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This article tests the hypothesis that ordinary people favor punishing badly behaved foreign actors to make them "pay" for their crimes rather than purely to protect national security interests. In an undergraduate sample, people's endorsement of the principle of retributive punishment was related to their support for punishing transgressor states and their support for torturing detainees, controlling for partisanship, ideology, humanitarian and security values, and beliefs about the efficacy of force. The interstate transgression scenarios included a state sponsoring terror attacks against a rival, a nuclear proliferator, and a small, unnamed aggressor. Retributive dispositions were also strongly related to support for the death penalty, which helps explain prior findings that American death penalty supporters are unusually bellicose toward foreign wrongdoers. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

This article tests the hypothesis that ordinary people favor punishing badly behaved foreign actors to make them "pay" for their crimes rather than purely to protect national security interests. In an undergraduate sample, people's endorsement of the principle of retributive punishment was related to their support for punishing transgressor states and their support for torturing detainees, controlling for partisanship, ideology, humanitarian and security values, and beliefs about the efficacy of force. The interstate transgression scenarios included a state sponsoring terror attacks against a rival, a nuclear proliferator, and a small, unnamed aggressor. Retributive dispositions were also strongly related to support for the death penalty, which helps explain prior findings that American death penalty supporters are unusually bellicose toward foreign wrongdoers.

If trade affects the costs of conflict, does it also influence the likelihood of mediation attempts? This article argues that dense bilateral trade between antagonists yields high opportunity costs since it is expensive to seek alternative markets and the belligerents will be highly vulnerable to sanctions from their counterpart. This creates incentives for combatants to limit hostility and settle conflicts through mediation. By contrast, the extent to which belligerents trade with other states decreases the likelihood of mediation since antagonists with alternative partners can mitigate the consequences of sanctions and substitute for markets, which may be at risk or even lost because of the outbreak of a dispute. The divergent effects of different trade ties imply that the impact of bilateral trade on the prospects for mediation should vary conditional on countries' trade with states outside the dyad and vice versa. This article demonstrates that this is partially valid.

If trade affects the costs of conflict, does it also influence the likelihood of mediation attempts? This article argues that dense bilateral trade between antagonists yields high opportunity costs since it is expensive to seek alternative markets and the belligerents will be highly vulnerable to sanctions from their counterpart. This creates incentives for combatants to limit hostility and settle conflicts through mediation. By contrast, the extent to which belligerents trade with other states decreases the likelihood of mediation since antagonists with alternative partners can mitigate the consequences of sanctions and substitute for markets, which may be at risk or even lost because of the outbreak of a dispute. The divergent effects of different trade ties imply that the impact of bilateral trade on the prospects for mediation should vary conditional on countries' trade with states outside the dyad and vice versa. This article demonstrates that this is partially valid. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

This article analyzes the two-stage problem a country faces in first choosing the optimal amount of arms to acquire and then deciding whether it can improve upon the allocation that emerges after the first stage by engaging in a military conflict. A model is introduced based on the concept of economic externality to generate conflict situations in the first stage. Then comparative static results are derived by varying the parameters of this model, for example, the rate of technological progress in the military sector and the rate of economic growth, and examining whether the conflict situation improves or worsens as the social welfare of the nations change accordingly. Uncertainty is then introduced and the results are analyzed. Finally, the last part explores the conditions under which the conflict situations presented in the first stage actually lead to the outbreak of war.