Syria recently suffered a once in 500-year meteorological drought followed by one of the worst conflicts of the twenty-first century. We exploit subnational variation in drought impact to examine associations between climatic stress and Syria’s political unrest. Climatic stress may produce instability through both immediate hardship and, indirectly, internal migration. Consistent with the internal migration hypothesis, we find less severely drought-stricken Syrian regions more likely to experience protest. We employ nighttime lights as a proxy for population density to examine the association between climatic stress and internal displacement. We find climatic stress decreased nighttime light intensity during the drought period. Increases in nighttime lights from 2005 to 2010 are associated with added risk of protest in Sunni Arab areas, suggesting an influx of migrants bolstered local grievances. Our findings support the internal migration hypothesis and suggest extreme climate events may impact civil unrest via geographically and temporally indirect paths.

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We analyze the sources of two politically relevant, yet opposing emotions: empathy and Schadenfreude. We propose that group and individual-level political factors affect empathy and Schadenfreude toward other groups. Using a survey experiment conducted in Lebanon we find that, when presented with a prompt about political repression, respondents are less likely to express empathy and more likely to express Schadenfreude when victims of political repression were from the out-group perceived as their group’s most recent antagonist. At the individual level, those more involved in their in-group’s community are generally more likely to feel Schadenfreude and less likely to express empathy.

An article recently published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution by Koos and Nuepert-Wentz finds an association between geographically proximate polygynous ethnic groups and rural violence in Africa. This study applies several empirical adjustments to their analysis. The association between rural violence and polygynous neighbors loses significance when replacing violent events with fatalities in both ACLED and UCDP-GED data or converting event counts to binary. Subsetting Afrobarometer data by urban and rural respondents shows that rural respondents from polygynous groups are not significantly more likely to feel violence is justified. Moreover, there is no evidence the conflicts leading to the most rural violence in ACLED, farmer-herder clashes, or UCDP-GED, violence during the apartheid transition in South Africa, are related to “excess men.” Both conflicts suggest broader violations in the assumptions made in hypothesizing why polygynous neighbors lead to rural violence. The re-analysis calls the claim that polygyny is associated with rural violence into question and suggests researchers use broader approaches to measuring violence than just event counts.