Volume 23, Issue 3

The current state of race relations in the United States have brought to light the issue of the militarization of local police, where officers are being provided with unused equipment from the government’s war chest through the 1033 Program. But, is this increase in militarization beneficial, or does it harm relations between citizens and police? Using data on purchases provided by the Defense Logistics Agency, this paper analyzes effects of military purchases on assaults on police officers. Fixed effects negative binomial regressions on state-month level data show that stockpiling of material militarization equipment (guns, armor, and clothing) exhibits a statistically significant decrease in assaults, with guns showing no significant relation on assaults. However, operational militarization purchases (surveillance, sonar, and radar) lead to an increase of assaults, suggesting that there may be unforeseen consequences of increased militarization due to a change of structure and information gathering.

Rates of foreign direct investment (FDI) to Africa are increasing, yet little is known about how this will affect the political environment. One possibility, explored here, is that increasing levels of FDI within developing states will incentivize state conflict activity. Using an instrumental strategy, we show that in states with a low regard for civil liberties, or with unhealthy economies (i.e. states with a cash deficit), increased access to investment is associated with a higher number of conflict actions by the state. We argue that access to investment can push regimes into using violent strategies to secure their internal environment and to ensure their survival, specifically in their engaging in conflict against opposition and armed combatants. This underscores the need for extensive monitoring of state behavior following the receipt of investment, similar to the oversight of conditional aid.

This article explores the effects of international adjudication on individual-level attitudes in territorial disputes. In particular, we investigate the micro-foundations for the argument that international court rulings provide political cover for governments settling disputes through unpopular territorial concessions. In an online survey conducted for this project, 494 Indian respondents were confronted with a fictitious foreign policy scenario. A randomized experiment embedded in the survey provides four major findings. First, international adjudication makes citizens more willing to support concessions in border disputes. Second, international courts influence the perceived fairness of comprosmise solutions. Third, legal conflict management mediates the emotional fallout of territorial concessions. Finally, we do not find any evidence for the claim that international adjudication reduces individual-level concerns over commitment problems. By focusing on individual-level data, this article provides an important contribution to the literature on international conflict management.

This paper considers if increases in temperature and decreases in rain associated with climate change are a potential driver of Islamist terrorism across states in Nigeria. With state-level Islamist terrorism event, temperature, rainfall and sociodemographic data for Nigeria, we estimate latent variable and count data specifications of the relationship between the number of Islamist terrorism events and climactic variation in temperature and rainfall motivated by how the psychological costs of conflict can be decreased by increases in outdoor ambient temperature and decreases in rainfall. Our parameter estimates reveal that increases in temperature and decreases in rainfall increase the likelihood of Islamist terrorism in Nigeria. This suggests that global warming and reduced rainfall induced by climate change are potential drivers of terrorism in Sub-Saharan Africa, and policy interventions designed to abate anthropogenic climate change can reduce violent conflict that is harmful for economic growth and development.

In this paper we attempt to assess the extent to which conversion policies involving the shift of resources from the defence to the non-defence sector may entail some form of peace dividend for the economy of Greece. The issue has become one of increasing importance during the past few years during which the demand for growth-supporting policies has been a top priority requirement as an antidote to the recession. The paper employs a VAR model in order to investigate the interactions among the growth rate of gross domestic product and alternative measures of defence expenditure. We find that defence spending and more so, expenditure on defence equipment, under the present circumstances in which the bulk of the procurement represents import payments is not related in any form of Granger-causal relationship with the economic growth of Greece. Our results point to the fact that there can be no possibility of a peace dividend under the circumstances prevailing, unless defence procurement policies shift to an import – substitution strategy.