STATE OF INSECURITY

Many people are looking forward to the new year with uneasiness. Judging by the record of the last couple of years the new millennium is off to a rough start. Terrorism, war, random violence, climate change, recession and potentially dangerous new technologies are all contributing to a mood of public anxiety, even fear.

Insecurity and conflict: affect the availability of food through the destruction of productive assets, household food stores and the disruption of commodity trade networks; undermine economic access to food through, for example, the diminution of financial assets, and limit physical access to food sources such as markets due to the presence of conflict front lines or roadblocks; and are unambiguous determinants of the temporal dimension of food security, stability. The combination of these dimensions, and in conjunction with climate, shape livelihood strategies and have clear outcomes in terms of food and livelihood security.

The risk of international terror, a and a continuous crisis can lead to and horrible as
conflict increases the probability of civil war, while the risk of civil war increases the
probability of international conflict. The risk of losing office does not affect the proba-
bility of civil war, but the risk of civil war—not surprisingly—significantly affects the
probability of losing office. Finally, and in stark contrast to the postulated logic of
the diversionary use of force, we find that a higher risk of losing office decreases the
probability of international conflict even after we control for the endogenous risk of
civil war.