Dorussen (1999) concludes that trade between states reduces the incentives for conflict, but that the effect of trade diminishes with a larger number of countries. I demonstrate that the indicator Dorussen uses to gauge the impact of trade is dependent on the size of the system itself, and...

Esteban & Ray formalize the argument that conflict is likely to be more intense when individuals in a society are divided into two clearly identifiable groups where differences within groups are considerably smaller than differences between groups. They show that such polarization increases...

The article reviews the literature on the relationship between democracy and armed conflict, internal as well as interstate. The review points to several similarities between how democratic institutions affect both conflict types. It summarizes the main empirical findings and discusses the most...

An important key to reducing the suffering due to civil war is to shorten conflicts. The marked decrease in the incidence of conflicts in the 1990s was mostly due to a high number of conflict terminations, not to a decrease in the number of new wars. The articles in this special issue treat...

In this article, we re-examine the statistical evidence for the democratic peace at the dyadic level. We also investigate the seeming paradox that democracies are engaged in war as often as autocracies at the nation level. From the extensive literature on democracy and peace we have selected as...

Countries have better abilities and stronger incentives to engage in militarized conflicts the larger and more powerful they are. The article applies Zipf's notion of a ``gravity model'' to the risk of interstate conflict and argues that the empirical relationship between size and distance and...

A measure—trade efficiency—that models the extent to which individual economic entities within two countries trade with each other is used to investigate the claim that symmetrical dependence on trade between two states is required for the trade bond to reduce the probability of...

This article examines the link between subnational poverty and the location of civil war events. Drawing on the ACLED dataset, which breaks internal conflicts down to individual events at the local level, we take a disaggregated approach to the study of conflict. Local-level socioeconomic data...

In the literature on civil war onset, several empirical results are not robust or replicable across studies. Studies use different definitions of civil war and analyze different time periods, so readers cannot easily determine if differences in empirical results are due to those factors or if...

The gravity model of trade states that the volume of trade between two countries is proportional to the product of the sizes of the two countries and the inverse of the distance between them. The gravity model, however, was initially suggested for other types of social interactions, and it also...