For the second straight year, large cities on the U.S. are experiencing an alarming increased [sic] in homicides, mostly committed with firearms. Philadelphia reported 406 homicides in 2006, giving it the highest rate of homicides among the ten largest cities (27.8 per 100,000 people). This trend has renewed interest in policies to limit the availability of firearms. However, the effectiveness ...

A range of theories have attempted to explain the variation in civilian abuse of warring parties. Most of these theories have been focused on the strategic environment in which these acts take place. Less attention is devoted to the perpetrators of these human right abuses themselves: the armed groups. This study tries to fill this niche by using the organizational process theory in which it is...

I provide an analytical review of the literature on poverty and political violence, focusing on civil war. I also consider the effects of economic inequality and education. Expectations from rational choice theories of civil war are that violence will rise as income per capita, education, and economic growth decline. This is due either to the declining opportunity cost of violence or to the dec...

The international business literature presents an interesting intellectual puzzle regarding the effect of political instability and political risk on foreign direct investment (FDI). Survey evidence shows that multinational executives take into account political instability in making investment decisions, while econometric studies produce conflicting findings. In this paper, I offer a new theor...

Because of the prevalence of wars, political violence and other forms of man-made disaster in Third World countries many individuals and communities suffer prolonged and often multiple traumas. In Western psychiatry certain conceptions of the response to violence and trauma have been developed, including the widely used category of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We argue that because co...