Annual Review of Political Science
The Consequences of
Contention: Understanding
the Aftereffects of Political
Confict and Violence
Christian Davenport,
1,2
Håvard Mokleiv Nygård,
2
Hanne Fjelde,
2,3
and David Armstrong
4
1
Department of Political Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA;
email: christiandavenport@mac.com
2
Peace Research Institute Oslo, 0134 Oslo, Norway; email: havnyg@prio.org
3
Department of Peace and Confict Research, Uppsala University, 753 20 Uppsala, Sweden;
email: Hanne.Fjelde@pcr.uu.se
4
Department of Political Science, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario N6A 5C2,
Canada; email: dave.armstrong@uwo.ca
Annu. Rev. Political Sci. 2019. 22:361–77
The Annual Review of Political Science is online at
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https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-050317-
064057
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Keywords
political violence, legacy of violence, outcomes, consequences, aftereffects,
contention, civil confict
Abstract
What are the political and economic consequences of contention (i.e.,
genocide, civil war, state repression/human rights violation, terrorism, and
protest)? Despite a signifcant amount of interest as well as quantitative re-
search, the literature on this subject remains underdeveloped and imbal-
anced across topic areas. To date, investigations have been focused on par-
ticular forms of contention and specifc consequences. While this research
has led to some important insights, substantial limitations—as well as op-
portunities for future development—remain. In particular, there is a need
for simultaneously investigating a wider range of consequences (beyond
democracy and economic development), a wider range of contentious ac-
tivity (beyond civil war, protest, and terrorism), a wider range of units of
analysis (beyond the nation year), and a wider range of empirical approaches
in order to handle particular diffculties confronting this type of inquiry (be-
yond ordinary least-squares regression). Only then will we have a better
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