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.

Measuring the intensity of conflicts in conservation

Conflicts between the interests of biodiversity conservation and other human activities pose a major threat to natural ecosystems and human well‐being, yet few methods exist to quantify their intensity and model their dynamics. We develop a categorization of conflict intensity based on the curve of conflict, a model originally used to track the escalation and deescalation of armed conflicts. Our categorization assigns six intensity levels reflecting the discourse and actions of stakeholders involved in a given conflict, from coexistence or collaboration to physical violence. Using a range of case studies, we demonstrate the value of our approach in quantifying conflict trends, estimating transition probabilities between conflict stages, and modeling conflict intensity as a function of relevant covariates. By taking an evidence‐based approach to quantifying stakeholder behavior, the proposed framework allows for a better understanding of the drivers of conservation conflict development across a diverse range of socioecological scenarios

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

100 The limits of the liberal peace

For the past fifty years, the Western states have enjoyed a continuous peace among themselves. How can this be explained? According to the proponents of the `liberal peace', the Western peace rests on the pacifying effects of democratic regimes and commercial links between the states. The thesis investigates this claim theoretically and empirically, with emphasis on the `trade promotes peace' aspect of the liberal peace proposition. To see whether there are limits to the liberal peace, this thesis investigates four core questions. Firstly, it studies the `trade promotes peace' hypothesis itself: Is the extent of the trade bonds between two states positively correlated with peace between them? Secondly, it looks at the realist counter-argument: If there is a relationship, is the impact of trade bonds really causally prior to the peace they are supposed to explain? The third question takes up an objection from `structuralist' or dependencia scholars: Can we expect any pacifying effects of highly asymmetrical trade relationships? And finally, drawing on the work of Richard Rosecrance, does the liberal peace require a certain amount of socio-economic development in the states that take part in it? The thesis discusses the theoretical arguments in the literature and seek to model them in a game-theoretical model. A set of hypotheses from the theoretical discussion is derived, and the thesis surveys a set of large-N quantitative studies to see how these fare when confronted with historical data. Finally, some of the hypotheses are tested using Cox regression, a method that in several aspects improves on the method employed in comparable earlier studies. The overall conclusion of the thesis is that interdependent pairs of states - dyads - really are more peaceful than non-interdependent pairs, but that this does not apply to dyads involving less-developed countries. For dyads of developed countries, on the other hand, trade is an important factor for peace. Furthermore, it is argued that the direction of causation counter-argument applies only below a certain interdependence threshold. Finally, the thesis finds no support for the idea that the `peace through interdependence' hypothesis requires a symmetrical relationship

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

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