Abstract The international community increasingly promotes referendums as it intervenes in self-determination conflicts around the world. However, ability of to bring about peace remains uncertain. This paper develops argument that conflict resolution potential is conditional, depending on whether or not they are held under mutual agreement relevant minority and majority groups. When mutually a...

Bizumic et al. (2013) have recently shown that attitudes towards peace and war reflect two distinct constructs rather than two poles of a single dimension. We present an attempt at validating the French version of their 16-item Attitudes toward Peace and War Scale (APWS) on five distinct (mainly Belgian) French-speaking samples (total N = 808). Confirmatory factor and criterion validity analyse...

We present a non-technical account of ambiguity in strategic games and show how it may be applied to economics and social sciences. Optimistic and pessimistic responses to ambiguity are formally modelled. We show that pessimism has the effect of increasing (decreasing) equilibrium prices under Cournot (Bertrand) competition. In addition the effects of ambiguity on peace-making are examined. It ...

On the Escalation and De-Escalation of Conflict We introduce three variations of the Hirshleifer-Skaperdas conflict game to study experimentally the effects of post-conflict behavior and repeated interaction on the allocation of effort between production and appropriation. Without repeated interaction, destruction of resources by defeated players can lead to lower appropriative efforts and high...

Play is a widespread phenomenon in the animal kingdom. But only humans engage in games, that is, in rule-governed, conventional play activities. We move pieces of wood on a board according to some arbitrary rules, making some of the pieces queens, others knights, and the whole activity that of chess. We walk on stages and declare war or peace—in games of makebelieve. No other species engages in...

Crowd control has become increasingly important in urbanized military operations such as peace keeping, riot control, disaster management, emergency evacuation, and rescue operations. In this paper, we describe an architecture for simulating virtual crowd to aid in the training, planning and decision making process in the area of military operations. Our system makes use of the light-weight age...

This essay provides an overview of the way in which regions and regional institutions have become increasingly important in debates about international security, making it possible to speak of a ‘regional dimension of global security’. After discussing some of the regional sources of insecurity past and present, and introducing the debate about the so-called ‘regionalization of security’, it fo...

To understand the social driving forces that lead to environmental change, we must account for the role of social interactions, the development of norms of behavior and the institutionalization of rules and norms — the development of ‘social capital’. This paper demonstrates the utility of social capital theory by articulating linkages between human decision making at individual and collective ...

Abstract This article analyzes South Korea’s unification policies and makes ethical suggestions in light of Christian theological theories war peace. Since 1948, North Korea have repeatedly confronted each other with heavily armed forces. Unification would be considered the achievement Korean people’s endeavour to deter military warfare promote peace between two Koreas. In this regard, it is un...