Peace Studies & Conflict Resolution books

This study contributes to the debate on whether defense spending encourages or hinders economic growth. The effect of politics on economic growth in developing societies is assessed, with a focus on the Middle East. The study is the first to add conflict variables to the production function defense-growth model and test them empirically across countries and regions, and provide robust empirical evidence on the differential effects of interstate and intrastate conflicts on economic growth. The study provides compelling empirical evidence and guidelines to policy decision makers on how to allocate the resources of their states and adopt policies that promote political economic development. The study urges Third World leaders to improve levels of freedom, democracy, and openness of their political systems because the results confirm that political factors are at least as important as economic factors in promoting economic growth. Furthermore, the results attest that the reallocation of resources from military to the civilian sector is the sine qua non to improve the performance of developing countries' economies.

"Economics of War and Peace: Economic, Legal, and Political Perspectives" brings together recent, cutting-edge research on economic factors affecting peace and war. This important area of continuing research was the focus of an international conference held at the University of Sydney in June 2009 and these chapters are partly drawn from among the best contributions to that meeting. The book weaves together threads from a number of themes in current research including new theoretical perspectives on the economic foundations of peace, violence and war within countries, connections between international trade and inter-state conflict, and the role of legal/institutional factors in international and internal conflict. Through a focused exploration of these related topics emerge areas of scholarly consensus as well as areas of continued debate. International in scope, it is the only book to explicitly bring together economic, legal and political scholarship to focus on the problem of conflict. It employs a range of modern social science analytical methods, including qualitative cases, econometrics, and game-theoretic models, to rigorously advance understanding of conflict within and between countries.

This volume of "Contributions to Conflict Management, Peace Economics and Development" includes some of the selected papers presented by scholars in a European Peace Science Network Meeting recently held in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Chapters in this volume cover the conflicts in Maoist India, South America, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The authors have employed highly sophisticated quantitative techniques and principles of Economics and Political Science in determining the causes of these ethnic conflicts and effects on human and material resources.

This volume explores three recent challenges the military faces: changing missions, changing socio-economic and demographic conditions, and end of conscription. The military will have to change its view of the world, the nature of conflicts and its profession considerably.

International Social Movement Research

Foreign affairs practitioners and policy analysts claim that international arms embargoes usually fail due to the lack of political will among national governments to implement and enforce these restrictions. This volume confronts this critique directly, first by describing a more nuanced assessment of success, and then by presenting well-informed empirical and case-study chapters that reveal arms embargoes to be more effective than often understood. The chapters in this book examine some of the more complex cases of arms embargoes such as Iraq, Pakistan, Angola, Liberia and the Great Lakes region of Africa. Readers will find data and assessments not available in prior studies, as well as frameworks that can be replicated in future research. The book concludes with policy suggestions for how arms embargoes might be strengthened and their political objectives more readily attained.