The Political Economy of War and Peace brings insights into the political and economic forces that shape the international, sub-national and ethnic conflicts of the present Cold War era. The larger vision is that war must be studied as a syndrome of historical events that occur as a conjecture of contributing causes. Each study within this volume examines a facet of the conflict process.

Taken together, these facets are more than their constituent parts: theoretical political and economic models, historical studies, environmental issues, military and strategic analysis and statistical estimations. War appears as an endogenous aspect of systems of social interaction. The point of the volume is not simply to be interdisciplinary for its own sake. It aims to shed light on the internal dynamics of war and to lead to public policy to alleviate or eliminate it.