities best explain onset of violent ethnic conflict by exploring the escalation risks of specific combinations of such factors. Applying Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), the author examines 102 onsets of ethnic conflict between 1990 and 2009 along with a random sample of almost 400 non-onsets. Given certain codings of the data, the article finds that four specific combinations of incentive and opportunity factors can explain almost two-thirds of all the ethnic conflict onsets studied. While the isolated effects of these factors are fairly well-known, this article is the first to empirically demonstrate the enhanced explanatory power of mapping multiple paths to ethnic conflict. Adding to this, the comparative method used (QCA) is shown to predict onsets somewhat more successfully than a statistical model (logit) and it can fairly directly be translated into common language of policy communities.'
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The award is USD 1,000.
Honourable mention goes to the runners-up:
Christopher Michael Sullivan (University of Michigan) 'The (in)effectiveness of torture for combating insurgency', Journal of Peace Research 51(3): 388–404.
And
Allan Dafoe (Yale University) & Nina Kelsey (University of California, Berkeley) 'Observing the capitalist peace: Examining market-mediated signaling and other mechanisms', Journal of Peace Research 51(5): 619–633.
