The secession of the Sudan into two parts, Northern and Southern countries and the following armed conflicts on its borders, calls for an analysis of why that happened. It is seen as a disaster for both as there are interrelationships between the two built over historical period. There are also...

A multi-stage model on the course of war is presented: Individual battles are modeled as private value all-pay auctions with asymmetric combatants of two opposing teams. These auctions are placed within a multi-stage framework with a tug-of-war structure. Such framing provides a microfounded...

For the past 70 years, there has been a downward trend in the size of wars, but the idea of an enduring "long peace" remains controversial. Some recent contributions suggest that observed war patterns,including the long peace, could have come from a long-standing and unchanging war-generating...

We investigate the role of networks of military alliances in preventing or encouraging wars between groups of countries. A country is vulnerable to attack if there is some fully-allied group of countries that can defeat that country and its (remaining) allies based on a function of their...

This is a game-theoretic analysis of the link between regime type and international conflict. The democratic electorate can credibly punish the leader for bad conflict outcomes, whereas the autocratic selectorate cannot. For the fear of being thrown out of office, democratic leaders are (i) more...

We investigate the effect of trade integration on interstate military conflict. Our empirical analysis, based on a large panel data set of 243,225 country-pair observations from 1950 to 2000, confirms that an increase in bilateral trade interdependence significantly promotes peace. It also...

We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We...

This paper reviews the economics approach to conflict and national borders. The paper (a) provides a summary of ideas and concepts from the economics literature on the size of nations; (b) illustrates them within a simple analytical framework where populations fight over borders and resources,...

The overall goal of the report is to increase the capacity of researchers and policy makers to identify comparatively, and across time, how individuals, households and communities are affected by violent conflict. The report provides an extensive overview of existing practices and datasets used...

In many instances of potential violent or non-violent conflict the future strategic positions of adversaries are very different when there is open conflict than when there is settlement. In such environments we show that, as the future becomes more important, open conflict becomes more likely...