This survey explores some of the institutional and political factors that set the underlying conditions for the emergence of conflict. The political economy perspective offered here differs from other important surveys and analyses of the same topic, which have focused on the ethnic dimensions...

Which countries are likely to be subjects of research in the study of armed conflict? Evidence from other fields suggests that research often focuses disproportionately on the West, but it is unclear to what extent this is true in conflict studies. We suggest that a baseline explanation of...

I examine whether and how the means through which a civil war ends affects the success of a country's state-building strategy after conflict. I show that two distinct modes of conflict termination-military victories and negotiated settlements-lead to differential long-run statebuilding outcomes...

This study investigates the case of Iran to evaluate how changes in the intensity of international sanctions affect internal conflict in the target country. Estimating a vector autoregressive model for the period between 2001q2 and 2020q3 with quarterly data on internal conflict and its three...

This study investigates the case of Iran to evaluate how changes in the intensity of international sanctions affect internal conflict in the target country. Estimating a vector autoregressive model for the period between 2001q2 and 2020q3 with quarterly data on internal conflict and its three...

China’s provision of development finance to other countries is sizable but reliable information is scarce. We introduce a new open source methodology for collecting project-level development finance information and create a database of Chinese official finance to Africa from 2000 - 2011. We...

We survey selected parts of the growing literature on the microeconomics of violent conflict, identifying where academic research has started to establish stylized facts and where methodological and knowledge gaps remain. We focus our review on the role of civilian agency in conflict; on wartime...

We study from both a theoretical and an empirical perspective how a network of military alliances and enmities affects the intensity of a conflict. The model combines elements from network theory and from the politico-economic theory of conflict. We postulate a Tullock contest success function...

Recent advances in political science and economics highlight the role of historical events in shaping contemporary political and economic outcomes. This article joins the growing literature by utilizing disaggregated data and mediation analysis to explore the causal mechanisms bridging ethnic...

While most civil wars seem to have an economic basis, they are generally pushed by political, ethnic, and religious differences. This paper attempts to identify the drivers of the Syrian civil war of 2011 by investigating the role of ethnic divisions in starting a conflict. We integrate a...