Democracies rarely if ever fight one another, but they participate in wars as frequently as autocracies. They tend to win the wars in which they participate. Democracies frequently build large alliances in wartime, but not only with other democracies. From time to time democracies intervene...

When coding events from media sources – as the majority of data projects do – different reports may oftentimes contain contradictory information. What do coders make of this? It is up to them to aggregate different reports into one coded event, and to supplement missing information...

The reported role of social media in recent popular uprisings against Arab autocrats has fueled the notion of ‘liberation technology’, namely that information and communication technology (ICT) facilitates organization of antigovernment movements in autocracies. Less optimistic...

According to the liberal peace proposition, pairs of democratic states and pairs of states with extensive trade ties are more peaceful than other pairs of states, and democratic states are also more peaceful internally than other regime types. This article reviews the recent literature on the...

This paper conducts the first analysis of the effect of armed conflict on progress in meeting the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals. We also examine the effect of conflict on economic growth. Conflict has clear detrimental effects on the reduction of poverty and hunger, on primary...

Dorussen (1999) concludes that trade between states reduces the incentives for conflict, but that the effect of trade diminishes with a larger number of countries. I demonstrate that the indicator Dorussen uses to gauge the impact of trade is dependent on the size of the system itself, and...

Peace and regime type can be examined at the dyadic, nation, and system levels. At the dyadic level, it is well established that democracies rarely if ever fight each other. At the national level, the broad consensus is that there is no significant relationship between democracy and war...