Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy

Published by De Gruyter

Volume 21 Issue 3

Issue of Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy

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Contents
Journal Overview

Publicly Available August 5, 2015

Frontmatter

Page range: i-iii

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Publicly Available June 9, 2015

Aggressive or Peaceful Rise? An Empirical Assessment of China’s Militarized Conflict, 1979–2010

Jun Xiang, Christopher B. Primiano, Wei-hao Huang

Page range: 301-325

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Abstract

The recent years have witnessed a heated debate on China’s rise. Using various theoretical arguments, existing research has generated quite divergent conclusions on whether China rises peacefully. Liberals argue that China has significantly benefited from the existing international economic system and therefore China is rising peacefully. On the other hand, realists such as John Mearsheimer argue that because China is likely to challenge the status quo, a rising China poses a threat to international security. Surprisingly, despite the ample scholarship on this topic and the existing divergent conclusions, a large-N empirical evaluation of China’s rise is missing in the existing research. This study fills this important gap by providing a large-N empirical investigation of militarized interstate disputes between China and other states from 1979 to 2010. We find that although China’s GDP, military spending, and CINC score have increased remarkably since the start of its economic reform, no empirical evidence points to more conflicts between China and other states. Furthermore, trade exerts only a weak effect on China’s conflict, a surprising yet interesting finding that revises the conventional wisdom in the literature.

June 1, 2015

The Moroccan Crisis of 1905–1906: An Analytic Narrative

Frank C. Zagare

Page range: 327-350

Abstract

This paper interprets the Moroccan crisis of 1905–1906 in the context of an incomplete information game model, the Tripartite Crisis game, and one of its proper subgames, the Defender-Protégé subgame. In the early stages of the crisis the action choices of the players were shown to be consistent with the players’ beliefs, but their beliefs were not tested. In the final phase, beliefs and action choices were brought into harmony. British support of France during the conference that ended the crisis, the firm stand that France took at the conference, and the German decision to press for a conference is explained in terms of the model’s principal variables. The explanation derived from the model is not necessarily at odds with consensus historical interpretations of the Moroccan crisis. Nonetheless, it offers several advantages over standard, largely atheoretical or ad hoc descriptions. One clear advantage is the convenient framework the model provides for organizing information about the crisis around a common set of assumptions and concepts and for the clear way the most salient causal variables are highlighted. Another is the model’s ability to point to a logically consistent set of expectations about the connections between certain action choices and the beliefs that drive them. Finally, the model’s straightforward applicability to an important and complicated watershed event is suggestive of its potential generality.

July 20, 2015

A Mathematical Analysis of Domestic Terrorist Activity in the Years of Lead in Italy

Marco Marcovina, Bruno Pellero

Page range: 351-389

Abstract

The data-set of the casualties of terrorist attacks in the Years of Lead in Italy is analyzed in order to empirically test theoretical open issues about terrorist activity. The first is whether Richardson’s law holds true when the scale is narrowed down from global to only one epoch of domestic terrorism in a single country. It is found that the power law is a plausible model. Then, the distribution of the inter-arrival times between two consecutive strikes is investigated, finding (weaker) indications that also for this parameter a power law is a plausible model and that this is the result of non-stationary dynamics of terrorist activity. The implications of this finding on the models available today for explaining a power law in the severity of attacks are then discussed. The paper also highlights the counter-intuitive implications that a power law distribution of the waiting times has for a State inferring the time to the next strike from the observation of the time already elapsed since the previous one. Further, it is shown how the analysis of the inter-arrival times provides estimates about the temporal evolution of terrorist strength that can help discriminating among competing hypotheses derived from qualitative analysis. Finally, a simplified mathematical model of the policy decision-making process is constructed to show how the nature of power laws biases the prioritizing of the policy agenda and the consequent allocation of resources to concurring issues. It is shown how the bias causes systematical relative underfunding of policy issues whose severity follows a power law distribution and that this trend is likely to persist until a major event will reverse the behavior of the decision-maker, then causing relative overfunding.

June 16, 2015

The Revolving Door and the Entrenchment of the Permanent War Economy

Thomas K. Duncan, Christopher J. Coyne

Page range: 391-413

Abstract

This paper analyzes the “revolving door” phenomena in the military sector in the US. The revolving door refers to the back-and-forth movement of personnel between the government and private sector. We examine the structure of the revolving door and explain how its very nature leads to the perpetuation of the permanent war economy. This analysis yields several important implications. First, the dynamics of the revolving door shape the military-industrial complex in a way that serves the narrow interests of select elites rather than the broad interests of citizens. Second, because the perverse incentives are a product of the institutional structure of the US military sector, the negative consequences are also structural and cannot be solved by increased oversight.

About this journal

Objective
The main objectives of Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy (PEPS) are:
- to further research in Peace Science and Peace Economics,
- to expose the scholarly community to innovative peace-related research,
- to disseminate the study of peace economics to a wider audience.

PEPS accepts both theoretical and empirical contributions to the fields of Peace Economics and Peace Science. In line with Peace Science tradition, PEPS welcomes contributions from an interdisciplinary community of scholars from a variety of disciplines including economics, political science, regional science, mathematics, and history, among others.

Given the fact that the journal is online, authors are not asked to limit themselves to a set word or page count for full-length papers. In order to improve scientific communication within the field of Peace Science and Peace Economics, the journal also publishes “Letters,” to provide accounts of new original research. Letters generally do not exceed 2,500 words in length, exclusive of equations, graphs, and figures. Letters can concern either theoretical or applied work, and will be subject to the peer-review process. In order to make a decision in a short time reviewers are asked to give an “accept/reject” evaluation, without further comments.

Topics
The journal publishes papers covering a wide range of topics with the common theme of peace and conflict analysis, including:

Military expenditures (determinants and impact)
Arms Trade and Military industry
Alliances and games
Game and related theory
Contest theory
General equilibrium models of conflict and conflict management
Economic policies to cope with actual and potential conflicts
Peacekeeping
Economic policies for peacebuilding
Mathematical approaches to conflict management
Mathematical models of arms races and wars
Studies on the causes of wars and political violence
The impact of conflicts and violence on welfare
Arms control, government spending and International Security
Trade disputes, Trade wars and international economic sanctions

Article formats
PEPS publishes both full-length papers and shorter “Letters.”　

Information on Submission Process