Civil conflicts spill over into neighboring countries. This paper proposes a theory of the contagion of civil wars. Weak territorial control facilitates the emergence of a regional market for war inputs in the “porous frontier.” The contagion effect is nonlinear and creates multiple...

A considerable body of empirical evidence indicates that conflict affects reproductive behaviour, often resulting in an increased fertility rate due to higher child mortality and limited access to healthcare services. However, we know much less about the effect of peace in a post-conflict...

We investigate the implications of preferential trade agreements (PTAs) for interstate confl ict. We set up a two-stage game with three competing importers, where fi rst, two of the countries decide on whether to initiate war against each other, and subsequently, all three countries select their...

The literature on the relationship between the private sector, armed conflict, and peacebuilding has extensively analyzed how companies adapt to unstable contexts, what risks they face and how they are tackled, and the degree to which expected peace dividends serve as motivation for companies to...

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...

Over the last two decades or so, there has been a democratic turn in peace and conflict research, i.e. the peculiar impact of democratic politics on a wide range of security issues has attracted more and more attention. Many of these studies are inspired by Immanuel Kant's famous essay on...

We build a model of conflict in which two groups contest a resource and must decide on the optimal allocation of labor between fighting and productive activities. In this setting, a diaspora emanating from one of the two groups can get actively involved in the conflict by transferring financial...

Donor reactions to recent settlements of internal conflicts have been highly diverse, in terms of both overall aid and its sectoral composition. The allocation of post-conflict aid tends to be needs-based by favoring particularly poor countries. There is no conclusive evidence, however, that the...