Peace Science Research Articles

BSHAP project strong ground motion database and selection of suitable ground motion models for the Western Balkan Region

The Harmonization of Seismic Hazard Maps in the Western Balkan Countries Project (BSHAP) was funded for 7 years by NATO Science for Peace and Security Program to support the preparation of new seismic hazard maps of the Western Balkan Region. In the framework of BSHAP, the regional free field strong motion network capacity was significantly increased by deployed recorders (Gulerce et al. in Final report of improvements in the Harmonized Seismic Hazard Maps for the Western Balkan Countries (BSHAP-2) Project, NATO SfP-984374. http://wbalkanseismicmaps.org/ , 2015) and the BSHAP strong motion database that includes both pre-BSHAP (mostly analogue) and post-BSHAP (all digital) recordings was compiled. The BSHAP strong motion database includes uniformly processed strong motions along with the related earthquake metadata and station information; therefore, it provides a solid base for the ground motion characterization studies in the region. The established database is used for selection of the ground motion prediction equations (GMPEs) to be employed in the probabilistic seismic hazard assessment by comparing the compiled strong ground motions with the predictions of candidate global and Euro-Mediterranean GMPEs in a systematic manner. Details of the selection strategy including the analysis of model predictions for ground motion scaling, data testing to evaluate the model performance, and ranking is provided here along with the GMPE logic tree used in the proposed seismic hazard maps by Kuka et al. (Bull Earthq Eng, under review).

Disinformation and Misinformation: Organizational Self-Assessment in the Military

When can organizations assess themselves and adapt? The current literature articulates a number of answers, but lacks a clear understanding of how organizations evaluate their own personnel. This paper considers a Principal-Agent relationship and characterizes a “Self-Policing” dynamic in which Agents may inform on one another to the Principal. In the model, Principals evaluate Agents in an effort to replace incompetent Agents while retaining competent ones. The results indicate that there will be higher turnover when the probability of a competent replacement is greater or after poor outcomes provided that the cost to firing a Subordinate is sufficiently low. These characteristics also make Principals less able to identify incompetent Agents, increasing the likelihood that incompetent Agents will be retained and competent Agents will be fired. This paper highlights the need for further work on intraorganizational dynamics to further our understanding of conflict. ∗I would like to thank Cliff Carrubba, Michael Horowitz, Danielle Jung, Shawn Ramirez, Eric Reinhardt, Dan Reiter, Toby Rider, Emily Ritter, Idean Salehyan, Elizabeth Saunders, Jun Koga Sudduth, and Patricia Sullivan for detailed comments on previous drafts of this paper, which have been presented at the 2015 Peace Science Society International Annual Meeting, the 2016 International Studies Association Annual Meeting, and the 2016 Online Peace Science Colloquium. Correspondence: wawagst@emory.edu.

About the Cover

Recounts the life and professional achievements of Anthony Schuyler Arrott. Arrott discovered point singularities in liquid crystals in 1970. He applied the insights he and Press obtained to magnetism, where he demonstrated the utility of thinking in terms of curls and divergences to describe magnetic confi gurations. He called attention to the swirls that had been unnoticed for 40 years in the basic Bloch domain-wall configuration in rectangular parallelepipeds introduced in 1935 by Landau & Lifshitz. In 2004, working with Riccardo Hertel, Arrott found the connection between the magnetization pattern in an ellipsoid with three unequal axes, calculated using finite elements, and the Landau-Lifshitz pattern in a rectangular parallelepiped. In 2016 he showed that the Landau-Lifshitz domain configuration evolves, upon reducing an applied magnetic field, through the formation of an extended octupole of magnetic charge density in a helical pattern, connecting the swirl on one surface to the swirl on an opposite surface. Since 1954 Arrott has published over 200 journal articles and several reviews of his wide range of studies. Arrott was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 1969 and of the Royal Society of Canada in 1983. He received the Gold Medal for Physical Sciences from the Science Council of British Columbia in 1982 and the Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Physics from the Canadian Association of Physicists in 1986. In 1988-1989 he served as president of the Canadian organization, Science for Peace. He is currently affiliated with Virginia Commonwealth University (since 2006) and Morgan State University, Baltimore (since 2013), in addition to Simon Fraser University. His current research is on micromagnetic analyses of three-dimensional patterns of ferromagnetism obtained using a magneto-optical microscope from Rudolf Shaefer and simulation tools from Michael R. Scheinfein.

Introduction to the Proceedings of the 15th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference

Article Introduction to the Proceedings of the 15th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference was published on December 1, 2015 in the journal Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy (volume 21, issue 4).

Tilting at a windmill? The conceptual problem in contemporary peace science

Peace scientists such as Kenneth Boulding, Ted Gurr, Thomas Schelling, and Charles Tilly were fastidious in their use of abstract concepts free of the political baggage that politicians, policymakers, and pundits necessarily foist upon the terms in the rough and tumble world of politics. Too much contemporary peace science fails to follow their lead. This essay describes this problem and proposes a useful heuristic to help us improve.

Curation on Campus: An Exhibition Curatorial Experiment for Creative Industries Students

Curation on Campus: An Exhibition Curatorial Experiment for Creative Industries Students

Erratum

Conflict Management and Peace Science 32(1), February 2015 Special Issue: Exploring Interdependence in International Conflict Management Guest editors: Andrew P. Owsiak and Molly M. Melin The articles in this issue were published in the wrong order due to an error at the publisher. The correct running order for the issue is: Articles The interdependence of conflict management attempts Paul F. Diehl and Patrick Regan Escalation in international conflict management: A foreign policy perspective Molly M. Melin Between indifference and coercion: Third-party intervention techniques in ongoing disputes Renato Corbetta Forecasting conflict management in militarized interstate disputes Andrew P. Owsiak Strategic forum selection and compliance in interstate dispute resolution Vanessa A. Lefler The spatial contagion of international mediation Tobias Böhmelt Thanks to 2014 Reviewers

Structural Genomics Support for Infectious Disease Drug Design.

Structural Genomics Support for Infectious Disease Drug Design.

Introduction to the Proceedings of the 14th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference

Article Introduction to the Proceedings of the 14th Jan Tinbergen European Peace Science Conference was published on December 1, 2014 in the journal Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy (volume 20, issue 4).

Bringing peace back in: Presidential address to the Peace Science Society, 2013

Two recent books, Pinker’s the Better Angels of our Nature (2011) and Goldstein’s Winning the War on War (2011), demonstrate that the long-term trend in human society is toward a dramatic reduction in violence. The reductions that they describe range from state-led violence against subjects to crime and to interstate war. This reduction in violence over the long stretch of human history, moreover, is so dramatic that Pinker opines that we should no longer ask the question ‘‘what causes war’’ but rather we should begin to ask the question ‘‘what causes peace’’. This is not a new idea, and in fact recent scholarship is beginning to make inroads (e.g. Goertz et al., 2011; Hoglund and Kovacs, 2010; Wallensteen, 2012), but the idea that social scientists, historically and in general, focus on the wrong question is a key facet of my argument. Peace to us has many faces and it goes well beyond the traditional emphasis on the absence of war, both interand intra-state, to incorporate the conditions under which states have little need or incentive to use violence against their citizens, and conversely, citizens have little motivation or incentive to challenge a state by force of arms. In a perfectly peaceful environment our lexicon would only use words like ‘‘political repression’’, ‘‘genocide’’ and ‘‘civil war’’ in the context of historical discussions about social evolution from our violent past to our peaceful contemporary world. Two main points motivate this paper: (a) that members of the Peace Science community should study peace directly rather than through war; and (b) that we should not let our methodological sophistication obscure the value-laden aspect of our intellectual focus. We should embrace the values that are at the foundation of our subject matter and we should do so without sacrificing rigor. I start with the observation that contemporary social science focuses primarily on the study of war and lesser forms of armed conflict, and unless we study the pathways to peace as vigorously as we study those to war, we might miss the forest because the trees are in our way. Moreover, we should not assume that, because we have some understanding of the pathways to violence and war, we then understand the pathways to peace. Put differently, the methods of achieving peace are probably not simply the negative of the pathways to

Peace Science: A Multiple Attribute Approach

AbstractThe major dependent variable in peace science research has appropriately been death from inter-group conflict with war the major focus. However, a tenable hypothesis is that the same or similar motivations result in other risks to life. For example, the number of human deaths each year from preventable nonmilitary sources is approximately 20,000,000. Most major sources that assess the loss of life from military and related conflicts identify, over a long period of time, not more than 2,000,000/year. This dependent variable may also be extended to the non-military category. For example, evidence has emerged that approximately twenty-percent of the active duty female members of the US military are sexually assaulted by other members of the military during their period of service (Dick 2012). Thus, it seems reasonable to address a variety of phenomena that may be represented by a common set of attributes. These variables should include degree of physical injury, size of acting units, and public vs. private agents. Preventable non-military death is similar to the classification for death from war except that the agents are frequently private, such as corporations. This analysis is intended to contribute to a continuing discussion of the boundaries of the peace science domain. One function of the discussion is to foster the examination of a range of behaviors that may derive from a set of basic motives and goals. The discussion section concludes with reference to the problem of understanding a central factor in inter-group conflict – identification with the group.

Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Oleg Nikolaevich Bykov: life in science, diplomacy and fight for peace

Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Oleg Nikolaevich Bykov: life in science, diplomacy and fight for peace

Walter Isard and the Role of Regional Science and Peace Science for the Poor Countries

The objective of this article is to show how the techniques of regional science and peace science can be applied for the economic development of poor countries. This article also describes techniques for integrating regional science and peace science.

Peace Studies: Basics and Issues

Although questions of peace are different in context, for specific questions today, we need a science of peace in a universal sense. It is true that sometimes talking about peace is too unspecified and therefore too general. The term peace in its common sense has passed its peak. Instead of talking about peace we prefer talking much more concretely and bindingly for example about (racism and) intercultural learning, (violence in family and) nonviolent education, (exploitation and) fair economic structures, (war and) nonviolent conflict transformation, (patriarchalism and) gender awareness, (ecological destruction and) animal protection. Developments of differentiation are positive. We can meet questions of peace on different levels of living together and in different parts of our life and therefore in a lot of terms describe special problem areas. Anyway we have to reflect on the universal dimensions as well as the principles of peace. Using the term makes sense furthermore.

Reconsidering trade and conflict simultaneity: The risk of emphasizing technique over substance

Goenner ( Conflict Management and Peace Science, 28(5): 1–20, 2011) criticizes the simultaneous equations regression model (SEM) of bilateral trade flows (BT) and militarized interstate disputes (MID) developed by Keshk, Pollins and Reuveny ( Journal of Politics 66(4): 1155–1179, 2004) and extended by Keshk, Reuveny and Pollins ( Conflict Management and Peace Science, 27(1): 1–20, 2010). Like Hegre, Oneal and Russett ( Journal of Peace Research 47(6): 763–774, 2010), he does not agree with Keshk, Reuveny and Pollins that a larger BT has no effect on MID. Unlike Hegre et al. (2010), who focus on the role of distance between capital cities on MID in Keshk et al.’s (2004) SEM, Goenner finds faults in their econometrics. Once these faults are fixed, he says, a larger BT reduces the probability of MID. His analysis is unconvincing. We believe our essay is of interest beyond the trade and conflict research community, as it illustrates the risk of emphasizing technique over substance.

Mission accomplished: A reply to Reuveny and Keshk

Reuveny and Keshk (“Reconsidering trade and conflict simultaneity: The risk of emphasizing technique over substance,” this issue, 2013) argue that the econometric techniques used by Goenner ( Conflict Management and Peace Science 28(5): 459–477, 2011) to test and control for endogeneity when estimating the relationship between trade and conflict lack substance. Both sets of authors propose the use of instrumental variable methods, which are known by econometricians to be the natural remedy for estimation with potentially endogenous regressors. Where Goenner (2011) and Reuveny and Keshk (2013) agree is that theory should guide variable selection and the model’s specification. Yet they differ in that, while econometric tests cannot replace theory, one should not trust the appropriateness of the model’s specification based on theory alone – one should also verify. Otherwise, as Goenner (2011) notes, attempts to control for endogeneity may fail.

In Memoriam: Walter Isard

Walter Isard passed away on November 6, 2010. Walter Isard (1919-2010) was Professor Emeritus of Economics and Regional Science at the Cornell University. Walter's contribution to science is widely acknowledged. He pioneered the fields of both regional science and peace science. Walter was a founder in 1954 of the Regional Science Association. He was also one of the founders of the Peace Research Society in 1963, renamed as the Peace Science Society (International) in 1973.He had founded Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy in 1993 in order to further research in Peace Economics and Peace Science, and to disseminate peace methods and analysis to a wider audience. His commitment and efforts for PEPS have been intense and tireless. We all owe to him a great debt of gratitude for having developed and sustained this journal. His benevolent character and his goodness of heart were not inferior to his science. The whole peace research community will miss him.

List of Referees/Reviewers 2011

A list of of Referees/Reviewers for 2010 for Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy.

Addressing socioeconomic and political challenges posed by climate change

NATO Advanced Research Workshop: Climate Change, Human Health and National Security; Dubrovnik, Croatia, 28–30 April 2011; Climate change has been identified as one of the most serious threats to humanity. It not only causes sea level rise, drought, crop failure, vector‐borne diseases, extreme events, degradation of water and air quality, heat waves, and other phenomena, but it is also a threat multiplier wherein concatenation of multiple events may lead to frequent human catastrophes and intranational and international conflicts. In particular, urban areas may bear the brunt of climate change because of the amplification of climate effects that cascade down from global to urban scales, but current modeling and downscaling capabilities are unable to predict these effects with confidence. These were the main conclusions of a NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW) sponsored by the NATO Science for Peace and Security program. Thirty‐two invitees from 17 counties, including leading modelers; natural, political, and social scientists; engineers; politicians; military experts; urban planners; industry analysts; epidemiologists; and health care professionals, parsed the topic on a common platform.

Peace Science and Peace Economics Can Help Win the Fight against Nuclear Proliferation

There is a possibility of significant proliferation of nuclear weapons in the future, with various chains of proliferation as occurred earlier. This time, the chains could start from North Korea, Iran, and Burma (Myanmar) and spread respectively in Northeast Asia, in the Middle East and North Africa, and in Southeast Asia as well as in Eastern Europe, the southern cone of South America, and elsewhere. Peace science and peace economics could play constructive roles in preventing this dangerous development by studying the problem historically using case studies and by analyzing the economics and psychology behind proliferation decisions.