Archives

  • Vol. 20 No. 1 (2025)

    The first article in this issue by Philip J. Candreva on the current state of budgeting for defense in the U.S. marks the second case study in our defense initiative. This initiative started in the last issue with Smith’s description of the unaffordability and inadequacy of defense spending in the U.K. and the difficult challenges facing the Strategic Defense Review committee. Candreva’s U.S. case-study focuses on key changes in the last few decades in three categories: the strategic, political, and fiscal context for defense budgeting; the allocation to defense and the distribution within that budget; and core processes in both the Pentagon and in Congress. We are continuing to solicit more case studies covering the same issues for other countries which will be published in future issues.

    The subsequent article by Lucie Béraud-Sudreau, Meia Nouwens, and Veerle Nouwens discusses how Chinese arms transfers (as opposed to “regular” arms transfers) have evolved during the first ten years of Xi Jinping’s rule and what it tell us of China’s foreign policy.

    Oana Secrieru and Ugurhan Berkok’s article presents a game-theoretic model and analysis of sender, target, and third party options, costs, and benefits in the arena of sanctions, sanctions-busting, and secondary sanctions. The model takes into account exogeneity, illustrating both the uncertainty of detecting sanction-busting and the uncertainty about the criteria for imposing secondary sanctions. A full range of equilibria consistent with actual sanctions episodes are obtained.

    Finally, Jackson Tamunosaki Jack provides a cultural perspective on the cycle of violent conflicts in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria to explain the experience of the oil-producing communities where violence has proved persistent. It illustrates that an increasing general acceptance of emergent cultural norms that legitimize violence used to achieve socially desirable goals incentivizes hitherto peaceful individuals to absorb the culture of violence.

  • Vol. 19 No. 2 (2024)

    This issue marks the start of a couple of journal initiatives.

    The article by Mahamadou Bassirou Tangara is the first of a series that result from a collaboration between CORN West Africa and UNU-WIDER that supports researchers from West Africa working on conflict and development to bring their local knowledge and expertise to global discourses on peace and statebuilding. The initiative aims to amplify voices from the Global South to help shape sustainable solutions for critical development challenges. By strengthening local research capabilities, the partnership contributes to research outcomes that are relevant to local needs and contexts and contribute meaningfully to global policy debates. Tarila Marclint Ebiede is director of CORN West Africa and Patricia Justino and Laura Saavvedra-Lux are the UNU-WIDER collaborators. The papers are produced within the CORN network and then go through a process of review at WIDER and become working papers, before being considered by the journal through its normal procedures.

     The article by Ron Smith is an important review of defense budgets in the U.K. With the recent growth in international tension growing military spending has become commonplace. But this raises important issues of what the expenditure is, how it is measured and what choices need to be made and how comparisons are made. Just increasing defense spending does not necessarily lead to an increase in capability or security. It is more complicated than that. This review of the U.K. has led us to solicit more case studies covering the same issues for other countries which will be published in future issues.

    The issue also includes Lindgren et al.’s substantive comparative review of how the armed forces in NATO and NATO-partner countries pay and compensate military personnel and the issues involved. It goes on to highlight the lessons learned from this comparison (for instance, monetary incentives are not as homogenous as might be expected) and how this review may be expanded.

  • Vol. 19 No. 1 (2024)

    This issue commences with an article by Michael Brzoska providing a rough estimate of inefficiencies in German major weapons procurement. This is followed by Jennifer Spindel’s exploration of why states agree to offset provisions when they purchase weapons, and what are the consequences of different types of offsets. Finally, Deniz Güvercin examines the impact of protests and demonstrations on the terrorist attacks within a country.

  • Vol. 18 No. 2 (2023)

    This issue commences with an article by Kleczka, Buts, and Jegers examining where European defense industry consolidation has left gaps within subsectors at the national level. This is followed by Englund, Vincent, and Kopchick's exploration of the how the degree of economic reliance on oil sales influence military spending and conflict as oil prices fluctuate. Finally, Elveren introduces a model that differentiates workers and capitalists in the growth effects of military spending.

  • Vol. 18 No. 1 (2023)

    This symposium considers this issue, the situation of European defense and how it could evolve in in the wake of the Ukraine war and other rising international tensions. In “Strategic competition: Toward a genuine step-change for Europe’s defense industry?”, Daniel Fiott considers the institutional evolution of the EU as it adapts to today’s challenges but also the more profound transformation of relations between states and the European Commission in the field of defense. This evolution has consequences for the defense market and the way states organise it. Two articles explore this. Josselin Droff and Julien Malizard in “50 shades of procurement: The European defense trilemma in defense procurement strategies” consider procurement policy and Laurens Vandercruysse et al. focus on industrial policy in “Governing defense procurement: strengthening the E.U.’s defense technological and industrial base”. Most of the literature deals with Western European countries and little is known about the evolution of the post-communist countries’ Eastern European defense industries and in light of the Ukraine conflict this does seem an oversight. As Bohuslav Pernica et al. in “Defense industrial bases (DIB) in six small NATO post-communist countries”, provide an analysis of developments in Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia and find considerable changes have taken place, with Czechia and Hungary the main players, focusing upon expansion of the defense industry, but with governance concerns. While the Ukraine war has a major influence on decision-making in the short term, it is also necessary to understand the long-term evolutions that could influence European defense. Keith Hartley in “The future of the European defense firm” considers the changing nature of the firms and Renaud Bellais in “The future of cooperative programs in Europe, paradox of a hybrid market” questions the functioning of European armament markets.

  • Vol. 17 No. 2 (2022)

    This issue commences with Topher Mcdougal bioeconomics of planetary energy transitions in the context of unprecedented economic growth experienced by human societies over the past two centuries. Luqman Saeed considers the effects of humanitarian military interventions (HMIs) on conflict in the countries in which they have been used. Anke Hoeffler, Frederike Kaiser, Birke Pfeifle, and Flora Risse explore the methodological implications when measuring deaths caused by collective violence as a measure of progress on the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.1 .

  • Vol. 17 No. 1 (2022)

    This issue commences with Christopher Coyne and Nathan Goodman exploring the symbiotic relationship between U.S. border militarization and foreign policy. Christos Kollias and Panayiotis Tzeremes examine the economic effects of defense spending and, perhaps surprisingly, find no systematic and statistically significant relation between a country’s militarization levels and two main macroeconomic variables (growth rate of GDP and gross fixed capital formation as a share of GDP). Keith Hartley examines how Augustine weapons systems mean difficult choices for the United Kingdom and similar states, such as whether to reduce defense capability, import costly equipment, increase collaboration, and/or fund real-term defense budget growth. Raul Caruso and Anna Balestra examine the impact of EDUMILEX, namely the ratio between investment in education and military expenditure, on economic performance. Their findings suggest the existence of a non-linear, cubic relationship between EDUMILEX and economic performance.  

  • Vol. 16 No. 2 (2021)

    This issue commences with a standalone article by J Paul Dunne and Elisabeth Sköns which considers how the introduction of Big Tech into the U.S. military industrial complex has changed the landscape and the options for its future

    The issues then goes on to contain the second part of the articles selected from a symposium on Middle East and North African (MENA) conflict. “Political economy of the Syrian war: Patterns and causes” examines the political economy of the Syrian war and the changes it has undergone. “Political consensus and economic reforms in Tunisia”  studies the role of political consensus in Tunisia in slowing reforms, following the political crisis that followed President Kais Saied’s decision to dismiss the Prime Minister and suspend parliament. “Solidarity and fragmentation in Libya’s associational life” is a sociohistorical analysis of two regions of Libya, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania, following independence in 1951. 

  • Vol. 16 No. 1 (2021)

    This issue commences with a standalone article by Marianne Dahl, Scott Gates, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch and Belén González which uses a simple bargaining model, backed up by empirical analysis, showing that nonviolent and violent mobilization may arise from similar motives, but different movement characteristics are likely to give a comparative advantage to one or the other tactic.

    The issues then goes on to contain the first part of the articles selected from a symposium on Middle East and North African (MENA) conflict. “Warlord politics and economic clientelism in Lebanon” examines the interplay of the political, economics, and social factors that led to the current economic and political crisis. “Restructuring state power in Sudan”  studies Sudan’s protracted conflict(s), progression made during the current peace agreement, and how competitions between military and security elites have plagued Sudan’s economy. “Humanitarian aid and war economies: The case of Yemen” examines this case of a country forced to cope with one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world today. “Did the Qatar blockade work? Evidence from trade and consumer welfare three years after the blockade” examines the effects of the embargo (blockade) imposed on Qatar in June 2017 by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain.

  • Vol. 15 No. 2 (2020)

    This issue contains a symposium of papers on Thailand. Jessica Vechbanyongratana and Kawita Niwatananun delve into Southeast Asia's colonial-historical roots of land-based wealth inequality and show how Thailand's incomplete adoption of land-titling has led to land insecurity and implications for landlessness, poverty, and contemporary conflict. Their study thus provides a fresh approach as conflict scholars often examine only fairly short time-periods and thus may fail to detect history-dependent currents of conflict-causing factors. Chantal Herberholz examines the degree of inclusion/exclusion of stateless or otherwise nationality-less refugees in Thailand's relatively well-developed, even generous, national health care system. This is an important study as the plight of stateless people is almost wholly ignored in both, the academic and the policy worlds. Khemarat Talerngsri studies land-use related conflict related to Thailand's increasingly decimated northern forests, thus combining the literature's usual focus on people with additional concern for the larger natural environment within which and from which people derive their livelihoods. Isra Sarntisart develops a new Gini-decomposition method to better capture horizontal and vertical inequality among people. His study is important as inequality measures are increasingly used in the larger literature. Applied to Thailand's Deep South, a region which has seen many thousands of people killed in recent years, he shows that while regional inequality may have become less pressing in recent years, individual-inequality measures for people living in the south have increased, possibly contributing to the continuing unrest in the region. Sawarai Boonyamanond and Papusson Chaiwat also study Thailand's restive Deep South, developing district-level exploratory panel regressions and finding that the main drivers of the conflict are not, as often asserted, ethno religious-linguistic differences to the bulk of Thailand's population but, more likely, economic hardship reflected in widespread poverty at the individual, household, and district levels. The final paper is by Pongsak Luangaram and Yuthana Sethapramote who relate changes in foreign direct investment and foreign portfolio investment flows to Thailand to different types of political conflict. Using novel techniques to harvest daily news coverage related to conflict types, they find that direct investment and portfolio investment generally respond adversely to news of heightened conflict, but that the results depend on the type of conflict to which these investment flows respond. In sum, each of these papers offers a glimpse of Thailand but also offers techniques and lessons that might well be applied to and in other country's contexts.

  • Vol. 15 No. 1 (2020)

    This issue of the journal contains a symposium of articles based on selected papers from a World Peace Foundation (WPF) seminar on “The politics and economics of the global arms trade”, as part of WPF's program on “Global Arms and Corruption”. It brought together a range of researchers, activists and policy analyst and provided valuable insights into the changing global arms trade. In our first paper Sam Perlo-Freeman of Britain's Campaign Against Arms Trade and WPF, considers the warning signs or red flags that indicate a high risk of corruption. This builds upon work of the Compendium of Arms Corruption at WPF. It also provides the context for the other contributions. Paul Holden of Shadow World Investigations provides a case study of a notorious arms deal in South Africa, using recent disclosures of information that followed a Commission of Inquiry that found no evidence of corruption, but has now been ‘set aside’. The article provides novel insights into the problems with offsets and corruption in the arms trade, as well as showing how the promised economic benefits of offsets were massively oversold. Diego Lopes da Silva of SIPRI provides a case study of Brazil's dependence of its arms industry on exports, considering new domestic procurement data. He suggests that the level of export dependence of the Brazilian arms industry has been overstated. Linda Akerstrom of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society offers a case study of changing procurement relations and arms exports in Sweden. She focuses upon a Swedish government order of 14 empty (unfinished) airframes from Saab simply to maintain production capabilities, as an illustration of the hand-in-glove relationship between the Swedish state and Saab, its arms industry ‘national champion’. Emma Soubrier writes on the dynamics of the arms trade in the Persian Gulf, a major and possibly the world's most corrupt arms market. She analyses the changing power relationships between buyers and sellers in recent year and points to a growing  ‘reverse influence’ of buyer states on sellers, resulting from the ‘existential need to export’ in seller arms industries. Finally, a stand-alone contribution to the issue is provided by Kjell Hausken and Mthuli Ncube. They provide a model that considers how benefit provision to the population can alter the outcome of civil wars and revolutions.

  • Vol. 14 No. 2 (2019)

    This issue of the journal contains a diverse set of articles. Through a case study of Turkey, Julide Yildirim, Tekin Kose, and Gizem Tanrivere examine the connection between terror attacks and reported feelings of individuals' happiness. Due to advances in data, variable definitions, and estimation techniques, J. Paul Dunne and Nan Tian revisit the econometrics of the "greed vs grievance" debate in Africa. Kjell Hausken and Mthuli Ncube consider theories of revolutions and civil war involving an incumbent, a challenger, and the population. Michael Brzoska proposes new avenues to help estimate countries' and global levels of armaments production. Finally, Jurgen Brauer re-examines how U.S. military expenditures are measured and proposes an alternative measure.

  • Vol. 14 No. 1 (2019)

    This issue of the journal contains a diverse set of articles. Vanessa Boese and Katrin Kamin examine what happens when disparate datasets are merged in conflict and peace economics studies. Due to variations in country spellings or other incompatabilities, many observations in the original data sources get lost in merged files, often the very ones that are of most interest to conflict and peace researchers. Marion Bogers, Robert Beeres, and Myriame Bollen expand on the NATO burden-sharing debate by emphasizing that not only are there costs to be shared, but also benefits. In particular, they focus on safety and security expenditures other than military spending. Geoff Harris and Tlohang Letsie find that Lesotho, a small southern African country, might gain economically if it demilitarized its armed forces, as Costa Rica and a small number of other countries already have done. Stelios Markoulis and Nikolas Neofytou study the effect of recent terror attacks in Europe on sectoral capital markets in the global hospitality, air transport, and utility industries. As expected, market returns for the global hospitality and air transport industry are particularly pronounced, at least in the short term. Cind du Bois and Caroline Buts take up the recently prominent issue of foreign fighters who joined Daesh in Iraq and Syria. Their findings suggest that a country’s active international role against Daesh also increases the number of foreign fighters coming from that country, with possible backlash effect in the home country as well.

  • Vol. 13 No. 2 (2018)

    This issue contains a symposium of six articles regarding the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute's (SIPRI) arms industry and military services database. Aude Fleurant and Nan Tian, both at SIPRI with work responsibilities for the database, introduce the symposium and the history of the database. Ron Smith and J. Paul Dunne discuss types and examples of quantitative analyses of the database. Diego Lopes da Silva proposes a method by which to estimate countries' domestic arms production volume, using SIPRI's existing methods for estimating the volume of international arms shipments. Herbert Wulf proposes expanding SIPRI's arms industry database to compare the industry's size to other industries and to countries' GDP or other summative measures of overall economic heft. Keith Hartley discusses "knowns and unknowns" regarding arms industry data and the difficulties one encounters in collecting data. Finally, Sam Perlo-Freeman discusses arms trade corruption and the systemic role governments and party politics play in this regard.

  • Vol. 13 No. 1 (2018)

    This issue contains five articles, the first two of which constitute a mini-symposium of papers on postwar governance in response to the World Bank Development Report 2017 on Governance and the Law. Patricia Justino notes that even in war there are forms of governance and that these frequently influence feasible forms of postwar governance. Anke Hoeffler makes the case that in the security and violence debate scholars, policymakers, and other interested parties should look beyond collective violence and also begin to address interpersonal violence. In the first of three stand-alone articles, Jamie Levin examines the European origins, later effectively abandoned, of the Israeli-Palestinian economic union. In examining decentralization and learning during warfare, Garrett Wood provides, in the second article, a cautionary tale in regard to the rationalist approach to bargaining theory. Finally, Atin Basuchoudhary and Laura Razzolini examine conditions of rebel group coordination or splintering.

  • Vol. 12 No. 2 (2017)

    This issue contains five articles first presented at the Allied Social Sciences Association annual meetings in Chicago, IL, in January 2017 as part of a roundtable discussion on research and teaching in peace economics, organized by Economists for Peace and Security (USA). Shikha Silwal address the conjunction of peace and develpoment economics, using the topic of migration as one of her special examples. Charles H. Anderton speaks briefly about Walter Isard, an early and prominent proponent of peace economics, before delving into bargaining theory as a theoretical underpininning to explain both war and peace. Raul Caruso addresses peace economics and peaceful economic policies in light of the classic work of Kenneth Boulding. J. Paul Dunne develops an extensive essay on what peace economists have learned over the past 25 years or or, especially in regard to economic development issues. And Raymond Gilpin, while acknowledging the progress peace economics has made since Boulding and Isard, nonetheless challenges it to become more atuned to current issues and to become more applied and practical.

  • Vol. 12 No. 1 (2017)

    Organized by Renaud Bellais, his own article on the naval shipbuilding industry starts off a symposium on the European armaments industry. Bellais' article is followed by an article on the land armaments industry by Adrien Caralp. The military helicopter industry is examined by Josselin Droff while Vasilis Zervos looks at the outer space industry. Finally, Renaud Bellais and Daniel Fiott discuss issues of disruptive innovation and market destabilization within the context of the European armaments industry. An article that collects global perspectives on the foregoing articles concludes the symposium. The perspectives were written by Richard Bitzinger (Singapore), Aude Fleurant and Yannick Quean (Sweden/France), Keith Hartley (U.K.), Wiliam Hartung (USA), and Stefan Markowsiki and Robert Wylie (Australia). The issue concludes with a stand-alone article by Kjell Hausken and Mthuli Ncube exploring how benefits provision by an office incumbent interacts with the probability of triggering and spreading a revolutionary uprising.

  • Vol. 11 No. 2 (2016)

    The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has long been researchers' primary source for countries' military expenditure data. For the most part, the data were limited to the time period from 1988 onward. Now, SIPRI is releasing revised and backdated data for, in most cases, 1960 onward. The articles in this issue of EPSJ examine the new data and use them for comparative studies relative to the use of the "old" SIPRI data. By way of introduction, the lead article by Sam Perlo-Freeman and Elisabeth Sköns, the previous and current leaders of SIPRI's military expenditure data project, relates the history of SIPRI's military expenditure data construction. Gulay Gunluk-Senesen compares the "old" and "new" SIPRI data for the cases of Greece and Turkey. So does Eftychia Nikolaidou, but for Greece, Portugal, and Spain and with an emphasis on reexamining the nexus between miltiary expenditure and economic growth, especially in light of the post-2008 global financial and EU-debt crises. Christos Kollias and Suzanna-Maria Paleologou broaden the scope to study the EU15 countries, focusing on growth, investment, and military expenditure. Julien Malizard also studies the EU15, focusing on military versus nonmilitary public expenditure. Mohamed Douch and Binyam Solomon broaden the scope even further, to eleven Middle Power countries. Finally, J. Paul Dunne and Nan Tian include nearly 100 countries in their comprehensive and comparative study of military expenditure and economic growth with the "old" and "new" SIPRI data.

  • Vol. 11 No. 1 (2016)

    Two stand-alone articles by Frank Lehrbass and Valentin Weinhold on Russian risk-taking and by J. Paul Dunne and Ron P. Smith on the top-100 firms in the global arms industry are followed by a three-article symposium on Greece and Turkey. The first of these, by Eftychia Nikolaidou, examines the role of military expenditure and arms imports in the Greek debt crisis; the second, by Christos Kollias, Suzanna-Maria Paleologou, and Andreas Stergiou, looks at the economic constraints on Greek military expenditure; and the third, by Gulden Ayman and Gulay Gunluk-Senesen, explores Turkey's security policies and expenditures during the reign of the AKP party.

  • Vol. 10 No. 2 (2015)

    In addition to a four-article symposium on Afghanistan, this issue contains three stand-alone articles. The first two, respectively by Charles H. Anderton and by Sebastian Ille and Dina Mansour, both construct evoluationary game theory models to study the social evolution of violence and potential levers for intervention and the creation of peaceful environments. The third, by Uih Ran Lee, discusses the creation and application of a new dataset on the intentional targeting of civilians in war. The symposium on field research in Afghanistan is introduced by guest editor Travers B. Child and contains articles by (1) Daniel Karrel, (2) Greg Adams, (3) Jan Koehler, Kristof Gosztonyi, Keith Child, and Basir Feda, and (4) James Weir and Hekmatullah Azamy.

  • Vol. 10 No. 1 (2015)

    In addition to a four-article symposium on Nigeria, this issue contains three stand-alone articles. The first, by Jerry Hionis, is a theoretical piece considering the role of geographic distance in a contest between two warlords. The second, by Belah Fallal and Yousef Daoud, is on the effect of Israel's occupation on the Palestinian labor market. The third, by Matthew McCaffrey, studies aspects of war and peace economics in classic Chinese military writings. The symposium on conflict and peace in Nigeria starts with a political economy piece by Michael Nwankpa on Boko Haram. This is followed by Kostadis Papaioannou and Angus Dalrymple-Smith with a historical piece on the role of political order in affecting development outcomes today. Finally, a team of researchers around Topher McDougal, contributes two articles, one on the potential microeconomic benefits of peace in Nigeria's Middle Belt states; the other on the macroeconomic benefits for the country as a whole.

  • Vol. 9 No. 2 (2014)

    This issue contains several case studies. Travers B. Child writes on the relative lack of effectiveness of U.S. reconstruction spending in Afghanistan. Topher McDougal and Lars Almquist write on an agricultural cooperative in civil-war afflicted Burundi. Omer Goksecus, Claire Finnegan, and Huseyin Cakal write on beekeepers in northern Cyprus. And Jeremy Seekings and Kai Thaler write on violence in Cape Town. In addition, Oliver Cover and Saad Mustafa report on a study of Transparency International's anti-corruption index in the defense and security sector.

  • Vol. 9 No. 1 (2014)

    This issue contains a 6-article symposium on violence and peace in India. When India is considered at all, it is predominantly with respect to its neighbors, especially Bangladesh, Pakistan, and China. Violence within India rarely reaches even an academic audience. The symposium is introduced by guest editor Rupayan Gupta. Our authors are Gaurav Khanna, Laura Zimmermann, Saurabh Singhal, Sofia Amaral, Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay, Samrat Bhattacharya, Rudra Sensarma, Kuhuk Bhushan, Prakarsh Singh, Nilanjana Sengupta, Dolon Ganguly, Rikhil Bhavnani, and Saumitra Jha. In addition, Javier Alcantar-Toledo and Yannis Venieris write on general equilibrium modeling of social conflict, and Linda Bilmes examines the likely legacy costs of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  • Vol. 8 No. 2 (2013)

    William Bunting writes on litigated conflict over fundamental, constitutional rights. Boris Gershman studies envy and finds that it may serve both conflict-enhancing as well as conflict-mitigating functions. The issue contains two articles on Nepal. Shikha Silwal provides a spatial-temporal analysis of the country's civil war and Smita Ramnarain offers a case study on the political economy of peacebuilding. Finally, Guro Lien discusses the political economy of security sector reform (SSR).

  • Vol. 8 No. 1 (2013)

    In this issue J. Paul Dunne and Nan Tian survey the voluminous literature on military expenditure and economic growth. Expanded data series and more powerful econometric techniques begin to point to a gradual convergence of findings. Piotr Lis writes on armed confict, terrorism, and the allocation of foreign aid. Ron Smith examines the effects of the global recession on the defense industry. Jurgen Brauer studies on the demand and supply of commercial firearms in the United States.

  • Vol. 7 No. 2 (2012)

    Tiffany Chou opens this issue of EPSJ with a piece on Afghanistan: Does development assistance reduce violence there? She finds that overall developing spending has no clear effect on mitigating rebel attacks. Based on Rwandan household-level data, Kade Finnoff examines the prevalence and correlates of intimate partner violence and links her findings to female employment and pre- and post-genocide data. Prakarsh Singh brings us to the Punjab, in India, examining the relation among crime, insurgency, and agricultural labor markets. More abtract pieces include Olaf de Groot detaling the many channels, and the difficulty, of estimating the cost of military engagments. Finally, Rupayan Gupta merges aspects of alliance theory with bargaining theory and mechanism design to think about the optimal design of transboundary security institutions.

  • Vol. 7 No. 1 (2012)

    In this issue Ron Smith and Ali Tasiran quantitatively study the onset of peace after war. Sam Perlo-Freeman and Jennifer Brauner write on the link in Algeria between natural resource rents and levels of military expenditure. J. Paul Dunne and Jurgen Brauer mine new data to re-examine the impact of the 9/11 attack on the global airline industry. The issue also contains the final installment of our trilogy on the Austrian school's views on war and peace, this piece here by William Anderson, Scott Kjar, and James Yohe. (Parts I and II were published in vol. 5, no. 1 and vol. 6, no. 1, respectively.)

  • Vol. 6 No. 2 (2011)

    Sterling Huang and David Throsby write on quantitative political, economic, and social determinants of peace. Vincenzo Bove studies the theory of supply and demand for peacekeeping. Alvaro Riascos and Juan Vargas review the quantitative literature on violence and economic growth in Colombia. Zachary Tambudzai examines determinants of military expenditure in Zimbabwe. Steve Pickering questions the supposed "bellicosity" of mountain people. John Gilbert, Krit Linananda, Tanigawa Takahiko, Edward Tower, and Alongkorn Tuncharoenlarp study the deadweight cost of war with an illustrative computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. 

  • Vol. 6 No. 1 (2011)

    This issue contains articles by Keisuke Nakao and Sun-Ki Chai on criminal conflict and collective punishment and a two-part article by David Zetland on intra-organizational conflict. He uses the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California as his case study. Meanwhile, Christopher Westley, William Anderson, and Scott Kjar write on the Austrian School once again, this time on Mises, Hayek, and war. Part I of the Austrian School series was published in vol. 5, no. 1, and Part III is planned for vol. 7, no. 1.

  • Vol. 5 No. 2 (2010)

    In this issue, Christine Batruch writes on Lundin Petroleum's experience in East Africa; Wayne Nafziger re-examines Nigeria's long history of violence; Anouk Rigterink surveys the literature on natural resource-related conflict; Achim Wennmann studies wealth sharing and peace; Gilles Carbonnier writes on market incentives and regulation in extractive industries in fragile states; and Geoff Harris considers how to improve military expenditure decisionmaking in sub-Saharan Africa.

  • Vol. 5 No. 1 (2010)

    The issue contains articles by Scott Kjar and William Anderson on war and the Austrian School; Peter M. Li on military alliances; Alexandre Debs on economic theories of dictatorship; Joel Potter and John Scott on issues in third-party intervention and the role of destruction in conflict; Yang-Ming Chang, Shane Sanders, and Bhavneet Walia on conflict persistence and third-party intervention; C. Jill Stowe, Kate Krause, and Janie Chermak on preferences for privacy and security; and Neil Cooper on voluntarism, regulation, and supervision.

  • Vol. 4 No. 2 (2009)

    The issue contains two symposia, one on applied game theory with contributions by Fungisai Nota on southern Africa, Lisa Carson and Raymond Dacey on third players in traditional deterrence games, and Partha Gangopadhyay on intolerance, social conflict, and multiple equilibria games. The second symposium studies Southeast Asian maritime security, with contributions from Richard Bitzinger, James Manikom, Sam Bateman, and Brendan Howe.

  • Vol. 4 No. 1 (2009)

    This issue contains two symposia, one on defense innovation and one on the economics of conflict, with a focus on theory and micro-level evidence. In the first, Renaud Bellais studies defense innovation and venture capital, Sylvain Daffix and Yves Jacquin consider European defense R&D within a national innovation systems framework, and Peter Hall and Andrew James consider the structure of defense innovation and industry in the U.K. In the second symposium, guest edited with an introduction by Philip Verwimp, Mansoob Murshed considers social contracts, greed, and grievance, Zulfan Tadjoeddin and Anis Chowdhury consider violence in Indonesia, Ana Maria Ibanez, looks at forced displacement in Colombia, and Steven Spittaels and Filip Hilgert use conflict mapping to analyze the situation in the DR Congo. In addition, in four stand-alone articles, Christopher Warburton considers war and exchange rate valuation, Steve Chan reviews the democratic peace thesis, Steve Townsend writes on petropolitics, and Ronan Bar-El, Kobi Kagan, and Asher Tishler examine issues of long and short term military planning.

  • Vol. 3 No. 2 (2008)

    This issue contains a symposium on the Palestinian economy, a vital aspect of the conflict with Israel that gets relatively little attention and one that clearly deserves more. The issue also contains four stand alone articles. In the first, Siddharta Mitra considers the relation between poverty and terrorism, developing an analytical model and using case studies to show the link between the two; then Raul Caruso and Andrea Locatelli apply insights of contest theory to al-Qaeda's recruitment process, Pavel A. Yakovlev considers what factors affect casualties in civil as well as interstate wars and Nadege Sheehan assesses potential structures that would best produce effective U.N. peacekeeping. In the symposium, guest editor Sam Perlo-Freeman provides an introduction setting the scene and summarizing the insights contained in the articles. Aamer S. Abu-Qarn provides a valuable context setting review of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Atif Kubursi and Fadle Naqib consider the interaction between the Palestinian and Israeli states, and the costs and benefits to each. The decline of the economy is further considered by Osama Hamed with an analysis of the de-development of the Palestinian economy. Jennifer C. Olmsted considers an important but much neglected topic, the impact of the violence on the nature of employment in Palestine, with particular emphasis on the damaging effects on women's employment. Numan Kanafani and Samia Al-Botmeh discuss the growing food insecurity and malnutrition in Palestine. Finally, Basel Saleh looks at the economic causes that explain much of the governance problems in Palestine and the fragility of the state.

  • Vol. 3 No. 1 (2008)

    This issue contains a symposium on the British Military Industrial Complex (MIC), together with two stand-alone papers on Middle East cooperation, by Raphael Bar-El and Miko Malul and small arms proliferation in Asia by Stefanie Koorey, Stefan Markowski, Peter Hall, and Jurgen Brauer. The British MIC symposium brings together economists and noneconomists to consider a range of issues in arms production and governance, raising issues that deserve further research by economists. David Edgerton, argues for a political economy understanding of the important role that military industry has played in the U.K., while Keith Hartley considers the present relationship between the U.K. and European defense industrial bases and likely future conflicts. Nicolas Gilby provides evidence of past corruption in British arms deals, using documents recently made available through a Freedom of Information Act filing, while Anna Stavrianakis details the problems with the present system of arms export licences. U.K. dependence on the U.S. for nuclear weapons is forcefully shown by Dan Plesch, while Chris Langley analyses the continuing militarization of the U.K.'s universities. Jonathan Feldman provides a case study of one aspect of BAE Systems' past attempts at conversion to argue that the initiative failed for internal political reasons rather than for technical ones. Finally, Derek Braddon considers the changing ownership patterns of British arms producers and their implications for governance. Overall, the articles give a wide-ranging analysis of the British MIC and make clear the importance of continued research on a sector that is undergoing considerable change with important implications for future economic, political, and military security.

  • Vol. 2 No. 2 (2007)

    This issue contains three symposia covering important security concerns in the modern world. The first, a symposium on water conflict and economics, provides an overview of this topical issue as well as a range of case studies. The studies are written by Frederic Pryor, David Phillips, Marwah Daoudy, Rebecca Adler, Marius Claassen, Linda Godfrey, Anthony Turton, Alyssa Neir, Michael Campana, Marko Keskinen, Mira Kakonen, Prom Tola, and Olli Varis. The second is a symposium on trade and conflict and again provides an overview of the issues and literature together with a number of case studies. Our authors are Solomon Polacheck, Enrique Pumar, Prasad Bhattacharya, Dimitrios Thomakos, Archontis Pantsios, and Saumitra Jha.  The third symposium is on insurgency, occupation, and reconstruction and extends the journal's coverage of these issues. The authors are Christopher Coyne and Rupayan Gupta.

  • Vol. 2 No. 1 (2007)

    This issue of EPSJ opens with a symposium consisting of six articles on the organization of force in the modern world. The first three deal with the issue of the induction of youth into a state's armed service, either by conscription or by joining a volunteer, market-wage paid force. They are written by Panu Poutvaara and Andreas Wagener, Julide Yildirim and Bulent Erdinc, and Curtis Simon and John Warner, respectively. The other three articles by Antonio Giustozzi, Herbert Wulf, and Loretta Napoleoni, respectively, concern various aspects of the increasing trend toward privatization and internationalization of violent conflict, including how post-9/11 terrorist organizations finance themselves. In this issue, we also present three excellent overview articles. The first, by Keith Hartley, surveys accomplishments and challenges of research in defense economics, the second, by Vasily Zatsepin, discusses recent developments in Russian military expenditure, and the third, by Fernanda Llusa and Jose Tavares, provides a very well-done, succinct summary of the academic literature on the economics of terrorism.

  • Vol. 1 No. 2 (2006)

    The second issue of the EPS Journal takes up the theme of economic aspects of peacemaking and peacekeeping. Economics Nobel-Laureate Lawrence R. Klein reviews the arguments for, and the likely cost of, a standing United Nations peacekeeping force. Lloyd J. Dumas argues that minimizing economic stress also helps minimize the potential for violent conflict, and Dietrich Fischer reviews the cost of war as against the cost of war-prevention. But for all the good reasons of why peace is cheaper than war, war nonetheless recurs. Jurgen Brauer examines why there seems to be so little peace - if it were so cheap to obtain - and studies the conditions under which states appear willing to intervene in trouble spots around the world. Bassam Yousif, Guy Lamb, J. Paul Dunne, and Ross Fetterly present a set of country studies - on Iraq, Namibia, Mozambique, Rwanda, and Canada. The Canadian piece is of particular value as there is virtually no literature that tries, as Fetterly does, to compute the cost of providing peacekeeping services. The other country studies offer valuable comparative lessons of what does, and does not, work in post-violence reconstruction. The final two articles look at the business side of things. Bob French has written a forceful account of what it takes to clean up land mine pollution, and John T. Marlin examines what consumer campaigns might do, and have done, to rattle the market for gold jewelry and to compel gold-mining companies to adopt behaviors that might reduce conflict.

  • Vol. 1 No. 1 (2006)

    The inaugural issue of EPSJ - conflict or development? - has a regional focus on Africa. Joseph Stiglitz discusses the role of information in conflict and draws a fascinating analogy between civil strife and a labor strike. Paul Collier and Neil Cooper take different positions on the prospects for reforming war economies, and E. Wayne Nafziger gives details of the evolution of humanitarian emergencies. In the two country studies, Tilman Bruck examines the destruction and reconstruction of Mozambique, and Manuel Ennes Ferreira discusses the civil war in Angola. J. Paul Dunne tells the story of South Africa's defense contractor Denel from its origins under apartheid until today, and David Gold describes the context and history of the current actions against "conflict diamonds."