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The use of physical force is, unfortunately, one of the key elements in the repertoire of human behaviour. Given the persistence and prominence of the intentional use of force, or violence, for human interactions, group behaviour and state actions, it is surprising how limited the degree of understanding of this topic still is. Many of the policies dealing with potential or actual group-based violence therefore remain imperfect. For example, not one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which have shaped the development aid discourse since 2000, refers to peace or security. This silence on security, conflict and peace is overdue to be remedied. The SIPRI Yearbook aims to fill existing knowledge gaps: it provides information on and endeavours to enhance understanding of conflict, peace and security, thereby enabling better policies to be made in the pursuit of a more peaceful, secure and equitable world. Social science has identified at least four further significant fields that exhibit knowledge gaps concerning the strategic use of force by groups in areas with weakened state institutions, including in undemocratic states. These four fields are the drivers of insecurity, conflict and fragility; trends in security, conflict and peace; the consequences of violent conflict and insecurity; and interventions and institutions for security and peace. Taken as a whole, these gaps imply the absence of a comprehensive system of security data tying together the different strands of peace research, which may be the most fundamental and systematic knowledge gap presented thus far. This lack of understanding greatly complicates peacebuilding and conflict prevention. It makes interventions in conflicts much more ideological, much less an issue of actual common interests and ultimately less successful -- leading to self-fulfilling prophecies or 'narratives' of failed interventions, seemingly demonstrating the limitations of such actions. If so many other issues in an individual's life or in society can be measured, it should be possible to develop metrics for peace and security, both at the individual and the aggregate, national levels. However, measuring perceptions of insecurity, counting the war dead, tallying incidents of weapon smuggling, developing proxies for peace and estimating security indicators is not sufficient. Despite these and many other developments referenced in the SIPRI Yearbook over the years, at least two important challenges remain. The first challenge is to define the remaining data needs to advance the study of security, conflict and peace. The second will be to develop a 'global system of security accounts', which brings together in a consistent framework the many variables measuring flows of security and peace. The SIPRI Yearbook has for almost five decades provided a narrative on global security developments, building on SIPRI's unique ability to gather, collate and interpret relevant trends. The time may be right to ask how this narrative can be formalized to further develop knowledge on and policies for security and peace. Adapted from the source document.

We identify research gaps and recent contributions in the economics of terror. We focus on the human drivers of insecurity as a key topic. Insecurity shapes growth, perceptions of individuals, and policy responses. The economics of security policies remains large under-researched. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]

This article analyzes the effects of household-level activity choices on farm household welfare in a developing country affected by mass violent armed conflict. The study uses household survey data from postwar Nampula and Cabo Delgado provinces in Northern Mozambique capturing many activity choices, including market participation, risk and activity diversification, cotton adoption, and social exchange, as well as income-and consumption-based measures of welfare. The study advances the literature on postwar coping and rural poverty at the micro level by estimating potentially endogenous activity choices and welfare outcomes using instrumental variables. The study finds that increasing the cultivated area and on-farm activities enhances postwar welfare of smallholders exploiting wartime survival techniques. Subsistence farming reduces income but does not affect consumption, while market participation has positive welfare effects. This suggests that postwar reconstruction policies should encourage the wartime crop mix but offer enhanced marketing opportunities for such crops. Cotton adoption, which was promoted by aid agencies in the postwar period, reduces household welfare per capita by between 16% and 31%, controlling for market access. This contradicts previous studies of postwar rural development that did not control for the war-related endogeneity. Hence, addressing the potential endogeneity of activity choices is important because the standard regression approach may lead to biased estimates of the impact of activity choice on welfare, which in turn may lead to biased policy advice. The article discusses and contextualizes these findings, concluding with a discussion of suitable pro-poor reconstruction policies for national governments and donors.

This introduction notes the importance of the economic evaluation of the consequences of terror & summarizes the contributions in this special issue. 9 References. [Copyright 2004 Elsevier B.V.]

Many Colombians are confronted with the ongoing conflict that influences their decision making in everyday life, including their behavior in labor markets. This study focuses on the impact of violent conflict on self-employment, enlarging the usual determinants with a set of conflict variables. Our estimation strategy compares three different estimates: one from fixed-effects panel data (OLS-FE), estimates using lagged conflict indicators instead of contemporaneous regressors, and instrumental variables (IV-FE) estimates. Our results show that a one standard deviation increase in net displacement rates increases the rate of self-employment by about 7 percent points. Dividing the self-employed into different sectors (services and agriculture), we find that net displacement increases self-employment in the services sector but has no effect in agriculture that is affected by attacks by rebel and paramilitary groups, instead. Looking at the income of self-employed individuals, an influx of displaced reduces sharply hourly income in the self-employment sector. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

In this article, we provide an introduction to the Special Issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution devoted to the impact of violent conflict on entrepreneurship in developing countries. First we note that there is insufficient attention in the literature on the impact of violent conflict on the firm or entrepreneur level. Then, after we define entrepreneurship and violent conflict, we provide a summary of the existing literature and give an overview of the contributions in this Special Issue. We conclude by noting policy implications and areas for further research. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]

We use aggregate country data as well as individual level survey to uncover, for the first time, the effect of extreme events such as natural disasters and terrorist attacks on entrepreneurial activity. We find that natural disasters and terrorist attacks influence individual perceptions of the rewards to entrepreneurship and, more surprisingly, extreme events affect entrepreneurship rates positively in a robust and significant way. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]

This article introduces a special issue on the micro-level dynamics of mass violent conflict. While most analyses of conflict typically adopt a regional, national or global perspective, often using country-level data, this special issue takes an explicit micro-level approach, focusing on the behaviour and welfare of individuals, households and groups or communities. At a fundamental level, conflict originates from individuals' behaviour and their repeated interactions with their surroundings, in other words, from its micro-foundations. A micro-level approach advances our understanding of conflict by its ability to account for individual and group heterogeneity within one country or one conflict. The contributors to this special issue investigate the nature of violence against civilians, the agency of civilians during conflict, the strategic interaction between civilians and armed actors, the consequences of displacement, the effectiveness of coping strategies and the impact of policy interventions. The core message from these articles is that in order to understand conflict dynamics and its effects on society, we have to take seriously the incentives and constraints shaping the interaction between the civilian population and the armed actors. The kind of interaction that develops, as well as the resulting conflict dynamics, depend on the type of conflict, the type of armed actors and the characteristics of the civilian population and its institutions.

This paper reviews both current practices and common challenges of measuring the causes, functioning, and consequences of violent conflict at the micro-level. The authors review existing conflict -- and violence-related survey questionnaires, with a particular focus on the World Bank's Living Standard Measurement Surveys. Further, they discuss methodological challenges associated with empirical work in conflict-affected areas—such as operationalizing a definition of conflict, using the appropriate units of analysis, deciding on the timing of the survey, dealing with data biases and conducting surveys in an ethically sound manner—and propose ways to improve the usefulness of existing surveys to analyze conflict processes at the micro-level. Violent conflict, households, survey methods, questionnaire design.

In this article, we estimate the total costs of the German participation in the Afghanistan war, both past and future. This is a hugely complex and uncertain calculation, which depends on several important assumptions. These assumptions pertain to the different cost channels and the shares of these channels that can be attributed to the German participation in the war. By calculating the costs of the German participation, we provide a framework for other researchers to do the same with respect to other countries. The article can function as a roadmap for researchers focusing on this topic. In the end we find that, in the most realistic of several possible scenarios regarding the duration and intensity of the German participation in the war in Afghanistan, the German share of the net present value of the total costs of the war ranges from 26 billion Euro to 47 billion Euro. This large range reflects the uncertainties with which the costs must be estimated. On an annual basis, we estimate that the German participation in the war costs between 2.5 and 3 billion Euro. This contrasts with the official war budget, which is little over 1 billion Euro for 2010, showing that governments may not adequately represent the costs of military action. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]