Volume 30, Issue 2

In real life, winning a conflict sometimes does not end the conflict. Revenge motivations can stay and provide momentum to the conflict, thus leading to further escalation of the conflict. This is known as the value effect or vengeance effect of revenge. However, the presence of revenge can lead to de-escalation of the conflict out of self-deterrence and sometimes retaliation out of revenge is not possible if the combatant is incapacitated. Hence, the impact of revenge on the level of violence is a priori not clear. This paper is an attempt to answer that question. Using a two-period game of conflict this paper tries to show how desire and capabilities of the combatants to exact revenge can influence the intensity of the conflict. This paper shows the following: how the strategies of the combatants are influenced by the value effect of revenge, self-deterrence and incapacitation of the combatants; how the stronger combatant is in a favourable position in the conflict and can prevent its opponent from going into second period conflict out of revenge; when the combatants are equally strong the intensity of the conflict starts falling with time. It also lays out some real-life conflicts and existing empirical work to support the results.

Recent scholarship claims that group grievances due to political exclusion and discrimination drive civil wars. The grievance perspective suggests that socio-psychological factors allow groups to overcome collective action problems. We argue that the grievance perspective (over)focuses on the ends and not means , which are critical to explain how groups survive state sanction, allowing contention to escalate to civil war. We suggest that inclusive economic governance reduces investment in state-evading infrastructures for quotidian economic reasons, leading to the buildup of rebellion-specific capital. Physical and human infrastructures of state evasion form the logistical bases for survival against state sanction. Our analyses show that group-grievance-generating political factors are poorer predictors of civil war compared with economic freedoms measured as free-market friendly policies and the private ownership of economies, which should reduce economic rents accruing to state-evading shadow markets. Our results are robust to several alternative models, data, and estimating method. Theory that ignores the  means explain the main causes of costly violence only partially, or mistake symptom for cause. Freedom and inclusiveness, which should reduce grievances, are intrinsically valuable, but they are hard to obtain when violence is waged successfully for more narrower ends.

The relationship between government defence expenditure and economic growth is a debated topic. This study uses UK data for the period of 1960–2012 and applies two of the most prevailing theories used within the literature, the ‘Feder-Ram’ and the ‘augmented Solow’ models, to assess this question. We utilise traditional model specifications, alongside extensively altered versions of both models, enabling a comprehensive comparison between them. The alterations to the models include re-evaluating how core variables are expressed, inclusion of measures of conflict, the impact of recession, etc. The results show that the augmented Solow model outperforms the Feder-Ram model, and we provide some explanations for this result. In addition, our results suggest that military expenditure has a positive effect on economic growth within the UK, implying that the decision to reduce defence spending may have been detrimental to the UK economy.

After 9/11, contemporary debates on security often place civil liberties and security at opposite ends of the same spectrum, requiring the loss of one for the maintenance of the other. In addition, public concerns about terrorism determine or at least color public perception about government counterterrorism activities. Thus, the current study empirically examines factors influencing the public’s perception of government activities that may infringe upon individual rights, focusing on the effects of concern about terrorism. For this study we use data collected in World Value Survey (WVS) pertaining to respondents from the U.S. The results of a series of regression analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) indicate that public concern about terrorism is positively associated with support for counterterrorism activities. Moreover, other factors including satisfaction with democracy, community membership and trust in the government are found to play an important role in explaining public support for counterterrorism activities.