A total of 226 armed conflicts have been recorded for the period 1946–2002.1 During the period 1989–2002, there were 116 armed conflicts in 79 locations around the world (Table I). In 2002, there were 31 conflicts active in 24 places, both figures being lower than in 2001 (Gleditsch et al., 2002). The number of wars decreased significantly from 11 to 5 in 2002. This was due to the fact that the...

The Balkan Wars of 1991–2002 were the deadliest confl icts in Europe since the Second World War – one dominated by ethnic cleansing resulting in over 100,000 deaths, many non-combatant civilians, with over a million people displaced from their traditional homes. The major parties in the 1991–1996 war were ethnic Croatians (Roman Catholic), Bosniacs (Muslims), and ethnic Serbs (Orthodox Christia...

Why do wars continue even when their original causes are resolved? I offer a rationalist explanation: wars end in a negotiated settlement only when wartime and peacetime balances of power are approximately equal. Since fighting tends to shift the wartime balance of power, war creates its own commitment problems which can preclude a peaceful settlement—even after its initial causes have become i...

This collection of essays investigates issues related to elections and wars. In the first essay, we present an auction-type model of war and characterize its unique equilibrium. We offer three different explanations for the causes of wars. First, as an individual-level explanation of war, we show that wars occur due to information asymmetry between governments. Second, as a societal-level expla...

Gastrointestinal problems are common during wars, and they have exerted significant adverse effects on the health of service members involved in warfare. The spectrum of digestive diseases has varied during wars of different eras. At the end of the 20th century, new frontiers of military medical research emerged due to the occurrence of high-tech wars such as the Gulf War and the Kosovo War, in...

The Wistar Audiogenic Rat (WAR) strain is a genetic model of sound-induced reflex epilepsy which was selected starting from audiogenic seizures susceptible Wistar rats. Wistar resistant rats were used as WAR's control in this study. In the acute situation, audiogenic seizures (AS) in WARs mimic tonic-clonic seizures and, in the chronic protocol, mimic temporal lobe epilepsy. AS have been shown ...

Sociologists have long recognized that historical events, such as wars, depressions, and natural disasters, can affect the trajectories of people’s lives and can, more broadly, alter social structure. The following paper examines the effect of a particular type of event, war, on a particular facet of people’s lives, their ability to work. The paper uses longitudinal data from the Panel Study of...

The American Indian Wars provide unusual insight into debates about group structure and military behavior. These conflicts present a cross-section of experience with a relatively high degree of unit homogeneity; it is possible to gather information on tribes that fought as well as those that did not; scholars have recorded information about the tribes’ political and economic structures in detai...