Petros G. Sekeris

“Oil above Water” Economic Interdependence and Third-party Intervention

We explore economic incentives for third parties to intervene in ongoing internal wars. We develop a three-party model of the decision to intervene in conflict that highlights the role of the economic benefits accruing from the intervention and the potential costs. We present novel empirical results on the role of oil in motivating third-party military intervention. We find that the likelihood of a third-party intervention increases when (a) the country at war has large reserves of oil, (b) the relative competition in the sector is limited, and (c) the potential intervener has a higher demand for oil.

US Security Strategy and the Gains from Bilateral Trade

We explore the geo-strategic determinants of bilateral trade flows between the USA and the rest of the world. We develop a three-party model of security and trade patterns and use data on military assistance and troop deployments over the 1950–2009 period to validate its predictions. We find that security assistance has significant, positive impacts on the shares of bilateral trade between the USA and the recipient country, results that are robust to issues of reverse causality and hold across different sectors.

Deterrence in Contests

This paper explores the role of deterrence in contests. As a general rule, we show that for a deterrence strategy to be played by rational agents, it is necessary that the contest be destructive. We show for a very general class of functions that pure strategy deterrence equilibria where contestants deter one another do not exist. A corollary of this finding is that under fairly general conditions, agents should always be expected to engage in contests. Applied to international relations, our results imply that war is always a potential outcome despite deterrence attempts.

Self-Containment Achieving Peace in Anarchic Settings

In anarchic settings, potential rivals can be dragged into arms races degenerating in open wars out of mutual suspicion. We propose a novel commitment device for contestants to avoid both arming and fighting. We assume that the military decides the armament levels of a country, while the civilian decides whether to attack a rival country. When these decision-making bodies perfectly communicate, the decision makers are unable to credibly communicate to their foe their willingness not to arm and not to attack, thus implying that war ensues. With imperfect information, however, peace may ensue as countries credibly signal to their rival a more peaceful stance since contestants are more reluctant to enter in an armed confrontation with a potentially understaffed army. Using data on the 1975 to 2001 period, we provide supportive evidence that in countries where the head of the state or the defense minister are military officers, and are therefore better informed of their armies’ fighting preparedness, the likelihood of observing an international conflict is higher.

Politics and Insurgencies

The article provides an analytical approach to capturing the population-centric view of insurgency and allows for the inclusion of politics in describing its earliest stages. The outcome of the politico-military contest over population support now becomes not only a function of the proposed governing policies of the two contestants, the government and insurgents, but also a function of such factors as the sensitivity of the population to the proposed policies and efforts of the two parties, the effectiveness of their mobilization efforts, and the strategic value of the region to insurgents. We also look at two different scenarios in which the government can and cannot mobilize against the insurgency and establish conditions in which a government may actually choose not to mobilize against a possible domestic threat. We also determine conditions under which insurgents may engage in less rent extraction than the government in order to increase their chances of gaining population support.

The timing of contests

We develop a simple model to analyze the timing of contests. When the odds of winning a contest are exogenously given – we show that if either the players discount the future or if the total cost of contest is smaller in the future – there exist subgame perfect equilibria where both players settle, anticipating a contest in the future. With endogenous efforts, the aggregate efforts expanded in a contest are smaller if the contest occurs in the future when the relative effort productivities remain constant or diverge over time, thus creating scope for delay in contests. When the effort productivities converge over time, the total efforts may be greater under a future contest. As a consequence, players either settle over the two periods, or else they initiate a contest immediately.

Going out on a limb

Prime Minister Theresa May has said she will trigger Article 50 of the European Constitution by next April to begin the UKs exit from the European Union. This will set a two-year clock ticking for talks to finalize withdrawal. Game theorists have long known delaying tactics can be potent in the right circumstances, and everything suggests that this is the right approach here. Invoking Article 50 immediately would have put the UK in a weak position, because Europe needs to be tough in the face of the threat of rising right-wing extremism. Sekeris opines that invoking Article 50 should ideally be done no earlier than May 2017 to retain influence in EU elections and budget-setting and to be close enough to German and French elections to minimize their influence.

Tragedy in the making

The world risks heading the way of Easter Island – a spiral into conflict as depleted natural resources are plundered, warns Petros Sekeris