Another possibility is that internal fighting over the succession could bring wide-scale violence inside North Korea, tempting outside powers to intervene to stop the bloodshed.
Unless wide-scale violence erupts, it will be the first time a Nigerian president has been more or less peacefully ousted at the ballot box.
Though many of the 43% who voted for Mr Odinga feel aggrieved, most Kenyans have heaved a collective sigh of relief that the wide-scale violence and chaos that ruined the last election, in 2007, have mercifully been avoided.
It says reports of a "wide-scale violence campaign against LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] activists after the adoption of the new law is simply not true".
A decade ago, wide-scale violence erupted after contested elections in 2007, in which 1,200 were killed and 600,000 displaced.
This is not to say that sexual harassment does not exist on a wide scale, or that violence against women isn't endemic.
However, most studies of sexual violence in war and armed conflict, in particular those conflict situations where sexual violence was/is used on a wide scale, do not differentiate between rape and non-consensual sexual violence, and only focus on self-reported rape.
We are not going back to the days of wide-scale domestic violence, even if 31 Republican men in the Senate recently voted against the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act because it expanded coverage to the gay community and Native Americans.
"Costa Gomes thought decolonization was inevitable, and he wanted to keep wide-scale domestic violence from breaking out," said Kenneth Maxwell, an expert on Portuguese-speaking countries at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Building on all this, the international tribunal for Rwanda, set up to bring the perpetrators of genocide to justice, was the first to prosecute wide-scale sexual violence as attempted genocide.
Combined with instability and uncertainty after the August 20 elections, allegations of wide scale electoral fraud and an alarming increase in violence and deaths, the new research further emphasizes the deterioration in Afghanistan.
