Have gun give food

It's been a few weeks since I am somewhat back to what was once a fun sport I liked very much: Reading papers. That, plus my newly revived interest in other areas of research, is why I have a pile of interesting scientific publications lying around waiting to be archived.

The first of that series shall not be left unknown to the kind readers of this blog, so I created a new category "Science" which will serve as a dwelling place for posts related to .. well, guess what ;)

Anyway, the paper I shall point to today is called "Have gun give food: Agriculture, Nutrition and Civil Wars in Sub-Saharan Africa". Its author is Alexander Moradi, who until recently was located here in Tübingen, Germany, but now seems to have moved abroad.

Essentially, he takes a very different approach than the usual ones to explain and even predict the outbreaks of civil wars in certain african countries. My understanding is that this kind of conflict is traditionally explained using fancy political theories, but they are, well, say, still being developed. However, Moradi uses some hard facts in an empirical model to analyze and predict outbreaks of civil wars mostly using nutrition as a key factor. The stunning part is that apparently some of his predictions turned out - sadly - to be correct.