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The article reviews the literature on the relationship between democracy and armed conflict, internal as well as interstate. The review points to several similarities between how democratic institutions affect both conflict types. It summarizes the main empirical findings and discusses the most prominent explanations as well as the most important objections raised to the finding, empirically and theoretically. To a large degree, the empirical finding that pairs of democratic states have a lower risk of interstate conflict than other pairs holds up, as does the conclusion that consolidated democracies have less conflict than semi-democracies. The most critical challenge to both conclusions is the position that both democracy and peace are due to pre-existing socio-economic conditions. I conclude that this objection has considerable leverage, but it also seems clear that economic development is unlikely to bring about lasting peace alone, without the formalization embedded in democratic institutions.

The gravity model of trade states that the volume of trade between two countries is proportional to the product of the sizes of the two countries and the inverse of the distance between them. The gravity model, however, was initially suggested for other types of social interactions, and it also predicts well the probability of militarized disputes. This raises a concern about omitted-variable bias in the literature on trade and conflict: if the gravity model is correlated with both trade and conflict, it is necessary to control for the size of both countries in the dyad. In this article, I analyze the nature of this bias both empirically and theoretically. I find that a correct model specification leads to a stronger relationship between trade and conflict than in the traditional models. However, the empirical finding must be reinterpreted: what is crucial is not the relationship between the value of the bilateral trade and the size of the larger economy in the dyad (`trade dependence'), but rather `trade efficiency'—the extent to which the two countries trade more than expected from the gravity model.

Countries have better abilities and stronger incentives to engage in militarized conflicts the larger and more powerful they are. The article applies Zipf's notion of a ``gravity model'' to the risk of interstate conflict and argues that the empirical relationship between size and distance and conflict is stronger than any other identified in dyadic statistical studies of interstate conflict. Most empirical studies of interstate conflict fail to take size properly into account. The article shows that controlling for size variables improves the estimation of other variables of interest, and it explores the impact of omitting size variables for the investigation of the power preponderance versus power parity debate. The results indicate that even though a power capability ratio variable suggests asymmetric dyads are less conflict-prone, the risk-increasing effect of power itself means that a unilateral increase of power in one country increases the risk of conflict.

Esteban & Ray formalize the argument that conflict is likely to be more intense when individuals in a society are divided into two clearly identifiable groups where differences within groups are considerably smaller than differences between groups. They show that such polarization increases conflict, and they introduce a theoretical basis for its quantitative measurement. This article applies Esteban & Ray's (ER) measure of polarization to two international distributions: the world income distribution and the distribution of political systems. The article discusses extensions of the ER measure that render it independent of the number of groups in the system, and investigates empirically whether any of the three types of polarization are associated with conflict in the form of militarized interstate disputes. The results are rather inconclusive, despite the fact that some of the micro-level regularities consistent with the polarization and conflict argument have solid support in previous studies.

A measure— trade efficiency—that models the extent to which individual economic entities within two countries trade with each other is used to investigate the claim that symmetrical dependence on trade between two states is required for the trade bond to reduce the probability of interstate conflict. This measure is better suited to study this question than existing measures since it is by definition uncorrelated with asymmetries in country size. The relationship between the different conceptions of interdependence and militarized conflict is explored in an expected utility model of trade, distribution of resources, and conflict. For the particular pacifying mechanisms of trade studied here, the model supports the view that trade reduces the incentives for conflict but that this effect is most clearly seen in relatively symmetric dyads.

An important key to reducing the suffering due to civil war is to shorten conflicts. The marked decrease in the incidence of conflicts in the 1990s was mostly due to a high number of conflict terminations, not to a decrease in the number of new wars. The articles in this special issue treat theoretically and empirically the determinants of civil war onset, duration, and termination, with particular emphasis on duration and termination. This introduction gives an overview of the articles in the special issue and discusses a few central topics covered by the different contributions: rebel group motivations, the importance of financing, military factors, misperception, and commitment problems. Finally, the article sums up some policy recommendations that may be derived from the articles in the issue.