One of the most surprising findings in research on UN peace operations (UNPOs) is that they work. Scholarship has focused on how UNPOs solve the security dilemma but overlooked their role in maintaining parties’ political commitment to reforms, which we conceptualize as the implementation...

This Policy Insight suggests the UN must account for a diverse range of conflict drivers, including health insecurity, and that UN peace operations can play a role in countries of deployment to counter health crises. Insecurity is experienced in a variety of different ways in a complex world...

We consider a dynamic setting in which two sovereign states with overlapping ownership claims on a resource/asset first arm and then choose whether to resolve their dispute violently through war or peacefully through settlement. Both approaches depend on the states' military capacities, but...

Trade sanctions are a common instrument of diplomatic retaliation. To guide current and future policy, we ask: What is the most cost-efficient way to impose trade sanctions? To answer this question, we build a quantitative model of international trade with input-output connections. Sanctioning...

While there is a large literature on how conflict affects entrepreneurship and investment, little is known about how the end of a conflict affects businesses and firms’ creation. The direction of the effect is not obvious as conflicts bequest poverty and inequality –reducing the returns of...