This article presents a rational choice model of a regime’s incentive to allocate resources to fighting rebels and killing civilians when facing an internal threat to its political or territorial control. Assuming that intentional violence against civilians is an inferior input and fighting...

The institutionalization of peace research has been a tortuous process and it has proven particularly difficult to establish separate departments for peace research in the universities. The Department of Peace and Conflict Research at Uppsala University is a spectacular exception. This article...

The indirect effects of military spending on security are stronger and more important than its direct effects, and its long run impact more telling than its short run impact. In the short run, military spending can be a source of both physical security and economic stimulus. In the long run, it...

Using the currency demand approach, size and development of Colombia’s shadow economy are estimated over the period from 1980 to 2012. The results show a great extent of shadow economic activity varying over time between 27 and 56% of GDP. The most important factors driving the shadow economy...

For researchers and students of International Relations (IR), one date looms larger than all others: 1648. The end of the Thirty Years War, formalized by the signing of the Treaties of Osnabrück and Münster, led to a period known as the “Peace of Westphalia.” Westphalia represented a...

Studying the determinants of international conflict, researchers have found a series of influential variables, but few have addressed the robustness of the results to changes in the definition of the dependent variable, conflict. The two main sources for operationalizing conflict in empirical...

Colombia is a country with both high incidence of poverty and an ongoing civil conflict. This study uses measures of government deterrence and anti-narcotic activity as instruments of conflict-specific variables to estimate the impact of conflict on poverty in Colombia. Using census-level data...

Low take-up of stigma-free social benefits is often blamed on information asymmetries or administrative barriers. There is limited evidence on which of these potential channels is more salient in which contexts. We designed and implemented a randomized controlled trial to assess the extent to...

The Colombian conflict has lasted for around 50 years. It has been fueled by the financial opportunities coming from production and traffic of illegal drugs, and predation of other natural resources. In such a context it is not clear what policies are more effective to reduce conflict. Two...