Serious instability and deadly political violence have surrounded several recent elections and gained global media coverage. Do elections in general make such incidents more likely? Are elections especially dangerous in partially democratic or ethnically divided states? Elections are among the...

Do factors associated with the outbreak of genocidal violence differ across global regions? This chapter focuses on the role of institutions relating to democratic or authoritarian governance, using statistical models to test hypotheses on five decades of data. Improved understanding of causal...

The privatization of major industrial assets represent a a fundamental economic policy choice. The decision to allow foreign capital to participate in this process represents a fundamental foreign policy choice, one that I believe is framed largely by decision makers' preferences regarding...

Competing hypotheses are tested on an extensive set of defense-burden data to determine the general factors that influence states' levels of military spending. Results provide some clear answers to longstanding questions and supply new findings that beg further investigation. When controls are...

Economies of War and Peace: Economic, Legal, and Political Perspectives brings together recent, cutting-edge research on economic factors affecting peace and war. This important area of continuing research was the focus of an international conference held at the University of Sydney in June 2009...

Global public opinion has emerged as a prominent issue in international relations. But have U.S. public diplomacy efforts during the post-9/11 period successfully improved foreign publics’ appraisals of U.S. foreign policy? We examine this question by estimating the effects of U.S. high-level...

To overcome obstacles to causal inference in observational and qualitative studies, we use synthetic control method to assess whether acquisition of nuclear weapons by security rivals might increase their level of conventional militarized conflict. Recent theoretical (Powell 2015) and...

Purpose – The main purpose is to provide ideas about an intellectual framework for considering the role of “economic factors” in conflict and to suggest some potentially useful future areas of research. I selectively reference some relevant findings from the other chapters in this volume....

In their chapter, ‘A method to compute a peace gross world product by country and by economic sector’, Jurgen Brauer and John Tepper Marlin present a novel method to assess the economic value of peace, in both the domestic and international realms. This is not only a tool for assessing and...