Frontiers of Peace Economics and Peace Science: Volume 16

In the social science discipline, the subject of Peace and Conflict has been pursued on different paths. The first approach is the ethical aspect involving religion, culture, nonviolence, etc. Next is the established area of Peace Studies which focuses more on case studies, and is usually qualitative. The area of conflict management in industrial relations involving negotiations, arbitrations, etc., is also case oriented but is becoming more quantitative. Peace Economics and Peace Science use tools, methods, and quantitative framework of various Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, Law, and Engineering. Unlike Peace Economics, Peace Science is much more theoretical and related to Political Science and International Relations. At this time, Peace Science is far from becoming an interdisciplinary field as its founder, the late Walter Isard, wanted it to become. The frontiers of Peace Science is moving farther due to such factors as globalization, global economic downturn, terrorism, environmental factors, international and intranational conflicts, wars, etc. Papers included in this volume indicate the direction in which Peace Science is moving.

Decisions to initiate conflict often have an irrevocable character. They tend to transform the status quo in ways that it is often foreseen only with difficulty beforehand, and this change is then mostly impossible to undo. The sentence attributed to Colin Powell talking to President Bush about the Iraq War, “You break it, you own it,” illustrates the issue quite well. Closely linked to irrevocability is the issue of conflict costs. The uncertainty about conflicts and wars is due not only to the identity of the eventual winner but also to the costs inflicted upon the parties including the victorious ones. Often, prospective losers such as Napoleon and Hitler were initial winners who were in the end defeated by an accumulation of war costs they could not master.11There is some evidence that Napoleon, and then Hitler, were driven by increasing needs to absorb more and more territories. Clearly, Napoleon sold Louisiana to Jefferson to replenish his war chest and Hitler pillaged the central banks of conquered countries to support German military expenses. It is mostly the sunk costs associated with war that account for the irrevocability problem. Unfortunately, the literature on the formal analysis of war has not dealt with this matter, representing instead conflict as involving fixed costs or fixed cost expectancies at the onset. Additional cost estimates that should be taken by a decision-maker due to possible failures or irreversibility of actions are not considered. This is nowhere more evident than in the so-called bargaining model of conflict and war, whose numerous sometimes hidden assumptions have to be discussed and analyzed. The goal of this paper is to show that irrevocable decisions add to the cost of making them. Belligerent parties often have a tendency to minimize these especially, and this is an interesting twist of the analysis of irrevocable decision-making, if estimations of the gains of war are made on the basis of risk neutral expected utility calculations. The latter consideration leads me then to formulate alternative theories of war and conflict under the assumption of rationality.

This chapter explores a number of issues connected with the use of game-theoretic models to organize analytic narratives, both generally and specifically. First, a causal explanation of the Rhineland crisis of 1936 is developed within the confines of a game-theoretic model of asymmetric or unilateral deterrence. Then some methodological obstacles that may arise in more complex cases are discussed and suggestions for overcoming them are offered. Finally, the advantages of using game models to more fully understand real world events are highlighted.

We develop an extension of the Traditional Deterrence Game to examine the interaction between international and domestic sources of uncertainty as these sources influence the behavior of Challengers and Defenders. The extension involves incorporating a third and a fourth domestic player, named Assassin ♯1 and Assassin ♯2. Assassin ♯1 reacts to Challenger's decision to capitulate to Defender, and Assassin ♯2 reacts to Defender's decision to capitulate to Challenger. From the perspective of Challenger and Defender, Assassin ♯1 and Assassin ♯2 are lotteries that involve a probability of being punished, and a complementary probability of not being punished, for the decisions to capitulate to the adversary, respectively, in the international game. We employ the two-sided incomplete information version of the game wherein Challenger is uncertain about Defender's type and the behavior of Assassin ♯1, and Defender is uncertain about Challenger's type and the behavior of Assassin ♯2.

The model provides an account of the trade-off between domestic and international conflicts generally, and specifies the conditions under which Challenger and/or Defender is advantaged in the international game with the presence of a domestic constraint in the form of Assassin ♯1 or Assassin ♯2. The model generates two striking results in particular. First, Assassin ♯1 can influence the behavior of some Challengers, whereas Assassin ♯2 can determine the behavior of some Defenders. Second, the Challengers who ultimately capitulate are more prone to initiate conflict, in the first place, than are the Challengers who will not capitulate.

Over the years, political scientists have dominated academic analysis of issues concerning national and international security. Operating mainly within a paradigm of power, political scientists of the so-called “realist” school have tended to view force and the threat of force as the most effective means for achieving security. If power is the ultimate arbiter in the international arena and military force its most compelling manifestation, it follows that the weapons that can do the most frightful damage will become the most potent symbols of international standing. Looking at the world through these eyes, it is easy to understand the grotesque romance so many security analysts and policy makers have had with nuclear weapons since the birth of the atomic age in the deserts of New Mexico two-thirds of a century ago. And so we continue to live, two decades after the Cold War passed into history, with a profusion of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction spread among a growing number of nations.

The paradigms of economists have much more to do with choice and incentive than with force and coercion. Considering the growing support for the idea of nuclear disarmament, there may be a great opportunity, in this moment of history, to help bring about the kind of paradigmatic shift that can encourage the removal of the nuclear sword of Damocles with which we have all lived for so long. Perhaps, the tools of economics can help point the way to a world that is not only more productive but also more secure.

Wars have important economic dimensions. They involve costs requiring resources that have alternative uses such as new hospitals, schools, and roads. Economists can contribute to the understanding of wars by identifying their costs. Case studies make a valuable contribution by providing estimates of the costs of conflict. Much has been written about the costs to the USA of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Similar studies for the UK have been lacking. This chapter provides UK estimates of the costs of both conflicts.

The issue of the link between wars and economic cycles and the sense of the causality has given rise to many economic studies. The statistical works of N. D. Kondratiev11Kondratiev (1935). This paper is a synthetic presentation of Kondratiev's works during the 1920s. in the 1930s, showing the existence of long economic cycles regulating capitalism, have contributed much to the economic cycles' theory. This analysis based on the observation of long-term economic changes in GDP growth rates and/or price levels shows some rising and declining phases, as well as reversal points of the cycles. Among the most easily identifiable phenomena are the following: the economic crisis of the 1930s, the post–Second World War growth period, and the economic crisis that started in the 1970s. However, as shown by a study of Tylecote, A. (1992). History as a forecasting tool: The future of the European economy in a long-wave/long-cycle perspective. Review of Political Economy, 4(2), 226–248. The long economic cycles are less identifiable for the period 1850–1930, unless the disruptive effects of the American Civil War and First World War are considered: their recessive and then reflationary effects would have disrupted the rising and declining phases. But some analyses present war as being a central factor in long-term economic changes.

Modelski, G. (1987). Long cycles in world politics. London: Macmillan of long cycles had become very famous in the 1980s. It identifies cycles of 100–120 years, starting with an exceptionally long global war (it may also be a more discontinuous phase of war, like the two world wars) and giving rise to a new dominant power. Its technological and commercial domination permits keeping an uncontested supremacy, until some competing powers start to erode it. However, this theory does not focus on the links between major wars and long-term economic changes.

This issue having been largely studied in the past, the first part of the paper will present a review of these analyses. Then in the second part, it will ask if these ideas may help in predicting future major economic crises and related international conflicts. It is a delicate task, as it is as difficult to show subsequently a link between economic cycles and major wars as to predict future cyclical phenomena on the world economic and political scene.

The likelihood of dying from preventable non-military causes (PNMD) is far greater than the likelihood of death from armed conflict of all types (labelled political mass killing and comparable to Rummel's democide). However, the allocation of resources by governments for the military overwhelms the allocation for PNMD. In the USA, the ratio of expenditures per death for the military are greater than 1,000 times that allocated for each death from currently preventable non-military causes.

The research program precipitated by these facts consists of several components. The first is the compilation of objective data on PNMD both in the USA and worldwide. The second is the development of an analytic framework in which military conflict and PNMD are compared. The framework provides substantial similarities in both motivation and organization between the direct attack represented in military conflict and the indirect attack that characterizes PNMD. The third major component is the examination of the differences between perceived and actuarial risk and the study of the psychological factors that may account for such differences.

Data are presented that illustrate the levels of death from military and non-military causes. Then the motivational and organizational characteristics of both military and non-military sources are examined. Finally, the design of research to investigate the psychological factors that may relate to differences in perceived compared to actuarial risk is presented.

This study especially concerns the causal relationship between official defense expenditure and economic development for mainland China from 1953 to 2007 by employing a combination of VAR models and the Granger Causality Test. The final conclusions are diverse in varied time periods where no evidence showing the Chinese economy had an effect on its military development or the reverse. Nevertheless, military spending benefited the economy after 1989 when the development of defense was running on a new path. This study also includes a proxy series of Western estimated data, say SIPRI, which has a result that resembles Chinese official data over the period 1989–2007.

The chapter presents a very general overview of the new (2010) United States–Russia nukes reduction treaty and a brief analysis of the failure of the UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen (2009). The revival of the term of “competitive coexistence” as a description of United States–Russia relations is discussed. The author also suggests that present-day China–India relations can be considered as an example of the newly emerged version of a regime of “competitive coexistence.”

Violent conflicts have become one of the major concerns of modern nation states. Regardless of their political, social, and economic conjunctures, nations are increasingly exposed to the risk of conflicts. Conflicts are generally categorized as “major” and “minor” based on the level of intensity and the number ofcasualties. The Middle East has experienced a dramatic increase in the number of conflicts since the early 1990s. In this chapter we examine the causes that triggered unprecedented changes in conflicts by using a panel of conflict estimates for 10 Middle Eastern nations for the period 1963–1999. The fixed effects model is used to control for unobservable country-specific effects that result in a missing-variable bias in cross-sectional studies. More importantly, the fixed effects model is chosen since the main goal of this study is to investigate what factors have caused statistically significant changes in conflicts over time within nations rather than to explain variation in conflicts across these nations. On the basis of the panel data, we explain the roles of inequality, inflation, growth, military spending, foreign direct investment, and remittances in the surge in conflicts in the Middle East.

The title of this chapter, “We're Losing the Fight against Nuclear Proliferation” is a quote from the keynote address of former Secretary of State James A. Baker, III, to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Workshop on “Policy Implications of Managing or Preventing Proliferation” that was held at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University in Houston, November 9–11, 2007. Dagobert L. Brito and I helped organize this conference on the 25th anniversary of the 1982 conference on “Strategies for Managing Nuclear Proliferation: Economic and Political Issues” held at Tulane University, which we had organized and that was published in a book with that title in 1983 edited by Dagobert L. Brito, Michael D. Intriligator, and Adele E. Wick (1983). My belief is that this observation of Secretary Baker was correct in 2007 and is even more correct today, although many government officials and policy analysts have not yet appreciated the truth of his observation.

Most fresh and good quality water resources, feasible for development and distribution, are already being used. Conflicts over water resources between bordering countries, states, counties, or sectors are a common occurrence.

Saul (Shaul) Arlosoroff graduated from the Israel Institute of Technology (Technion) in mechanical engineering (1953 – BSc, and 1954 – Dipl. Eng.) and later graduated from the Tel Aviv University/Management school – with MBA in public enterprises and economics (1970–1972). For over 50 years he has been involved in urban and rural water resources management, supply and demand aspects, in over 40 countries. He served as the World Bank Program Manager for water and sanitation (1981–1992), residing in Israel serving as an international consultant on mainly regional and local water and sanitation, and related conflicts, and political issues. He has published various articles within books and scientific events.