Development Research and Action: Four Approaches

In this article the IDS history of leading ideas in development is reviewed. Following Burawoy's classification of the production of knowledge in sociology, the IDS40 Roundtables in South Asia are used as a basis to explore and critique four kinds of production of knowledge in development studies: professional, policy-related, critical and public knowledge. © Institute of Development Studies

The Power Allocation Game on A Network: Balanced Equilibrium

This paper studies a special kind of equilibrium termed as "balanced equilibrium" which arises in the power allocation game defined in \cite{allocation}. In equilibrium, each country in antagonism has to use all of its own power to counteract received threats, and the "threats" made to each adversary just balance out the threats received from that adversary. This paper establishes conditions on different types of networked international environments in order for this equilibrium to exist. The paper also links the existence of this type of equilibrium on structurally balanced graphs to the Hall's Maximum Matching problem and the Max Flow problem

Major Powers and Militarized Conflict

This article attempts to answer the question of why major powers engage in more active foreign policy behaviors than minor powers. It does so by comparing two explanations for the increased conflict propensity of major powers. The first explanation focuses on major powers’ observable capabilities, while the second stresses their different behavior. We incorporate both into an ultimatum model of conflict in which a state’s cost of conflict consists of both observable and behavioral components. Using data from the period from 1870 to 2001, we empirically illustrate the observable and behavioral differences between major and minor powers. We then utilize a decomposition model to assess the relative significance of the two explanations. The results suggest that most of the difference in conflict propensity between major and minor powers can be attributed to observable differences