Contributions in the political economy of political violence

The dissertation consists of three chapters that analyze implications of strategic interactions between various economic and political agents in peacekeeping and transnational terrorism from a theoretical and empirical perspective. The first essay studies the impact of state fragility on the incidence and production of transnational terrorism. Using a panel data of 123 countries for 19 years, the study finds that state failure has a conditional relationship with transnational terrorism with respect to the terrorists' proximity to the target and the logistical complexity of the attacks. The second essay analyzes the dynamic implications of making concessions and paying ransoms to terrorist kidnappers. Using a unique dataset on kidnappings that records many variables such as terrorist negotiation success and amount of ransom paid, the study finds that past concessions result in more hostages being abducted owing to terrorists' anticipated future payoffs. Based on the results, not only do these concessions put a country's citizen in greater peril of becoming hostages in the future, but, for ransom payments, they fund terrorist operations, thereby placing all targeted countries at risk. The third essay studies the determinants of donor countries' personnel contributions to UN and non-UN peacekeeping operations (PKOs) based on a public good approach that allows for jointly produced donor-specific gains and pure public benefits. For UN PKOs, contributions are driven by donor specific benefits largely due to the cost-sharing mechanism in place. Since rich industrial countries bear the major share of the costs involved for UN missions, some countries with inexpensive personnel can actually earn money by sending their troops to peacekeeping deployments. On the other hand, non-UN peacekeeping displays a clear complementarity between a contributing country's own peacekeepers and those from other countries.