Development and the Liberal Peace

According to the liberal peace proposition, pairs of democratic states and pairs of states with extensive trade ties are more peaceful than other pairs of states, and democratic states are also more peaceful internally than other regime types. This article reviews the recent literature on the liberal peace, and proceeds to review the literature on how factors assoiciated with socio-economic development are related to democratization, democratic stability, and to the risk of war. Based on this review and a set of recent empirical studies, it argues that development is a precondition for the liberal peace.

Interest rate modeling with applications to counterparty risk

This thesis studies the estimation of credit exposure arising from a portfolio of interest rate derivatives. The estimation is performed using a Monte Carlo simulation. The results are compared to the exposure obtained under the current exposure method provided by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). We show that the simulation method provides a much richer set of information for credit risk managers. Also, depending on the current exposure and the nature of the transactions, the BIS method can fail to account for potential exposure. All test portfolios benefit significantly from a netting agreement, but the BIS approach tends to overestimate the risk reduction due to netting. In addition we examine the impact of antithetic variates and different time-discretizations. We find that a discretization based on derivatives' start and maturity dates may reduce simulation time significantly without loosing generality in exposure profiles. Antithetic variates have a small effect

Political opportunity structures, democracy, and civil war

Theories of mobilization suggest that groups are more likely to resort to violence in the presence of political opportunity structures that afford greater prospects for extracting concessions from the government or better opportunities to topple ruling governments. However, existing efforts to consider the possible influences of political opportunity structures on incentives for violence and civil war empirically have almost invariably relied upon measures of democracy to proxy for the hypothesized mechanisms, most notably the argument that the opposing effects of political accommodation and repression will give rise to an inverted U-shaped relationship between democracy and the risk of civil war. The authors detail a number of problems with measures of democracy as proxies for political opportunity structures and develop alternative measures based on the likely risks that political leaders will lose power in irregular challenges and their implications for the incentives for resort to violence. The authors evaluate empirically how the security with which leaders hold office influences the prospects of violent civil conflict. The findings indicate that recent irregular leader entry and transitions indeed increase the risk of conflict onset, while democratic institutions are found to decrease the risk of civil war, after controlling for the new measures of state weakness. </jats:p

It Takes Two

Theories of conflict emphasize dyadic interaction, yet existing empirical studies of civil war focus largely on state attributes and pay little attention to nonstate antagonists. We recast civil war in a dyadic perspective, and consider how nonstate actor attributes and their relationship to the state influence conflict dynamics. We argue that strong rebels, who pose a military challenge to the government, are likely to lead to short wars and concessions. Conflicts where rebels seem weak can become prolonged if rebels can operate in the periphery so as to defy a government victory yet are not strong enough to extract concessions. Conflicts should be shorter when potential insurgents can rely on alternative political means to violence. We examine these hypotheses in a dyadic analysis of civil war duration and outcomes, using new data on nonstate actors and conflict attributes, finding support for many of our conjectures. </jats:p

Reassessing the Democratic Peace: A Novel Test Based on the Varieties of Democracy Data

The democratic peace is one of the most robust findings in international relations. Yet it suffers from two important limitations. First, even those who fully embrace the democratic peace have difficulty precisely identifying which facet of democracy drives the result. Second, the vast majority of studies have relied on a single measure of democracy - the Polity index. This paper reassesses interstate conflict on several new measures of democracy and their disaggregated components from the Varieties of Democracy project in a global sample of 173 countries from 1900-2010 (www.v-dem.net). We theorize three distinct mechanisms of constraint that may explain why some countries do not engage in military conflict with each other: formal vertical (e.g. elections), informal vertical (e.g. civil society activism), and horizontal accountability (e.g. interbranch constraint on the executive). We find that the formal vertical channels of accountability provided by elections are not as crucial as horizontal constraint and the informal vertical accountability provided by a strong civil society.Earlier versions of the paper has been presented to the 2016 convention of the International Studies Association, the 2016 Swedish National Conference on Peace and Conflict Research, and the 2016 convention of the American Political Science Association. Thanks to Charity Butcher, Stephen Marr, Nils Petter Gleditsch, and Michael J. Reese for comments on earlier versions of the paper, and to Jennifer C. Boylan, Ryan P. Whittingham, Gudlaug Olafsdottir, and Kristina Petrova for excellent research assistance. The research has been funded by the Research Council of Norway, project 217995/V10, the University of Florida Foundation in support of the Raymond and Miriam Ehrlich Chair, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, grant P16-0124:1, and the Swedish Research Council, grant 2012-5562. Jan Teorell also wishes to acknowledge support from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship at the European University Institute, Florence, which made it possible for him to work on this paper

Civil Conflict and Development

Abstract This article examines the relationship between civil conflict and development. After outlining definitions of conflict and development, it considers a number of explanations of why they are empirically related. The extent to which conflict, such as civil war, is due to development is discussed, along with how conflict affects development. The article then describes the routes through which conflict reduces development, namely destruction, disruption, diversion, and dis-saving. It also considers why development reduces the risk of conflict, paying particular attention to poverty as motivation for conflict, opportunities for violence entrepreneurs, poor state capacity, decreased lootability in diversified economies, higher costs to violence in densely interacting societies, indirect effect through political institutions, and education and the cognitive ability to maintain peaceful relations. The article concludes by assessing future prospects for the conflict–development linkage, as well as the role of development in reducing incidences of armed conflict worldwide.</jats:p