Our paper explores the economic conditions that lead third parties to intervene in ongoing internal wars. We develop a formal model that ties together some of the main forces driving the decision to interfere in a civil war, including the economic benefits accruing from the intervention and the...

We explore the geo-strategic determinants of bilateral trade flows between the USA and the rest of the world. We develop a three-party model of security and trade patterns and use data on military assistance and troop deployments over the 1950–2009 period to validate its predictions. We find...

Earlier research has shown that the tragedy of the commons may be resolved by Folk theorems for dynamic games. In this article we graft on a standard natural-resource exploitation game the possibility to appropriate the resource through violent means. Because conflict emerges endogenously as...

In this paper we show that in highly unequal societies, different societal groups may support a rent-seeking dicator serving their interests better than the median voter in a democratic regime. Importantly, it is the stakes of dictator in the economy, in the form of capital ownership, that...

In anarchic settings, the potential rivals are dragged in an arms race that can degenerate in an open war out of mutual suspicion. We propose a novel commitment device for contestants to avoid both arming and fighting. We allow the players to decentralize the two core decisions that determine...

In weak institutional settings, autocrats barter political and economic concessions for support to remain in power and extract rents. Instead of viewing the favors’ beneficiaries, i.e. the elites, as an exogenous entity, we allow the king to decide whom to coopt provided the subjects are...

We estimate the impact of geo-located mining concessions on the number of conflict events recorded in the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1997 and 2007. Instrumenting the variable of interest with historical concessions interacted with changes in international prices of minerals, we...

Can the international community enable conditions for voluntary, safe and sustainable return of displaced people As conflict is key in the decision to leave and to return, this paper investigates whether the deployment of UN peacekeeping operations can reduce the insecurities driving...