No systematic study has examined the effect of post-conflict justice on the duration of peace on a global basis. This paper attempts to fill that void by building on a newly constructed dataset (Binningsbo, Elster, and Gates 2005), which reports the presence of various forms of post-conflict...

Autocratic regimes are quite often short-lived kleptocracies formed and maintained through force and used to appropriate wealth from subjects. Some of these autocracies collapse after only a year or two of plundering while others manage to survive for 15 or 20 years. This paper asks why some...

The dominant hypothesis in the literature that studies conflict is that poverty is the main cause of civil wars. The authors instead analyze the effect of institutions on civil war, controlling for income per capita. In their set up, institutions are endogenous and colonial origins affect civil...

The most influential recent work on the determinants of civil wars found the factors associated with the grievance motivation to be largely irrelevant. Our paper subjects the results of this empirical work to further scrutiny by embedding the study of civil war in a more general analysis of...