Theodore Roosevelt used the US military to create what he called quot;civilized societies.quot; A growing literature focuses on the economic benefits of empires, benefits sometimes referred to as quot;global public goodsquot;. Some authors, such as Mitchener and Weidenmier (2005) and Ferguson...

Offshoring is usually thought of in the context of globalization and economic activity. Yet a signal feature of the Bush Administration's quot;war on terrorquot; was the offshoring of core security functions. The most famous example is the use of Guantanamo Bay as a detention center, but many...

In His State of the Union Address, President Bush outlined the Advanced Energy Initiative to help break America's dependence on foreign sources of energy. The President has set a national goal of replacing more than 75% of U.S. oil imports from the Middle East by 2025. With America on the verge...

This article determines the conditions under which the Southern countries should act together, or separately, while negotiating with the North about climate change policy and about the conditions for future Southern engagement. The paper models the international negotiations with complete and...

The existing literature on the determinants of terrorism treats terror as a uniform phenomenon and does not distinguish between different types of terror. This paper explicitly addresses the heterogeneity of terror by classifying groups according to their ideologies. We show that the pattern of...

We reconsider the relationship between oil and conflict, focusing on the location of oil resources. In a panel of 132 countries over the period 1962-2009, we show that oil windfalls increase the probability of conflict in onshore-rich countries, while they decrease this probability in...

The paper presents a political economy model linking terror and governments' respect for human rights. Using panel data for 111 countries over the period 1973-2002, we then empirically analyze whether and to what extent terror affects human rights - measured by three indices covering a wide...

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...

I critically review recent studies that estimate those costs of violence and conflict that can emerge among organized political groupings, from states, religious and ethnic organizations to guerillas and paramilitaries. The review includes studies that estimate direct and indirect costs due to...

Ethnic and religious fractionalization have important effects on economic growth and development, but their role in internal violent conflicts has been found to be negligible and statistically insignificant. These findings have been invoked in refutation of the Huntington hypothesis, according...