In the past few decades, social scientists have devoted a lot of effort to studying the causes and preconditions of civil wars. They approach this area of study in an admirably scientific way—by collecting large data sets and running statistical analyses on them. Two important centers for this type of research are located in Nordic countries: the Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway, and the Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University in Sweden. In the US, the most influential research project is the Political Instability Task Force (PITF). This project, funded by the
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