Abstract To cut through inconsistent findings on non-state violence born of contested concepts and uneven data, I introduce the Tactics and Resources Dataset (TRD): a panel dataset on 649 violent and non-violent political non-state organisations. It focuses on their tactical choices and the types and origins of resources provided to them, alongside political, social, and economic indicators and key historical junctures. TRD offers a robust empirical foundation for studying how various types of resources and external sponsors influence escalation trajectories, why some actors transition into violence while others maintain restraint, and how tactics are interrelated. Another distinctive feature is its explicit modelling of the constituent country, in addition to home and target country. First empirical findings demonstrate the analytical value of the dataset, emphasising the crucial role of resources and sponsors in non-state actors’ escalation dynamics.
Abstract The impact of military expenditure on economic growth has been studied for decades, yet there is still no consensus on the subject. This paper analyses 177 empirical studies published by 301 authors between 2000 and 2026 to assess the reported effects of military expenditure on economic growth. Then, it tests hypotheses concerning potential systemic biases in published results related to researchers’ characteristics, countries of origin, and institutional affiliations. The estimation results provide only weak evidence for the existence of any such biases in the literature. Negative effects of military expenditure on economic growth are reported more frequently by researchers from English-speaking countries, whereas positive effects are more commonly reported by researchers from more democratic countries. Single-country studies, particularly those examining the authors’ own countries, are significantly more likely than cross-country studies to report a positive impact of military expenditure on growth.
Abstract The 2025 Sky Canada Project is the first national government-administered dataset on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP). Using the UAP context and these data, I examine how citizens’ security framing sensitivity (SFS) predicts support for governmental policy interventions including disclosure. I define security framing sensitivity (SFS) as the extent to which individuals interpret UAP through flight safety and national security lenses. I use the 2025 Sky Canada Project (n = 1,008) to construct within-person relative expectations for alternative policy measures. I find that citizens with a higher SFS are more supportive of all policy demands investigated. When relative policy expectations are examined, the findings suggest that citizens do not uniformly request disclosure as the most significant policy intervention. In particular, I find that a higher SFS is associated with a greater demand for government “seriousness” regarding UAP. Seriousness is interpreted as the expectation that government treat UAP as just another legitimate and important policy issue. This pattern may indicate that security-sensitive respondents differentiate between transparency and responsible governance. The implications are discussed.
International remittance flows represent one of the largest sources of external finance for many developing economies, yet their relationship with political stability remains contested. While some studies suggest that remittances are associated with improved household welfare and stability, others indicate that they may coincide with higher levels of unrest or insecurity. This paper examines the relationship between remittance inflows and national peace outcomes using cross-national panel data covering 115 countries from 2008 to 2024. The analysis focuses on the Global Peace Index (GPI), a multidimensional measure capturing domestic security, internal conflict, and militarisation. The study argues that the remittance-peace relationship is conditional rather than uniform and varies across institutional and distributional contexts. Using fixed-effects and dynamic panel estimators, the findings suggest that remittances are positively associated with GPI scores on average, indicating lower levels of peace. However, this association appears weaker in countries characterised by stronger institutional environments and stronger in societies with higher levels of income inequality. Rather than establishing definitive causal effects, the analysis extends existing cross-national research by examining how the remittance-peace relationship varies across institutional and distributional contexts.
This study sets the spotlight on the dynamic interplay between geopolitical risk (GPR, GPR acts, GPR threats) and developed as well as rising national currencies. Examination is conducted through the lens of elevated inflation induced by the Russia-Ukraine and subsequent conflicts. Using data from 14 September 2021 to 23 May 2025 and a spectrum of Quantile-VAR specifications, investigation focuses on alternative market conditions. GPR serves for absorbing national currency systemic risk. Safe havens like the US dollar lead causality in major national markets. In bear market conditions, geopolitical uncertainty has a larger footprint on major currencies while GPR threats mainly affect rising national currencies. Extreme inflation - like in the Turkish lira case-is the main settler of systemic risk in developing currencies. Highly devaluated currencies trigger crises in bear markets while work as money non-grata in bull markets and strengthen the risk appetite for alternative risky currencies. These outcomes contribute to the Guzman and Stiglitz (2021) theory about pseudo-wealth in crises.
This article addresses two research questions: (1) What are recent trends in nonstate actor (NSA) civilian mass killings by country locations and perpetrator groups? and (2) What are risk factors for NSA civilian mass killings based on economic choice theory and large-sample empirical inquiry? We summarize recent data on mass killings perpetrated by various NSAs including rebel groups; political, territorial, and identity militias; and terrorist organizations. Following a review of the empirical NSA mass killing literature, we develop an economic choice model of a NSA's resource allocations to direct (military) fighting and to violence against civilians when in contestation with a government over political, territorial, and/or ideological (identity) control. Our literature review and theoretical model guide our empirical inquiry into risk factors for NSA mass killings for a sample of 199 countries from 1989 to 2023. We find that low economic development, anocracy, natural resource dependency; high young male unemployment; ethnic division; population; civil and nonstate wars; regime change; and government mass killings each significantly elevate NSA mass killing risk. We conclude with suggestions on how NSA mass killings might be prevented or at least made less severe.
This research provides evidence of the multidimensional costs of crime victimization in Europe. Using data from 11 rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS) collected between 2002 and 2023, the study aims to estimate the effect of experienced victimization on two distinct domains of human perception: perceived safety and subjective well-being. The results indicate that crime victimization leads to a significant and enduring reduction in all explored metrics. Furthermore, gender-disaggregated analysis through interaction models reveals a gender-specific impact on perceived safety, which is 47 % larger for women than for men. Finally, the analysis identifies a significant temporal evolution of the consequences of victimization: the subjective well-being penalty associated with being a victim nearly doubled between 2002 and 2023. These findings challenge current policy paradigms that prioritize raw crime reduction over victim recovery and subjective security management.
This study examines the impact of economic sanctions on food production in SSA, measured by the Food Production Index (FPI). Using an unbalanced panel of SSA countries over the period 1990-2022, we employ a fixed-effects model with Driscoll-Kraay standard errors to address cross-sectional dependence, autocorrelation, and heteroskedasticity. The results reveal that both trade and financial sanctions exert negative and statistically significant effects on food production, with FPI declining by up to 8.77 % under trade and financial sanctions. Further, a two-stage mediation analysis identifies GDP per capita, inflation, and exchange rate volatility as key transmission channels through which sanctions undermine food production. These findings highlight the need for adaptive and resilient policy interventions to protect domestic food systems in sanctioned economies and to advance progress toward global food security goals.
Amidst a tense geopolitical environment and a rapidly evolving security landscape, this study investigates the determinants of alliance cohesion within NATO from its founding in 1949, examining both micro (dyadic) cohesion and macro (systemic) cohesion. The analysis employs an original dataset of more than 22,000 observations and introduces a novel operationalization of alliance political cohesion. A central finding outlines the role of trade asymmetry, which is strongly associated with alliance political cohesion. The results indicate that the structure of economic interdependence reflects a hierarchical structure within the alliance, enabling dominant actors to exert influence and sustain alignment through asymmetric dependence. Simultaneously, regime similarity, while it enhances cohesion in the full NATO sample, it is associated with greater divergence in US-ally relations. This pattern reflects the constraining role of domestic political processes, public opinion, and societal preferences in democratic states, which can limit alignment with US strategic choices. Overall, the findings contribute to the political economy of alliances by providing new evidence on how hierarchies, economic structure and political institutions jointly shape alliance behavior.
This note responds to the comments by Garbellini (2026) on the treatment of demand shocks in the Input-Output model in Stamegna et al. (2024). We show that the increase in arms expenditure is correctly identified as an investment shock, while increases in public expenditure on environmental protection, education, and health services should be more appropriately interpreted as public consumption shocks. Once import shares consistent with this interpretation are applied, the central result of Stamegna et al. (2024) - namely, the higher employment effects of civilian expenditure relative to arms procurement - is further reinforced, with only minor changes in estimates. Furthermore, in Stamegna et al. (2024) the shares of arms imports are estimated using data for European countries and, even under a zero-import-share assumption, the main results are shown to be robust. Finally, we show that reducing the dimensionality of the Input-Output table yields results that are almost identical to those that we obtain here using the disaggregated tables.
What drives some U.S. partners to gain access to advanced weapons cooperation such as the F-35 program, while others do not? Taking a relational and ideational scope, I argue that participation is not driven by strategic dependence but by ideational affinity operating through Security Alignment Network Embeddedness (SANE). States with liberal-democratic compatibility are selectively incorporated into dense, central positions within the U.S.-led security network, and this embeddedness - rather than realist security demands - creates both the opportunity and the willingness to enter high-cost technological cooperation. Using social network analysis to construct the SANE index, as well as panel-based structural measures for 130 states (2001-2023) within a mediation framework, empirical analysis shows that ideational affinity strongly predicts SANE, SANE in turn predicts F-35 participation, and affinity's effect is fully mediated through embeddedness, whereas strategic dependence has no systematic influence. A placebo test on the F-16 fighter and additional robustness checks confirm that this mechanism applies only to institutionalized advanced cooperation, not to general arms sales. The findings show that advanced weapons function as signals and symbols that consolidate hierarchy through embedded network relations.
This note clarifies a number of methodological issues in the treatment of sectoral investment shocks in the article by Stamegna, M., C. Bonaiuti, P. Maranzano, and M. Pianta. 2024. "The Economic Impact of Arms Spending in Germany, Italy, and Spain." Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy 30 (4): 393-422. In particular, the distinction between purchasing and supplying industries is not consistently followed, leading to an inaccurate specification of the final-demand vector and of the associated import propensities. As a result, the estimated multipliers cannot be interpreted as multipliers of investment expenditure in the sectors considered. The note outlines the standard input-output conventions governing gross fixed capital formation and briefly indicates how a scenario-based approach would be required to analyse investment effects in a conceptually consistent manner.
This article examines the impact of the Yemeni civil war on subjective well-being (SWB). Analyzing the relationship between regional war intensity and SWB for the period 2015-2023, while accounting for personal characteristics and regional fixed effects, we find a significant negative association between changes in fatality counts within a governorate and changes in SWB. In addition, the more recent political violence in a region, the stronger its negative effect on SWB.
This article takes as its starting point the warnings issued by the World Health Organization (WHO) on the perverse effects of a sedentary lifestyle on people’s health, resulting in additional health expenditure that diverts significant resources away from other areas of public spending. The research aims to empirically verify whether intra- and inter-state conflicts and political instability are associated with less active lifestyles among citizens, and whether sedentary lifestyles exacerbated by violent contexts have a different impact on men and women. The analysis is conducted by cross-referencing data on physical inactivity from WHO and data about ongoing conflicts and political instability in 192 countries from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) for the period 2000–2022. Despite the limitations due to the macroeconomic nature of the data compared to the microeconomic theoretical framework and the sensitivity of the results due to the introduction of education variables that distort the sample by reducing the amount of data for the poorest countries, our analysis showed a statistically significant negative association between the presence of inter- or intra-state conflicts and/or political instability, and physical activity. Furthermore, the analysis shows that the negative effects of the presence of conflict contexts on physical activity are not distributed evenly between men and women, being more intense for the latter. To our knowledge, this is the first study that attempts to verify, at the macroeconomic level, the effect of violence and instability on physical inactivity. The shift from a microeconomic approach to macroeconomic analysis represents the main limitation of this study, but it nevertheless is a first attempt to verify how contexts pervaded by violence can generate less healthy lifestyles and how these can, albeit only in part, explain gender differences in sedentary behavior.
This study revisits the long-standing debate on the guns-versus-butter phenomenon, that spending on military activity crowds out non-military expenditure. By focusing on Africa, we conjecture the crowding-out effect of military expenditure on health expenditure beyond government health expenditure, but also private and out-of-pocket health expenditure, and health outcomes. The empirical analysis based on the dynamic two-step system generalized method of moments reveals that omitting institutional quality measures biases the estimated crowding-out effects of military expenditure. After the inclusion, the results indicate that a 10 % increase in military expenditure leads to a 0.40 % decline in government health expenditure, accompanied by 0.01 % and 0.30 % increases in private and out-of-pocket health expenditure, respectively. Regarding health outcomes, the same increase in military expenditure results in a 0.20 % rise in maternal mortality, while infant mortality and life expectancy decline by 0.09 % and 0.01 %, respectively. Further analysis reveals that including the interaction term of military expenditure and institutional quality only reverses the crowding-out effect on government health expenditure and not on private and out-of-pocket health expenditure. For health outcomes, the favorable effect of the interaction term is only evident in reducing infant and maternal mortality rates. We offer policy recommendations to improve fiscal spending on the health sector in Africa as a paramount measure to improve human capital development and provide areas for further empirical contributions.
This article seeks to explain the outbreak of war between Ukraine and Russia in February 2022. The cause of the conflict appears to be very simple: Vladimir Putin wanted to go to war with Kyiv. However, as the bargaining model of war states: a conflict takes at least two actors, both of whom are determined to stop negotiating and resort to arms. We argue here that the negative spiral which led to the outbreak of war can be explained as the outcome of three interrelated strategic games that produced a failure in the US/NATO deterrence posture towards Moscow, an unclear (emboldening?) message sent by the US/NATO to Ukraine, and a misunderstanding of Russia's war aims (limited vs. unlimited) in Ukraine. A formal model is proposed that explains the outcome of the crisis as the equilibria produced by the interaction of the three actors' decisions.
Child soldiering has been identified as one of the most prevalent human rights violations perpetrated by rebels. The aim of this research is to elucidate the potential influence of third parties, external supporters, on child soldiering by rebels. The research hypothesises that rebel's likelihood of child recruitment could be differentiated depending on who the supporter is. The research argues that rebels with the backing of other insurgent groups are more likely to engage in child recruitment, whereas they may not engage in active child soldiering when having state supporters. The statistical results support the argument that rebels with rebel supporters are more likely to recruit child soldiers; however, the research also finds inconsistent outcomes on the impact of state supporters. This research emphasises the heterogeneity amongst types of supporters and contributes to the understanding of the relationships between external supporters and child recruitment, which has been relatively understudied.
This essay explores a fundamental modeling choice that must be addressed before an explanatory analytic narrative can be developed: whether to rely on a model fashioned around the specific event or political process under investigation using the procedure of "revealed preferences," or to "posit" preferences and situate the narrative in a more general model. It argues that analytic narratives that infer preferences from actual choices not only border on the tautological, but may also fail to take account of underlying preferences that are obscured by strategic behavior. In contrast, explanations derived from a more general model are enhanced when the model's expectations are confirmed empirically. By their very nature, the organizing power inherent in a generic model not only facilitates cross case comparisons, but also isolates the causal role played by critical explanatory variables. The latter advantage of using an 'off-the-shelf" model is demonstrated in an examination of three structurally similar, yet otherwise distinct, acute interstate crises: the Bosnian crisis of 1908-1909, the July crisis of 1914, and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.
This article examines the impact of military activities on public perceptions of terrorism within Europe. Utilizing data from the European Social Survey (ESS) database, which includes 92,636 respondents from 27 countries over the period 2005-2008, we analyse how increases in military expenditures and the frequency of armed conflicts, influence the public's fear of terrorism. Our findings show a clear correlation: as countries spend more on the military, participate more actively in conflicts, and their enemies are religiously divergent and less technologically developed, their citizens are more likely to fear terrorist attacks. However, this study also finds that higher levels of social and institutional trust, as well as greater educational attainment and diverse backgrounds of the citizens, can restrict these sentiments. The results highlight a dual need in policy-making: while military preparedness is crucial, enhancing social trust and investing in education could help reduce the heightened perceptions of terrorism risk that military actions may cause. This approach could balance national security needs with maintaining public calm and resilience.
