That military expenditure and conflict have adverse consequences for development is unsurprising but important. The policy challenge is to reduce them. I have suggested that substantial components of military expenditure could be reduced without jeopardizing security interests. Military...

The greatest contribution that economics can make to banishing war lies in creating conditions that help keep the peace, especially in the long run. The problem is to identify the set of conditions that will generate positive incentives for nations to keep the peace and work out a set of...

An assessment of the employment of mercenaries in Afghanistan gives mixed results. U.S. armed forces appear to have been happy with the Afghan Security Forces and ad hoc militias and only replaced them because of political reasons or because they felt that they were no longer needed. By...

This article highlights the until quite recently neglected political-economic thinking in matters of defense in twentieth-century Britain. It argues that retrieving such analyses from the interwar years is an excellent although partial way to get at an alternative picture of interwar defense...

Britain is not an independent nuclear power. Its nuclear warheads and delivery systems depend upon American supplied management and technology and have done so since the dawn of the nuclear age. For years these matters were classified and today both governments only supply partial information....

This piece provides a Foreword to the new journal by the chair of Economics for Peace and Security.

This article investigates the case of Nanoquest, a small diversification project that was tied to BAE Systems’ earlier incarnation as British Aerospace (BAe). I show that British military firms can have success when diversifying into civilian markets, but the process can be sabotaged by...

This article begins by emphasizing that the number and intensity of armed conflict has fallen substantially but that military expenditure levels in sub-Saharan Africa have nonetheless increased, largely as a result of South African expenditure. The article attempts to answer two questions....

Provides an introduction to the symposium on Palestine

The article examines the evolution of the Palestinian Authority as a paradigmatic case of state evolution from stable political regime to fragile and failing entity. By focusing on the performance of the Palestinian economy following the 1993/94 peace agreements, the study analyzes the forces...