Conflict and Peace Economics: Retrospective and Prospective Reflections on Concepts, Theories, and Data

Abstract

In reviewing the sweep of the extant literature over the past century or so, we first define and present an overview and conceptual synthesis of the field of conflict economics with a special view toward the subfield of peace economics. We explain that standard textbook economics is a special case of conflict economics and discuss assumptions, subject matter, and interrelations between economics and conflict. We also briefly discuss the nature of the peace and security good, including transboundary and transgenerational aspects. Second, focusing on new research opportunities arising from behavioral, identity, and social network economics we identify entire branches of economic theory that have been little harvested as yet to help address important aspects of conflict and peace. We provide illustrative models, each tied to economics’ standard rational choice setup. Third, we reflect on the use of conflict-related datasets in empirical research, illustrated with examples pertaining to data validity, missing data, data merging, and data mining.
KEYWORDS:

• conflict economics
• peace economics
• appropriation
• exchange
• conflict data
• quantitative social science

Description