The consequences of violent conflict permeate countless aspects of society, and are not limited to the political and economic institutions of a state. The concept of human security extends traditional, state-centric notions of security to include the security and well-being of people that live within states. Adhering to the human security framework, I examine the effect of militarized conflict on the populations of states by evaluating the relationship between war and public health while taking into account relevant political and economic factors, including democracy and wealth. I argue that interstate and intrastate conflict negatively influences the health achievement of states and, therefore, the human security of their populations. I assess this relationship by analyzing data on summary measures of public health in all states between 1999 and 2001. My analysis suggests that the negative effect of war on health is particularly intense in the short term following the onset of a conflict.Since the end of the Second World War, there have been numerous interstate and intrastate conflicts resulting in millions of deaths and billions of dollars worth of destruction. Yet scholars have focused very little attention on the consequences of conflict, in particular its social consequences. The World Health Organization's World Report on Violence and Health reveals that 1.6 million people die each year because of violence, including collective violence such as conflicts within or between states. A large number of the people who lose their lives because of militarized conflict are non-combatants. Furthermore, the 25 largest instances of conflict in the twentieth century led to the deaths of approximately 191 million people, and 60% of those deaths occurred among people who were not engaged in fighting (World Health Organization 2002). I assess the costs of conflict by looking at the relationship between conflict and public health.War leads to direct casualties and deaths during combat; violent conflict also results in widespread death and disability among the civilian populations that get affected either as collateral damage or as deliberate targets. During the Second World War, Russia lost 10.1% of its population; Korea lost 10% of its population in the Korean War; and 13% of the Vietnamese population died in the Vietnam War (Garfield and Neugut 1997). In addition to direct deaths and injuries caused by combat among the military and civilian populations, conflict results in conditions

The killing of a head of state is among the most severe and consequential forms of political violence. But to date, there have been no systematic studies of the incidence of such assassinations, with the few existing case studies tending to emphasize the uniqueness of those events. Drawing on existing theories of social protest and contentious politics, we argue instead that institutional and sociopolitical factors should be important correlates of assassination. We examine empirically the implications of this theory, using data on the incidence of assassinations of heads of state between 1946 and 2000. Our findings suggest that institutional factors related to leadership succession, institutionalized power, and levels of repression interact to influence the occurrence of such killings. Notable in this respect is our conclusion that, while repressive leaders are at greater risk for assassination, the effect of repression is moderated by executive power, such that weak, repressive leaders in nondemocratic systems face the highest risk of assassination. Our findings dovetail neatly with the broader literature on other forms of insurgency, suggesting that assassinations are but one manifestation of the larger phenomenon of political violence. President John F. Kennedy's 1963 assassination (e.g., Posner 1993; Thompson 1968). But despite their popular appeal, such studies fail to further our understanding of broader social and political factors that may contribute to political violence through assassination. The second such group include studies focusing on the individual-level characteristics of the assassins themselves. Such studies imply that assassinations are essentially random acts of violence, the explanation for which can be found at the individual level. But neither works that engage in in-depth historical analyses of specific assassination events nor those which dissect the psychological roots of assassins' behavior offer generalizable theories to understand the determinants of assassination as a political and social phenomenon.Here, we assert that neither an individualistic approach to the study of assassination nor simple descriptions of historical incidents is adequate to understand assassination as a form of political violence. We thus undertake the first large-scale investigation of the correlates of assassination of heads of state. More specifically, we assess the effect of relevant institutional and sociopolitical factors-including the manner in which leaders come into and exercise

The assassination of a political leader is among the highest-profile acts of political violence, and conventional wisdom holds that such events often have substantial political, social, and economic effects on states. We investigate the extent to which the assassination of a head of state affects political stability through an analysis of all assassinations of heads of state between 1952 and 1997. We examine the political consequences of assassination by assessing the levels of political unrest, instability, and civil war in states that experience the assassination of their head of state. Our findings support the existence of an interactive relationship among assassination, leadership succession, and political turmoil: in particular, we find that assassinations' effects on political instability are greatest in systems in which the process of leadership succession is informal and unregulated.

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