International Peacekeeping Operations: Burden Sharing and Effectiveness.

This article takes stock of some of the important contributions to the study of peacekeeping (PK). Two key topics stand out: peacekeeping burden sharing and mission effectiveness. For burden sharing, the theoretical foundation is the private provision of public goods and joint products. Implications for burden sharing differ whether financial or troop contributions are being shared, with the latter driven by jointly produced country-specific benefits. Financial burden sharing can also differ between United Nations (UN)-led and non-UN-led peacekeeping operations, wherein country-specific benefits are especially important for the latter. Many articles gauge peacekeeping effectiveness by the mission's ability to maintain the peace or to protect lives for a set time period. More recently, multiple criteria are raised for evaluating peacekeeping in today's world of multifaceted peacebuilding operations.

Gender Imbalance and Terrorism in Developing Countries.

This article investigates whether gender imbalance may be conducive to domestic terrorism in developing countries. A female-dominated society may not provide sufficient administration, law, or order to limit domestic terrorism, especially since societies in developing countries primarily turn to males for administration, policing, and paramilitary forces. Other economic considerations support female imbalance resulting in grievance-generated terrorism. Because male dominance may also be linked to terrorism, empirical tests are ultimately needed to support our prediction. Based on panel data for 128 developing countries for 1975 to 2011, we find that female gender imbalance results in more total and domestic terrorist attacks. This female gender imbalance does not affect transnational terrorism in developing countries or domestic and transnational terrorism in developed countries. Further tests show that gender imbalance affects terrorism only when bureaucratic institutions are weak. Many robustness tests support our results.

The Changing Nonlinear Relationship between Income and Terrorism.

This article reinvestigates the relationship between real per capita gross domestic product (GDP) and terrorism. We devise a terrorism Lorenz curve to show that domestic and transnational terrorist attacks are each more concentrated in middle-income countries, thereby suggesting a nonlinear income-terrorism relationship. Moreover, this point of concentration shifted to lower income countries after the rising influence of the religious fundamentalist and nationalist/separatist terrorists in the early 1990s. For transnational terrorist attacks, this shift characterized not only the attack venue but also the perpetrators' nationality. The article then uses nonlinear smooth transition regressions to establish the relationship between real per capita GDP and terrorism for eight alternative terrorism samples, accounting for venue, perpetrators' nationality, terrorism type, and the period. Our nonlinear estimates are shown to be favored over estimates using linear or quadratic income determinants of terrorism. These nonlinear estimates are robust to additional controls.

INTERPOL's Surveillance Network in Curbing Transnational Terrorism.

This paper investigates the role that International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) surveillance-the Mobile INTERPOL Network Database (MIND) and the Fixed INTERPOL Network Database (FIND)-played in the War on Terror since its inception in 2005. MIND/FIND surveillance allows countries to screen people and documents systematically at border crossings against INTERPOL databases on terrorists, fugitives, and stolen and lost travel documents. Such documents have been used in the past by terrorists to transit borders. By applying methods developed in the treatment-effects literature, this paper establishes that countries adopting MIND/FIND experienced fewer transnational terrorist attacks than they would have had they not adopted MIND/FIND. Our estimates indicate that, on average, from 2008 to 2011, adopting and using MIND/FIND results in 0.5 fewer transnational terrorist incidents each year per 100 million people. Thus, a country like France with a population just above 64 million people in 2008 would have 0.32 fewer transnational terrorist incidents per year owing to its use of INTERPOL surveillance. This amounts to a sizeable average proportional reduction of about 30 percent.

Regional public goods and international organizations.

This article focuses on the provision prognosis for regional public goods (RPGs) and the role of international organizations in fostering supply in developing countries. All three properties of publicness-i.e., nonrivalry of benefits, nonexcludability of nonpayers, and the aggregation technology-play a role in this prognosis. The paper highlights many provision impediments, not faced by national or global public goods. When intervention is necessary, the analysis distinguishes the role of global, regional, and other institutional arrangements (e.g., networks and public-private partnerships). The pros and cons of subsidiarity are addressed.