This thesis examines distinctive issues related to conflict theoretically and empirically. The theoretical part in this thesis investigates the following issues: the entitlement failure model, the defence spending allocation model and the terror cycles model. The empirical part focuses on the following: the CMP, the beta-index and beta-mobility idea, and the relation between economic inequality and violent social conflicts. The thesis argues that the introduction of market ethos and democratisation in developing nations has created a fragile economic and social system. It demonstrates the existence of a political equilibrium that maximises the probability of re-election of an incumbent government. This demonstrates the existence of a region of capital allocation such that if the optimal allocation of capital lies in this specific region there does not arise any distribution failure. In the second part we highlight two types of conflicts, namely market conflicts and political conflicts and attempt to weave them together to illuminate an important intersection between the economy and the polity. The thesis argues that conflicts are to some extent driven by international tension, or global, ideological and geo-political factors. Notwithstanding the global influence, local factors such as income inequality, income growth or lack of it, and political institutions, have an influence on conflicts. The thesis proposes a participatory conflict management procedure (CMP) that aspires to discover stable points for collaboration between confrontational parties. Stable points are mutual joint cooperative arrangements that diminish the probability of conflict re-escalation. The thesis presents a fundamental theoretical analysis for a new index of conflicts beta (b ) driven by international tension. In this section we show how to measure the extent to which local conflict in a country is driven by international tension/ global factors. We then offer an empirical foundation to the beta index by calculating the beta values for 92 nations for which we have data from 1970–2004. The thesis analyses the relationships between violent conflict and inequality. An econometric model is estimated using binary dependent variable techniques to capture the relation between violent conflict and inequality across Middle Eastern and Arab countries. It constructs two models based on the theoretical model and actual data: the first is a dummy variable that takes a value of one when a conflict has resulted over 1000 battle deaths in a given year and country. The second is a dummy variable that takes a value of one if the conflict is completely internal, and another which is equal to one when the conflict involves an external actor. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/273600 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Elkanj, Nasser, University of Western Sydney, College of Business, School of Economics and Finance |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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