Most aid spending by governments seeking to rebuild social and political order is based on an opportunity-cost theory of distracting potential recruits. The logic is that gainfully employed young men are less likely to participate in political violence, implying a positive correlation between...

Under the present civil Sudanese conditions, the country endures many hardships which are manifested in economic retraction, inflation, recession and stagflation. However, those are not the sole reasons for the sporadic conflicts that infest the people. Illegitimate property and economic...

This thesis aims at laying down the theoric foundations for a politics of security and at applying them to the case of crime. For that goal the concept of security will be granted an economic status as a capability according to Sen, for which an axiomatic is proposed. From this work, a security...

This paper seeks to analyze the nature of the terrorist threat following 9/11, and to explore the implications for defense R&D policy. First it reviews the defining trends of defense R&D since the cold war, and brings in pertinent empirical evidence: The US accumulated during the 1990s a defense...

We develop and test an economic theory of insurgency motivated by the informal literature and by recent military doctrine. We model a three-way contest between violent rebels, a government seeking to minimize violence by mixing service provision and coercion, and civilians deciding whether to...

This paper studies the causes and consequences of political centralization and fragmentation in China and Europe. We argue that a severe and unidirectional threat of external invasion fostered centralization in China while Europe faced a wider variety of smaller external threats and remained...

The World Economic Forum recognizes that while restrictions on energy affect water systems and vise versa, energy and water policy are rarely coordinated. The International Panel on Climate Change predicts that wet places will become wetter and dry places will become dryer. Transboundary water,...

Climate resilient communities can be achieved with the support of global research, development, deployment, and diffusion of environmentally sound low GHG emission technologies and processes. Technology cooperation should lower emissions remaining mindful of biodiversity, ecosystem services and...

We provide a new framework to account for the diverging paths of political development and state building in China and Japan during the second half of the nineteenth century. The arrival of Western powers not only brought opportunities to adopt new technologies, but also fundamentally threatened...

This article questions the extent to which U.S. continental shelf seabed mining policy, as reflected in the U.S. administration's recently issued five-year OCS development plan and accompanying agency regulations, is influenced by international environmental law, especially the deep seabed...