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.

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, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania 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.

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 .

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.  

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.