Institutions and conflict

Can institutions resolve ethnic conflict ?

High quality institutions, such as rule of law, bureaucratic quality, freedom from government expropriation, and freedom from government repudiation of contracts, mitigate the adverse economic consequences of ethnic fractionalization identified by Easterly and Levine 1997 and others. In countries with sufficiently good institutions, ethnic diversity does not lower growth or worsen economic poli...

Unbundling Institutions at the Local Level: Conflict, Institutions and Income in Burundi

We use a new dataset from Burundi to analyze the role of local institutions as determinants of income, and distinguish between three distinct dimensions of the institutional framework: (i) property rights security, (ii) local political leadership and (iii) social capital. Using measures of conflict intensity during the civil war as instruments for local institutional quality, we demonstrate tha...

Domestic Political Institutions and the Evolution of International Conflict 1

Normative conflict detection and resolution in cooperating institutions

Institutions (also called normative frameworks) provide an effective mechanism to govern agents in open distributed systems. An institution specifies a set of norms, with respect to the achievement of a goal or goals, that regulate agents’ behaviours in terms of permissions, empowerments and obligations. However, in most real circumstances, several institutions probably have to cooperate to gov...

A Conflict of Institutions: The WTO and EU Agricultural Policy

Europe has long defied GATT/WTO rules on agricultural trade during adjudication of trade disputes, but agreed to major reforms of its agricultural policies in the Uruguay Round. Such variation in liberalization outcomes raises questions about when nations will delegate to international institutions and how EU institutions influence its trade policy. This paper focuses on the policy process to e...