Peace and War With Endogenous State Capacity

Michael McBride (), Gary Milante and Stergios Skaperdas
Additional contact information
Gary Milante: The World Bank, Washington, DC, USA

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2011, vol. 55, issue 3, 446-468

Abstract: We explore how peace or war can occur in the presence of commitment problems. These problems can be reduced by institutions of good governance or, alternatively, state capacity which (a) can be considered a collective good and (b) can be improved through investments. We show how the likelihood of a peace agreement depends on the level of state capacity and on investments in state capacity made by adversaries. In accordance with existing evidence but contrary to various theories of conflict, we find that income levels unambiguously increase the chance of peace. Among other issues, we discuss the critical role of external actors in encouraging or discouraging commitment and in developing good governance institutions.

Keywords: conflict; institutions; governance; civil war (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
http://jcr.sagepub.com/content/55/3/446.abstract (text/html)

Related works:
Working Paper: Peace and War with Endogenous State Capacity (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jocore:v:55:y:2011:i:3:p:446-468

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().