The Political Economy of War and Peace brings insights into the political and economic forces that shape the international, sub-national and ethnic conflicts of the present post-Cold War era. The larger vision is that war must be studied as a syndrome of historical events that occur as a...

By defining political economy and war in the broadest sense, this unique Handbook brings together a wide range of interdisciplinary scholars from economics, political science, sociology, and policy studies to address a multitude of important topics. These include an analysis of why wars begin,...

This survey explores some of the institutional and political factors that set the underlying conditions for the emergence of conflict. The political economy perspective offered here differs from other important surveys and analyses of the same topic, which have focused on the ethnic dimensions...

Using data from the US commodity flow surveys, we show that the historical Union-Confederacy border lowers contemporaneous trade between US states by about 16 percentrelative to trade flows within the former alliances. Amongst one million placebos, thereis no other constellation of state...

The dispute that resulted in the secession of eleven Southern states from the Union and the ensuing Civil War proximately concerned the geographical expansion of slavery, but ultimately bore on the existence of the institution of slavery itself. This paper asks why in 1861 after seventy years of...