We explore a defender's prewar allocation of military resources between denial and punishment strategies for deterrence. While denial disproportionately raises the probability to countervail aggression by disrupting military forces ("guns"), punishment proportionately raises costs on the...

While political conflicts have been extensively studied by political scientists, criminal conflicts have received much less attention, especially by theorists in the field. Focusing on the latter type of conflict, we address why an individual crime across an ethnic or tribal border often leads...