Using costly-process models of war with democratic citizens and soldiers, this article explores two contrasting claims on the negative association between the probability of democratic victory and the duration of war. As a claim holds, democracies are not militarily disadvantageous in long wars....

By extending the extant costly-lottery models of war to three-party bargaining scenarios, we offer rationalist explanations for two-front war, where a state at the center is pinched by its two enemies at opposing peripheries. We found that even though private information exists only in one...

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...

How do belligerents choose and change their military strategies during war? How do these strategies shape war? To address these questions, we develop a random-walk model of war, where two belligerents fight over "forts" across periods. The random walk represents a battlefront, which moves as 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...

Why do some rebellions expand gradually as rebel groups challenge in sequence, whereas other rebellions explode instantaneously as rebel groups challenge in unison? To address this question, we develop a dynamic and spatial model of rebellion that illustrates patterns of war fought between a...

This paper develops a model of random matching with costly monitoring to demonstrate that the threat of ethnic conflict can function to create an in-group policing mechanism which helps enforce inter-ethnic social order. Instead of regarding ethnic conflict as a form of collective penalty on an...