Peace, war and international security

Peace, war and international security is an area in which economists are often conspicuous by their absence, to a degree that rivals the importance of economic issues to the problems at hand. It is getting to the point where the supposed ‘imperialism' of economics in the social science (Fine, 2001) is reversed and the political scientists, international relations and other such groups exclude the economists and take on the economics themselves. It is not unusual to find studies of post-conflict reconstruction in which economics is surprisingly found to be important. In the case of the World Bank, it came as a great shock to the other social scientists when economists started to argue that economics might have a major role to play in understanding civil wars (Collier et al., 2003). Economists do have the gift of overstatement and a tendency to state unpleasant truths in a clear and precise way that can disturb other social scientists, whose indignation and overreaction reflected this. More recently the debate has reached a more civilised recognition of the complexity of such issues (Arnson & Zartman, 2005; Berdal & Malone, 2000).