Economic globalization and liberalization have been blamed for numerous social ills over the last two decades, including a sharp rise in interethnic violence in countries all over the world. Not so, say the results of a study conducted by researchers from McGill University and published in the current issue of the journal International Studies Quarterly.

Kenya’s recent history has been dotted with several intense episodes of land-ownership conflict, starting in the early 1950s with the bloody repression of the Mau Mau movement by the British colonial power. This conflict caused 11 000 deaths among the rebels and also prompted the first regrouping of agricultural lands in Kenya. Access to land in this former European colony is still to this day a particularly hotly disputed issue.

Couples in which both the husband and wife suppress their anger when one attacks the other die earlier than members of couples where one or both partners express their anger and resolve the conflict, according to preliminary results of a University of Michigan study.

The trend toward fewer conflicts reported by peace researchers since the early 1990s now seems to have been broken. This is shown in the latest annual report “States in Armed Conflict,” from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program at the Uppsala University Department of Peace and Conflict Research.

The latest video technology could help to resolve conflicts between employees at work, neighbours or even family members, researchers from the University of Bath believe.

The latest video technology could help to resolve conflicts between employees at work, neighbours or even family members, researchers from the University of Bath believe.

Individuals whose close relationships have negative aspects, such as conflict and adverse exchanges, appear to have an increased risk of heart disease than those with more positive close relationships, according to a report in the Oct. 8 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

In the last century, more than 100 million people have perished in violent conflict, very often because of local clashes between ethnically or culturally distinct groups. In a novel study this week in Science, researchers report on a mathematical model that can predict where ethnic conflict will erupt.

The Foreign Ministers of the GUAM, an alliance of Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Moldova, intend to discuss in New York a draft resolution on lingering conflicts in their countries to aid it in the 62nd UN General Assembly.

While it may appear that conflict is an inevitable part of interaction between groups, research actually suggests that fighting, hating and contempt between groups is not a necessary part of human nature, according to an Ohio State University professor of psychology.

Climate change, and the resulting shortage of ecological resources, could be to blame for armed conflicts in the future, according to David Zhang from the University of Hong Kong and colleagues. Their research, which highlights how temperature fluctuations and reduced agricultural production explain warfare frequency in eastern China in the past, has been published online in Springer’s journal Human Ecology.

A pioneering AAAS program that provides technical expertise to human rights groups is helping Amnesty International USA with a new online effort to monitor threatened settlements in the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan and provide evidence of destroyed villages.