ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses foci for future research and highlights some fundamental issues of contention within and among countries that will drive future waves of violent conflict. It sketches two paradigmatic research projects: first ethnopolitical conflict, then a strategy to understand the sources of jihadist and Salafist movements. Much of the expansion of analytic work on political conflict has been driven by concerns among scholars and analysts about new and dramatic manifestations of conflict behavior. The comparative study of political terrorism was spurred by episodic campaigns by the radical left and separatists in Western Europe, Marxists in Latin America, and then and now the Middle East. Two fundamental conflict-generating divides, or cleavages, in the early twenty-first century are cultural and economic. Civil wars and state failures in the global South send hundreds of thousands of refugees to more stable and prosperous countries. One important characteristic of both the Taliban and Islamic State is that they restored governance in chaotically ungoverned regions.
