This piece introduces the new journal. This issue - Conflict or Development? - has a regional focus on Africa. Joseph Stiglitz discusses the role of information in conflict and draws a fascinating analogy between civil strife and a labor strike. Paul Collier and Neil Cooper take different...

High-technology weapons and their support platforms, together with robotic vehicles and satellite-based communications systems, have come to dominate how many nations frame their defense policies and wage war. The resulting technological dependence creates a number of problems for governments,...

To develop effective policy to reduce the proliferation of illicit small arms in developing countries, it is necessary to have a good understanding of how these weapons are distributed and how illicit stockpiles are formed. This article captures structural characteristics of small-arms...

This article addresses the relationship between European and U.K. defense industrial policy. It considers recent initiatives to create a European Defense Equipment Market and the U.K.’s Defense Industrial Strategy. The European and U.K. defense industries are evaluated and some of the future...

A strong Palestinian economy in the aftermath of the 1993 Oslo agreement has not materialized. This has had serious implications for employment outcomes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A number of authors have analyzed Palestinian labor markets during this period, but have focused almost...

Despite the trend toward fewer armed conflicts and war deaths, dramatic variations in conflict casualties exist across countries. This article examines what factors affect casualties in civil as well as interstate wars and finds that conflict casualties are directly influenced by geography and...

The article critically evaluates the literature that deals with the economic aspects of the Israeli-Arab conflict. The survey covers: (1) data issues and lack of trustworthy time series; (2) the existence and causal direction of an arms race between Israel and its Arab neighbors; (3) the...

On the basis of analytical reasoning and buttressed by case studies from Latin America and Northeastern India one can conclude that poverty can and does generate terrorist activity. But poverty alone is not a sufficient factor to generate terrorism. Other necessary and facilitating factors are...

This article reviews the literature on the relationship between natural resource abundance and civil conflict, focusing on cross-country, quantitative research. It concludes that results on natural resources (as a single category) as a cause of conflict onset are quite unstable. A more robust...