The assassination of a political leader is among the highest-profile acts of political violence, and conventional wisdom holds that such events often have substantial political, social, and economic effects on states. We investigate the extent to which the assassination of a head of state...

Of the consequences of war, the movement of large numbers of displaced peoples across international borders is among the most significant. I examine the determinants of international refugee flows in Africa during the period from 1992 to 2001. I begin with a gravity model of refugee flows, which...

The relationship between defense spending and inflation has been of interest to scholars and policymakers throughout much of the post-World War II era. Yet there is no agreement as to the exact nature of the relationship. We attempt to shed some light on this matter by identifying the...

The purpose of this discussion is to focus on two problems that appear to have hindered the development of a solution to what Zinnes (1978, 1980) has termed the “puzzle†regarding the war proneness of nations. Specifically, it suggests that scholars who are interested in understanding...

This article is an attempt to indicate how diffusion approaches, based on the concepts of linkage and interdependence, can be of help in our thinking about the spread of democracy. The analyses address the existence or absence of diffusion effects in regard to changes in the degree of freedom in...

Using realist models of international politics that deemphasize the two-level security game that states play, most analyses of hegemonic decline argue that decline is caused by the differential growth of power between hegemons and challenging states. The authors argue that decline is affected...

This article examines the relationship between power fluctuations in the elite power system and the frequency of war. A theory is developed and tested using a new dataset of elite powers and elite power wars. The theory posits that fluctuations in the elite power system are related to war among...

The growing literature on the relationship between democracy and war has focused on two questions-Whether democracies are more pacific than other types of government, and why democracies do not seem to go to war against each other. In the spirit of Lakatosian cumulativeness - looking for...