Band 23, Heft 1

Using a new data set that captures the share of reporting on terrorism, we explore the nexus between terrorist attacks and the news. It turns out that terrorism mainly influences news reports through the number of incidents. Regarding the reverse causality, we provide evidence that the share of the news devoted to terrorism Granger-causes further terrorist activities. However, short-run and medium-run effects differ: media coverage on terror only impact in the severity of terror in the short run (up to two months). From the third to the tenth months, it causes an increase in the number as well as in the severity of the attack. These observations are consistent with the idea of competition between terrorist groups.

The evolution of cooperation scholarship develops evolutionary stable theories that explain the presence of cooperation when there are many reasons to defect from cooperation. In this analysis, these theories are tested using the relations between states. Focusing on the direct reciprocity strategies of Tit-for-Tat and Win-stay/Lose-shift and the indirect reciprocity strategies of Cooperative Reputation and Tag, Tit-for-Tat and Cooperative Reputation are found to be robust, while Tags have mixed results. In the end, it is the direct cooperative action by states and their cooperative reputation and not shared characteristics that are most likely to elicit cooperative action in return.

This paper explores ways in which civil conflict can be simulated using numerical methods. A general two-party model of conflict is developed by extending an approach proposed by [Christia, F., (2012), Alliance Formation in Civil Wars, Cambridge University Press, New York], which is based on a metric of the ‘relative power’ that exists between the state and a rebel group. Various definitions of relative power are considered and one of these is chosen to illustrate different types of two-sided armed conflict, namely direct-fire, guerrilla and asymmetric warfare. The additional suggestion of Christia that random or stochastic events can lead to unexpected conflict outcomes is also further extended in this paper. The inclusion in the model of terms describing concurrent rebel recruitment of civilians and state deployment of troops are then described. Examples are presented for various hypothetical cases. It is demonstrated that numerical simulation techniques have great potential for modelling civil war. The Christia approach is shown to provide an excellent basis from which numerical models of civil conflict can be built and from which the progress of a conflict can usefully be visualised graphically.

This paper applies the ARDL approach to cointegration in order to address the defense unemployment nexus. We use information on Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain for the period 1960–2015. Our main results suggest that: (i) there is a stable long-run relationship between the variables under consideration for Portugal, Greece and Spain. (ii) Defense spending decreases (increases) unemployment for the case of Portugal and Greece (Spain), (iii) the impact of non-defense spending is weaker than that of defense spending and (iv) Okun’s law is validated for Portugal, Greece and Spain. (v) These results are robust to the use of heterogeneous panel cointegration and causality analysis.