We present two schemata with which to parse cases of genocide and mass killings (GMK) for economic content. The first schema enumerates several ways in which economic aspects affect and are affected by episodes of GMK and roams across various economic concepts and theories that might be applied...

Belligerents could in principle avoid the ex post costs of conflict by revealing all private information about their violent capabilities and then calculating odds of success ex ante. Incentives to misrepresent private information for strategic gain, however, can cause miscalculations that lead...

We test the hypotheses that fundamental characteristics in regional proximity, landlockedness, religious-domination, legal origin, and income levels affect cross-country differences in the persistence in political terror and political instability in 163 countries for the period 2010 to 2015. The...

Popular beliefs link terrorism to economic, political and social under- development. In this contribution, we comprehensively review the related, most relevant cross-country analyses to ascertain the true determinants of terrorism. The related theoretical underpinnings are presented and com- mon...

Many episodes of extension of franchise in the 19th and especially in the 20th century occurred during or in the aftermath of major wars. Motivated by this fact, we offer a theory of political transitions which focuses on the impact of international conflicts on domestic political institutions....

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...

This paper uses a formal model to analyze the effects of political economic competition between states on economic performance and the size and composition of the public sector. Great economies of scale in warfare and even distributions of military capability among the contestants generate...

The type of the mainstay of the military forces of a state decides the decree of economies of scope that exist among the military, the internal security establishment and, the fiscal apparatus which taxes and provides public goods. Economies of scope reduce the cost of military pursuit and other...

In this paper we extend the well known "agreeing-to-disagree" and "no-trade" results from economics and game theory to international relations. We show that two rational countries should never agree to go to war when war is inefficient and when rationality is common knowledge. We argue that this...

What determines the national security policy of a state? One classic answer posits a spectrum of three schools of thought on this subject. The first stands for the proposition that the national security apparatus is responsive almost exclusively to domestic pressures such as class conflicts,...