Peace economics

Peace economics is a specialized branch of economics. Peace economics focuses on the design of the sociosphere's political, economic, and cultural institutions and their interacting policies and actions with the goal of preventing, mitigating, or resolving violent conflict within and between societies. This violent conflict could be of any type and could involve either latent or actual violence. Presuming knowledge of the cost of violence, it focuses on the benefits of (re)constructing societies with a view toward achieving irreversible, stable peace. Together with approaches drawn from disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and cognitive science, geography and regional science, and political science and international relations, peace economics forms part of peace science, an evolving part of peace and conflict studies.

Peace economics is distinct from both war economics and military economics, even though there may be substantial overlap between these disciplines. Peace economics is also distinct from conflict economics, and it is distinct from security economics. A key difference between peace economics and these related fields is that peace economics emphasizes a study of the presence of peace, as distinct from studying the absence or presence of conflict, violence, war, or insecurity.

Peace economics has also been defined as "the use of economics to understand the causes and effects of violent conflict in the international system and the ways that conflict can be avoided, managed, or resolved." This restricts the subject matter to the international realm and leaves out the study of peace itself. Walter Isard defines peace economics as "generally concerned with: (1) resolution, management or reduction of conflict in the economic sphere, or among behaving units in their economic activity; (2) the use of economic measures and policy to cope with and control conflicts whether economic or not; and (3) the impact of conflict on the economic behavior and welfare of firms, consumers organizations, government and society." The notion of violence is absent and peace itself is not studied, but the level of analysis can be other than conflict between states. In a context restricted to international trade, another author writes that "Peace economics studies ways to eradicate and control conflict as well as to assess conflict's impact on society." The notion of violence is not explicit and the benefits of peace are seen only inasmuch as a reduction of conflict may improve opportunities for expanded global trade. Others make a distinction between "productive" and "unproductive" or "appropriative" economic activities their starting point of analysis in peace economics.

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