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This study aims to explore the role of rebel group legitimacy and ideology in durable peace (DP) following peace agreements to end civil wars. It builds on earlier research showing that justice and civil society involvement are critical in achieving DP. This study adds the impacts of rebel group activities and support on DP. Activities include service delivery and mobilization. Support is gauged with outcomes of presidential and parliamentary elections held following peace agreements.

Five data sets were used to measure the key variables: DP, inclusive commissions (IC), legitimacy symmetry (electoral outcomes), service delivery and ideological mobilization. A measure of rebel group integration in the political system was also constructed. Impacts of the integration, legitimacy and ideology variables were assessed with a hierarchical regression model (HRM). This study begins with a base model drawn from earlier research showing the key predictors were procedural justice (PJ) and IC. The authors ask about the extent to which the rebel group variables contribute additional variance to the prediction of DP.

The main contributors to the prediction of DP were PJ, IC and integration in the political system. None of the legitimacy or mobilization variables added significant variance to the prediction. Only one of the mobilization variables, forced recruitment, was significant. The decision to integrate into the political system following the agreement did not mediate the relationship between PJ in the negotiation process and DP. Results of a factor analysis showed that DP, PJ, IC and integration formed a cluster with strong loadings on the first factor.

The negative results for the legitimacy and mobilization variables may not be the last word on rebel group influences. Lack of support for the key hypotheses spurs attempts to discover other sources that contribute to the survival of rebel group actors in the political system and, in turn, to DP.

The issues raised by this study contribute to debates about ways to attain peaceful relations among competing groups following a civil war. It appears that attention to factors inside and around the negotiation process (PJ, ICs and conversion) may be more important than rebel group activities outside of these processes. The results call attention, in particular, to the important role played by political integration. From a policy perspective, it would be useful to develop levers for encouraging rebel groups to emerge as political actors in the post-agreement environment.

Developing measures of the symmetry of rebel group legitimacy and integration in the context of a comparative case study are the primary original contributions of this study. Furthermore, the mode of analysis (HRM) is novel in this literature. This approach builds on and extends the earlier research on factors influencing DP.

The purpose of this paper is to empirically explore and conceptualize how healthcare professionals and managers give shape to the increasing call for compassionate care as an alternative for system-based quality management systems. The research demonstrates how quality rebels craft deviant practices of good care and how they account for them.

Ethnographic research was conducted in three Dutch hospitals, studying clinical groups that were identified as deviant: a nursing ward for infectious diseases, a mother–child department and a dialysis department. The research includes over 120 h of observation, 41 semi-structured interviews and 2 focus groups.

The research shows that rebels’ quality practices are an emerging set of collaborative activities to improving healthcare and meeting (individual) patient needs. They conduct “contexting work” to achieve their quality aims by expanding their normative work to outside domains. As rebels deviate from hospital policies, they are sometimes forced to act “under the radar” causing the risk of groupthink and may undermine the aim of public accounting.

The research shows that in order to come to more compassionate forms of care, organizations should allow for more heterogeneity accompanied with ongoing dialogue(s) on what good care yields as this may differ between specific fields or locations.

This is the first study introducing quality rebels as a concept to understanding social deviance in the everyday practices of doing compassionate and good care.

This study aims to investigate the effects of mineral rents, conflict and population growth on countries' growth, with a specific interest in 13 selected economies in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This paper uses a combination of research methods: the pooled ordinary least squares (OLS), the fixed effect and the system generalized method of moment (GMM). The consistent estimator (system GMM), which provides the paper's empirical findings, remedies the inherent endogeneity bias in the model formulation. The utilized panel dataset for the study spans from 1980 to 2022.

The study suggests that mineral rents positively affect countries' growth by about 0.407 percentage points in the short run. The study further demonstrates the long-run negative impacts of population growth rates and prevalence of civil war on economic growth. The empirical work of the study reveals that an increase in the number of international borders within the group promotes mineral conflicts, which impedes economic growth. Evidence from the specification tests performed in the study confirmed the validity of the empirical results.

Mineral rents, if well managed and conditioned on good institutions, are a blessing to an economy, contrary to the assumptions that mineral resources are a curse. The utilization of mineral rents in Sub-Saharan Africa for economic growth depends on several factors, notably the level of mineral conflicts, population growth rates, institutional factors and the ability to contain civil war, among others.

This study is the first attempt in the post-coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) era to revisit the investigation of the impacts of mineral rents, conflict and population growth rates on the countries' growth while controlling for the potential implications of the qualities of institutions. One of the significant contributions of the study is the identification of high population growth rates as one of the primary drivers of mineral conflicts that impede economic growth in the states with enormous mineral deposits in Sub-Saharan Africa. The crucial inference drawn from the study is that mineral rents positively impact countries' growth, even with inherent institutional challenges, although the results could be better with good institutions.

In this opinion article, the authors share their experiences with and perspectives on course design requirements and barriers when applying challenge-based learning (CBL) in an online sustainability education setting. CBL is an established learning approach for (higher) sustainability education. It enables teachers to engage students with open, real-life grand challenges through inter-/transdisciplinary student team collaboration. However, empirical research is scarce and mainly based on face-to-face CBL case studies. Thus far, the opportunities to apply CBL in online educational settings are also underinvestigated.

Using the TPACK framework, the authors address technological, pedagogical and content knowledge related to CBL and online sustainability education. The integration of the different components is discussed, providing teachers and course designers insight into design requirements and barriers.

This paper supports the promising future of online CBL for sustainability education, especially in the context of inter-/national inter-university collaboration, yet emphasizes the need for deliberate use of online collaboration and teaching tools.

By examining the link between the two types of FDI and intrastate conflict from 1990 to 2015 in 138 countries, this paper intends to test the peace-through-FDI thesis.

To empirically test the hypotheses, this study examines county-year observations from 1990 to 2015 for 138 countries. An instrumental variable method is utilized to this end.

This paper shows that, while greenfield FDI generates pacifying effects on intrastate conflict, M&A investment is likely to promote the onset of intrastate conflict.

Despite the extensive literature on FDI and the onset of intrastate conflict, many have approached FDI as a singular phenomenon, and have not broken it down into its constituent parts of greenfield and brownfield investment types. Theorizing that this practice had oversimplified and blurred the relationship of FDI on intrastate conflict onset, the authors pursued the collection of novel data in order to more completely distinguish between the two types of FDI. With this novel approach dividing FDI into its component parts, the authors break open the black box of FDI to empirically find out the extent of its diverse influence on the onset of intrastate conflict.

The purpose of this paper is to reconceptualize how managers of multinational enterprises (MNEs) manage risk, particularly in fragile and/or conflict-affected areas of operation. The authors suggest that MNEs consider reducing risk at its source rather than trying to avoid or react to risks as they occur. By incorporating peacebuilding strategies, managers may not only reduce investment risk but also contribute to stability and prosperity in the communities where they operate, and gain a competitive advantage in doing so.

The authors show how firms can take a more holistic approach to working in conflict-affected areas. They do so by overlaying conceptualizations of risk with those of peacebuilding and then use case examples to illustrate how such actions work in practice.

Using a series of examples, the authors find that MNEs that incorporate peacebuilding frameworks in their risk calculations in complex settings tend to have a better understanding of local environments and how they affect firm operations and profitability. These same MNEs may hold a long-term advantage over international competitors that do not share the same understanding.

The authors argue that the study of relationships between international businesses and society in conflict-affected or fragile areas of operation is under-developed and tends to focus on negative (risk-aversion) aspects as opposed to positive (value-added) opportunities. This paper offers new ways in which these relationships can be reconceptualized. The authors’ main takeaway is that a peacebuilding approach does not require corporations to be arbitrators of peace at the expense of profit. Rather, it is instead a broader way to conceptualize and weigh risk when working in the world’s most challenging regions. This approach is more likely to be in the long-term interest of both the firm and the local society where the firm operates.

There is no doubt that the political speech of the Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad is of exceptional importance in understanding the developments of the war in Syria, and clarifies the position of all parties involved in the war, whether local, regional or international. Accordingly, and based on the dismantling of political discourse, the identification of its core, as well as its variables and major themes of this discourse, this study aims to understand the levels of complexity, paths and the fate of the war in Syria that certainly does not come free of charge, the hardest of which is the human cost whether for the victims or the displaced persons.

After a careful study of all the resilient factors in the literature review to categorize the primary data based on Assad’s discourses in the media, through a “qualitative research study” of his “interviews and discourses,” it is found that the Assad’s rhetoric is highly relevant to his tenacious presidency. The research reveals the themes that dominated Assad’s interview responses and speeches and his strategy of framing the revolution as a foreign insurgency against his government. In fact, Assad delegitimizes any semblance of the uprisings as a “pro-democracy movement” or “revolution,” denying the presence of a rebellion against his government.

By the analysis the study found out that Bashar Al-Assad continued to focus on certain reasons and issues that led to the crisis and the continuation of the war, such as the Muslim Brotherhood’s involvement, considering the Syrian opposition abroad as agents of Western countries, Syria is subject to a regional and international conspiracy, terrorism is a major scourge that must be fought and that the army is essential in resolving the battles taking place there. Likewise, emphasizing the internal dialogue with all stakeholders and involved parties is the way to solve the crisis.The Syrian President’s speeches do not focus much on the accusations against his regime from the opposition or the international parties involved in the conflict.

Assad’s resiliency has made him a distinct leader in the region. This paper analyzes the factors contributing to Assad’s resiliency. The literature review consists of the existing theories on authoritarian persistence and Assad’s power base in particular. The literature review discusses the factors that helped Assad adopts his resiliency strategies to the conflict environment. The research focuses on how Assad used the media as a platform for displaying his own manipulative narrative of the conflict. It concludes that Assad’s use of the media as his propaganda tool legitimized his rule, making it highly relevant to his persistence.