While some scholars interpret the frequently documented association between age and the strength of party identification as evidence of accumulated political learning, others stress the importance of critical life stages. Germany's turbulent last century, with its suspensions of democratic...

This paper provides a first study on use of professional peer reviews by the EU to strengthen the European fight against terrorism. The first part outlines two theoretical approaches to assessing the outcome effectiveness of such peer reviews, namely compliance and learning. Peer reviews can...

We address the pitfalls of averaging by exploiting the longitudinal variation in aid to identify sudden and sharp increases in aid flows. Focusing on specific events, we test if aid accelerations correspond to policies and shocks in the recipient country. For a large sample of 145 recipient...

European Union policy to counter terrorist financing is marked by uncertainty about causes and consequences. The paper addresses the role of evaluations of the effectiveness and efficiency of counter terrorist financing policies performed by international standard setting organizations in such a...

Naval counter-piracy measures off Somalia have failed to change the incentives for pirates, raising calls for land-based approaches that may involve replacing piracy as a source of income. This paper evaluates the effects of piracy on the Somali economy to establish which (domestic) groups...

The fight against terrorism, in particular of Islamist nature, has become a focus area of foreign and security policies in Western countries and around the world. This substantial effort is however only to a limited extent matched by adequate evaluations as to its actual success. This paper...

Until 2008, the growth of the world economy was quite strong and improved the economic well-being all over the globe, but this development was also accompanied by some risks. One of them is transnational crime, which has shown a remarkable increase in the last 20 years3. This raises the...

The financial means of international terror and transnational organized crime organizations are analyzed. First, some short remarks about the organization of international terror organizations are made. Second and in a much more detailed way a literature review is provided about the financing of...