Peace and regime type can be examined at the dyadic, nation, and system levels. At the dyadic level, it is well established that democracies rarely if ever fight each other. At the national level, the broad consensus is that there is no significant relationship between democracy and war...

Countries have better abilities and stronger incentives to engage in militarized conflicts the larger and more powerful they are. The article applies Zipf's notion of a ``gravity model'' to the risk of interstate conflict and argues that the empirical relationship between size and distance and...

A measure—trade efficiency—that models the extent to which individual economic entities within two countries trade with each other is used to investigate the claim that symmetrical dependence on trade between two states is required for the trade bond to reduce the probability of...

This article examines the link between subnational poverty and the location of civil war events. Drawing on the ACLED dataset, which breaks internal conflicts down to individual events at the local level, we take a disaggregated approach to the study of conflict. Local-level socioeconomic data...

In the literature on civil war onset, several empirical results are not robust or replicable across studies. Studies use different definitions of civil war and analyze different time periods, so readers cannot easily determine if differences in empirical results are due to those factors or if...

While territory, oil, and water are frequently mentioned as resources likely to promote interstate conflict, diamonds have emerged as a prominent factor in explanations of civil war. In this article, the authors report on a new database on diamond deposits and production and analyze the...

A number of recent studies argue that there is decline in armed conflict within and between nations. Gohdes and Price run against the grain in arguing that there is no evidence for a decrease in battle deaths in armed conflicts after World War II and that the trend reported in our earlier...

Proponents of the democratic peace have been criticized for failing to discuss colonial wars. Democratic countries have repeatedly fought such wars, which critics hold to be incompatible with democratic peace theory. Three reasons are suggested to explain why colonial wars do not invalidate the...

The Middle East is one of the most conflict-prone regions—butwhy? The Collier-Hoeffler model of civil war provides the starting point for our analysis. In an application to Africa, Collier and Hoeffler found poverty to be the most significant predictor of conflict. For conflict in the...