In this paper we extend the well known "agreeing-to-disagree" and "no-trade" results from economics and game theory to international relations. We show that two rational countries should never agree to go to war when war is inefficient and when rationality is common knowledge. We argue that this...

Peace economics can be defined as the use of economics to understand the causes and effects of violent conflict in the international system and the ways that conflict can be avoided, managed, or resolved. This chapter surveys major subject areas of peace economics, highlighting seminal as well...

The study of peacekeeping from an economics perspective is a fairly recent phenomenon. This chapter surveys three research areas pursued by economists in analyzing peacekeeping. The first research strand examines the theory and empirics of peacekeeping financing and burden sharing, while the...

In this chapter, we review the recent literature on conflict and appropriation. Allowing for the possibility of conflict, which amounts to recognizing the possibility that property rights are not perfectly and costlessly enforced, represents a significant departure from the traditional paradigm...

Why do sovereign states sometimes fail to settle territorial disputes peacefully? Also, why do even peaceful settlements of territorial disputes rarely call for the resulting border to be unfortified? This paper explores a class of answers to these questions that is based on the following...

We show that the recent rise in Afghan opium production is caused by violent conflicts. Violence destroys roads and irrigation, crucial to alternative crops, and weakens local incentives to rebuild infrastructure and enforce law and order. Exploiting a unique data set, we show that Western...

Several states in West Africa have experienced significant episodes of political violence since the early 2010s. These have included civil wars, religiously motivated terrorism, separatist insurgencies, military coups and communal strife, each of which have local, national and transnational...

This article proposes a reading of the armed conflict from an evolutionary design that takes into account the concept of private protection agencies in the works of Schelling / Nozick / Gambetta. Their aim is to assess the dynamics of conflict and changes from its author’s scientific output. A...

We examine the relationship between household income and happiness in Afghanistan and the moderating roles of fear of insecurity and experiencing violence. Our study is based on surveys conducted by the Asia Foundation from 2014 to 2021 across 34 provinces in Afghanistan. Employing fixed effects...

In the past decade, nearly 20 studies have found a strong, persistent pattern in surveys and behavioral experiments from over 40 countries: individual exposure to war violence tends to increase social cooperation at the local level, including community participation and prosocial behavior. Thus...