Scholars argue that third parties make rational calculations and intervene to influence interstate dispute outcomes in favor of their own objectives. Third parties affect not only conflict outcomes but also escalation and duration. Theories of third-party involvement are applied to understand...

Although research on conflict has tended to separately study interstate conflict and civil war, states experiencing civil wars are substantially more likely to become involved in militarized disputes with other states. Scholars have typically focused on opportunistic attacks or diversionary wars...

In the spirit of Lewis Richardson’s original study of the statistics of deadly conflicts, we study the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks worldwide since 1968. We show that these events are uniformly characterized by the phenomenon of “scale invariance,†that is, the...

Many sources of economic data cover only a limited set of states at any given point in time. Data are often systematically missing for some states over certain time periods. In the context of conflict studies, economic data are frequently unavailable for states involved in conflicts, undermining...

Theories of conflict emphasize dyadic interaction, yet existing empirical studies of civil war focus largely on state attributes and pay little attention to nonstate antagonists. We recast civil war in a dyadic perspective, and consider how nonstate actor attributes and their relationship to the...

Income varies considerably within countries and the locations where conflicts emerge are rarely typical or representative for states at large. Yet, most research on conflict has only examined national income averages and neglected spatial variation. The authors argue that civil conflicts are...

The Polity data are widely used to explore the causes and consequences of democratic authority patterns. These data often have been used uncritically. The authors explore some of the theoretical and empirical characteristics of these data. They show how the analytical composition of the...