Volume 21, Issue 4 - Proceedings of the 15th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference

This study focuses on the effect of economic growth shocks on the risk of civil conflict outbreak in Africa. The data set covers African first-order administrative units and the time period 1992–2010. Since sub-national GDP is not available for Africa, night-time light data from satellites is used to predict economic growth. Economic growth is then instrumented with rainfall and temperature variables in order to identify the causal effect of economic growth on conflict risk. Furthermore, a spatial autoregressive panel model is estimated to examine the role of spill-over effects. Estimation results suggest strong spill-over effects, but provide no evidence for a significant effect of economic growth on civil conflict.

Researchers have increasingly sought to identify the social repercussions of an evolving climate. Several influential studies claim that climate change is responsible for increases in conflict, while other research finds no such evidence. Relating human-caused changes in the climate to conflict poses a basic endogeneity problem, though: accepting that industrial activity is responsible for altering the climate implies that human agency is indirectly involved in the impact of the climate on conflict. Specifically, industrial activity is closely tied to climate change and to rising economic development, the latter generally being accepted as a determinant of reductions in conflict. In this letter, we discuss this endogeneity problem, outline possible shortcomings for empirical research if this problem is not addressed, and propose a research strategy that might eventually help to overcome it effectively.

Surveys are a valuable complement to field research and quantitative objective data. A small survey of the perception of security in Timor-Leste following the departure of UN peacekeepers shows most reporting that security has continued to improve. More vulnerable respondents are however more likely to regret the UN exit. Retrospectively the evaluation of the UN is largely positively, but few regret that the mission has completed.

This paper investigates the relationship between the US military spending and public debt in a panel of European countries in the period 1992–2013. Under the established evidence of the interdependence between US and European military spending, we exploited a dynamic panel estimation. Findings show that the debt of European countries is: (1) positively associated with US military spending; (2) negatively associated with average military burden of other European countries.

While much work has been devoted to the causes and consequences of civil war, little has been done to explore the prerequisites for civil peace. We shift the focus from the determinants of war to the preconditions to sustain peace , and address the following question: Are there necessary or sufficient conditions for stable civil peace? We use Qualitative Comparative Analysis to approach this question. We do not find necessary conditions for civil peace, but distinct potentially sufficient paths. These are (i) the presence of a fully democratic regime and (ii) the presence of a strongly autocratic regime, with the latter further requiring either a) the absence of a youth bulge and non-miserable living conditions or b) the absence of ethnic tensions. The first type of civil peace is referred to as inherent civil peace whereas the second type is largely a result of strong repression and thus denoted coerced civil peace .

Changes in the security environment after the Cold War and decreasing number of armed conflicts in NATO member states lead these countries to a gradual reduction in military expenditure. However, new security threats that these countries faced at the beginning of the 21st century brought a massive growth of military expenditure especially in the USA which lead to significant deepening of disparities between the USA and European NATO member states. The aim of the article is to investigate disproportionality of burden sharing among 28 NATO members and via multidimensional statistic methods identify free-riding in Alliances. A model based on theory of the demand for military spending provides the basis for an investigation of the disparities (identified especially in the characteristics of the economic and security environment) in determinants influencing military expenditure. Finding suggest that the Alliance is not mainly an economically homogenous body and individual economies thus allocate a significantly different amount of GDP for the needs of the armed forces in dependence on political priorities of individual governments, public finances or overall economic condition of national economies. However, the results of the classification model reveal the fact that group of countries identified as core states of the “traditional” NATO member states (with above-average values of variables) do not allocate the long-term recommended amount of military expenditure of 2% of GDP. These countries are suspected of dangerous free-riding.

The United Nations established in 2005 the United Nations Democracy Fund (UNDEF), whose objective is to support projects submitted by national NGOs aimed at increasing government accountability. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of NGOs activity on democracy exploiting the UNDEF database. An empirical analysis based on a propensity score matching (PSM) method is implemented on a sample of 102 developing countries. The findings indicate that the average treatment effect on the treated (ATT) is positive and significant only when countries receive UNDEF-funded NGOs projects for three rounds or more. In this case the Polity IV indicator improves by an average of 1.08 points with respect to the level of 2005.

The end of the Cold War meant fewer constraints on humanitarian intervention, and the third pillar of the nascent R2P norm suggests at least a moral imperative to intervene when another country’s population is threatened. Yet US leaders continue to shy away from protecting innocents outside of the United States from harm — despite the fact that presidential candidates often campaign on restoring America’s moral lead in the world and, in particular, on US responsibilities to avert mass atrocities. This paper investigates the extent to which US military intervention abroad is driven by domestic considerations. Using logistic regression analysis, we aim to explain decisions by Presidents Bush Sr., Clinton and Bush Jr. to send troops into harms way.

This article examines the determinants of United States arms transfers by examining military aid separate from military sales. Separation of the two types of transfers is necessary due to the different benefits the United States receives from the transfers. Sales create direct economic benefits while aid is economically costly. The results show that some political, strategic, and economic factors have differing effects on the type of transfer and its size.

Modern warfare is often indirect: rebel groups are normally too weak to fight the state’s army in an open conflict, while the main problem of the government is to find the hideout of the rebels or identify their supporters. In this paper, I argue that if communication channels like free media are missing, rebel groups choose to attack the energy infrastructure. Empirical evidence reveals that countries with freer media experience less attacks against their energy infrastructure.

There is a vast amount of studies on the origins of revolutions and armed conflict. However, there is no empirical analysis of the political outcome of revolutionary conflicts. A second branch of research focuses on waves of democratization. This paper fills the gap and links the two fields by examining the importance of revolutions as an explanatory factor for changes in systems of governance. Using a data set covering 135 countries from 1960–2011, global changes in the level of democracy are examined. The revolutionary conflicts examined in the panel had a positive influence on a countrys democratic path. In addition the effect of selected variables on the development of the system of governance is analyzed in more detail.

State capacity is known to constitute a driver of economic development. This note establishes the emergence of state power as a precondition for the development of state capacity. After clearly establishing the differences between these concepts, I explore the geographical factors favouring the emergence of state power and provide some evidence from a study of Madagascar.

A long debate continues whether international trade institutions (specifically preferential trade agreements [PTAs]) affect security relations between states. Contradicting theories and empirical claims are put forward by realists and liberals. The former posit that the institutions are epiphenomenal and possess no power to constrain state behavior whereas the latter claim that the institutions are likely to promote cooperation by supplying forums for consultation, arbitration and adjudication, thus reducing the risk of war between states. This study identifies an important channel through which the legal dimension of trade agreements (hence dispute settlement mechanisms [DSMs] in PTAs) may have pacifying effects on the outbreaks of war. DSMs of PTAs do have strong implications for militarized interstate disputes (MIDs), although not directly, but through low-level of foreign policy disputes, such as economic sanctions. If economic sanctions are believed to escalate to violent conflict, PTA DSMs may reduce the probability of war by mitigating the escalation of economic sanctions. However, the level of legalism differs among DSMs in PTAs. The present study first confirms empirically that sanction disputes escalate to militarized disputes and further, addresses the selection issue by using bivariate probit model. I find a sizeable impact of medium level of legalism reducing the sanctions escalation into war whereas high level of legalism, in which the state sovereignty is limited, do reduce the probability of sanctions but have no impact on war probability. Further, the interstate political cooperation proves to be a strong determinant for highly legalistic PTAs but not in the case of medium level of legalism.