Rebuilding state legitimacy is a thorny challenge in the aftermath of civil wars. The international community has stepped in to support post-conflict states in rebuilding state capacity, sometimes replacing governments in providing public goods. Most notably, research shows that UN peacekeepers...

While much of the literature studies causes and consequences of war, the reverberations of peace have rarely been studied. By focusing on the universe of ceasefire agreements since 1993, we study the causal effect of peace on economic recovery using a regression discontinuity in time approach....

This paper examines Bosnia with some comparative insights from Northern Ireland. Both places were extremely fragile in the immediate aftermath of their brokered peace negotiations and consociational institutions, in Bosnia in 1995 and Northern Ireland in 1998. Bosnia in particular was the...

India has employed a variety of military, political, and economic measures to combat the long running insurgency in Kashmir with little evidence on what contributes to stability in the region. This paper uses a variety of tests to detect structural breaks in the time series for violence over the...

We survey selected parts of the growing literature on the microeconomics of violent conflict, identifying where academic research has started to establish stylized facts and where methodological and knowledge gaps remain. We focus our review on the role of civilian agency in conflict; on wartime...

I examine whether and how the means through which a civil war ends affects the success of a country's state-building strategy after conflict. I show that two distinct modes of conflict termination-military victories and negotiated settlements-lead to differential long-run statebuilding outcomes...

Does repression of opposition elites prevent resistance against foreign-imposed regimes? On the one hand, elimination of elites can undermine the opposition's capacity for antiregime resistance. Yet killing opposition elites deprives the new regime of useful human capital. Co-optation of elites...

While significant amounts of foreign aid have been allocated to the group of so-called fragile and conflict-affected states in recent years, it is not clear whether that aid is targeted to where it is most needed. This paper extends recent work by Carment and Samy, and focuses on aid targeting...

The role of the state in promoting development is well established in the institutional economics literature. Yet, in recent decades the attention has been turned to the opposite side of the spectrum. Facing high levels of poverty and showing a slower progress in achieving development outcomes,...