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.