This study empirically investigates the impact of group characteristics and host country conditions on the duration and the ending of terrorist organizations and rebel groups. The empirical analysis relies on data for more than 600 armed groups from the Terrorist Organization Profiles, collected...

We examine how external intervention interacts with ethnic polarization to induce rebellion and civil war. Previous literature views polarization as internally produced --- the result of demographic characteristics or inter-group differences made salient by ethnic entrepreneurs. We complement...

Negotiated settlements after civil war are notoriously unstable and often go unimplemented. This is often due to factors such as credible commitment problems, lack of government capacity to implement, or one of the disputants begins a new wave of violence. Mediation is often utilized as means of...

From time to time, the press reports the disruption of a terrorist plot by means of government agents infiltrating a terrorist network. Terrorists believe they are dealing with co-conspirators only to find they have been dealing with government agents. The problem facing the terrorists is an...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the insights that might be generated into the nature of ‘lone wolf terrorism’ through the application of economic analysis. Orthodox approaches, particularly (standard) expected utility analysis and game theoretical analysis, are discussed. These...

Along with such factors as declining support, the dismantling of the leadership group and transition into legitimate political engagement there is another factor that is relevant to the decline and fall of terrorist groups. This is the group’s risk aversion. This aspect of the terrorist...

This paper develops a theory of political violence that is based on the rationality of individual agents. Violence is shown to be negatively related to the availability of alternative means of acquiring political goods and to the availability of alternative economic opportunities. Under quite...

Deterrence has been a crucial element in fighting terrorism, both in politics and in rational choice analyses of terrorism. However, there are two strategies that are superior to deterrence. The first one is to make terrorist attacks less devastating and less attractive to terrorists through...

Austrian insights on the limits of central planning, the pervasiveness of knowledge problems, and the importance of the entrepreneur in coordinating social change have yielded substantive contributions to the literature on how individuals and communities respond to both natural and unnatural, or...

In this paper we investigate whether the effects of terrorism in one country spillover to affect trade in neighboring nations. Using a sample of more than 160 countries from 1976 to 2014, we report robust evidence that terrorist attacks in a nation's contiguous neighbors significantly reduce...