This paper reviews some findings by Azam and Thelen (2008, 2010, 2012) that illustrate how foreign aid is used by rich countries to purchase the services of recipient governments with a view to protect or promote their economic and political interests. In particular, these findings show that...

This paper presents a model of provocation in a federation, where the local government triggers an insurgency with a view to acquire the control of some economic assets with the help of the central government. Some econometric support for this model is found using data on the Naxalite conflict...

This paper reviews some findings by Azam and Thelen (2008, 2010, 2012) that illustrate how foreign aid is used by rich countries to purchase the services of recipient governments with a view to protect or promote their economic and political interests. In particular, these findings show that...

Somaliland has recently developed an unexpected democracy after seceding from chaos-ridden Somalia, while turning its port of Berbera into a success story, competing successfully with the long established ones in the Horn of Africa. A simple game-theoretic model is used to explain why the...

This paper tries to reconcile the observed fact that suicide-terrorists have a relatively high education level with rationality. It brings out the conditions under which potential students choose to acquire some education in a rational-choice model where this yields a non-zero probability of...

This paper presents an analytic narrative of three decades of oil and violence in Nigeria, assuming rational choice by all the actors. It argues that, in the 1980s and 1990s, the government had to choose between spending money on preventing pollution and terrorizing the population away from the...