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Partha Gangopadhyay and Manas Chatterji have produced an outstanding book on Peace Science that will help further the establishment of this field as one with a solid academic base and with many practical applications in the world of policy. The field combines traditional international relations theory with peace and defense economics and national and global security studies in order to study peace. Peace science has made important contributions in recent years, many of which are treated in this book. Of course, more must and will be done to provide a framework to prevent war and promote peace, building on the earlier contributions, including this book.

Violent conflicts and peace are the flip sides of the same coin of our societies. In many societies, sometimes conflicts of violent nature paralyse our collective senses, which result in an appalling destruction of economic and social assets and abysmal loss of human lives. In similar societies, a peaceful resolution of serious conflicts takes place. Even many societies seem to traverse from conflicts to peace and to costly conflicts again. The goal of this chapter is to examine the foundation of cyclical fluctuations in the level of conflicts. One can ponder that a low level of conflict is a peaceful composure, while a high-level conflict represents a lack of peace. However, admittedly, it is impossible to pin down a level of conflict as a threshold between peace and violent conflicts. There is no science that we are to apply to define this threshold, or boundary, and we will rather depend on the common sense. Our simple definition of peace is somewhat tautological: peace is an absence of an unacceptable level of violent conflicts. What is an acceptable level of conflict in a society? It is important to note that it is virtually impossible to banish violence and conflicts from a society – especially at its current stage. We will thus externally impose a cut-off point for conflicts below which a society is taken as peaceful and beyond which the society descends into a conflictual crisis. Our intention is to explore whether the system has its own internal dynamics to fluctuate between peace and violent conflicts.

Public employment in India is often viewed as a source of job security. Hence, public employment seems to propel human security in India away from poverty and social exclusion. In the recent work, a significant attention has been accorded to understand how globalisation has impacted on job security and thereby human security in many developing countries. The literature revolves around two opposing effects of globalisation on the human security in a country: firstly, the efficiency hypothesis posits that globalisation tends to reduce the size of the government of a country to enable the country to attain comparative advantage for gainfully trading in the global economy. A reduction in the capacity of the government is argued to lead to a decline in public employment and, hence, a decline in human security with rising globalisation. Secondly, the compensation hypothesis argues that the size of government, and hence public employment, will increase with globalisation mainly to suitably manage a domestic economy in a complex global setting with an increased role of government for creating social stability and social security. Depending on the relative strengths of the mutually opposing forces of globalisation on public employment, the impact of globalisation on the human security of a country is ambiguous. A gap in the existing literature is a lack of documentation of the Indian experience. In this work, the authors seek to empirically test if globalisation has increased, or decreased, job security in India.

The fragmentation can either lead to an all-out civil war as in Sri Lanka or a frozen conflict as in Georgia. One of the main characteristics of fragmentation is the control of group members by their respective leaders. The chapter applies standard models of non-cooperative game theory to explain the endogenous fragmentation, which seeks to model the equilibrium formation of rival groups. Citizens become members of these rival groups and some sort of clientelism develops in which political leaders control their respective fragments of citizens. Once the divisions are created, the inter-group rivalry can trigger violent conflicts that may seriously damage the social fabric of a nation and threaten the prospect of peace for the people for a very long time. In other words, our main goal in this chapter is to understand the formation of the patron–client relationship or what is called clientelisation.

Our work provides a comprehensive examination of two major issues concerning the fragmentation of state and possible state failure, which will be one of the major deterrence for achieving peace in our world. There are two important sources of conflicts – one is for the rural society and the other is relevant for the urban society. In the rural set-up, we argue that the fragmentation of markets leads to clientelism between rich farmers and their subjugated clients, small farmers. We show this as an equilibrium phenomenon in which a handful of rich and powerful players, or farmers, can effectively control millions of small farmers, which can easily challenge the authority and the mandate and the jurisdiction of a nation state. This element of clientelisation can effectively fragment the state in a developing nation.

The fundamental idea that we seek to establish in this chapter is that the establishment of regional or local, peace calls forth global peace. In other words, our argument is that local and regional conflicts are partly driven by global factors, especially what is commonly known as international tension. In order to achieve meaningful and sustained peace, there is a reason to believe that it is mandatory to manage and contain international tensions. The main thesis of this chapter is to explain or posit, conflicts as a product of continuing international chasms, splits and differences of political and social ideologies in our modern world. Thus, we argue 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, political institutions – can and do exacerbate conflicts and a peaceful resolution of conflicts becomes a difficult phenomenon.

In many societies, conflicts of violent nature regularly spring up that usually cause a destruction of economic and social assets and needless loss of human lives. Violent conflicts and food entitlements seem to bear mutual feedbacks: first and foremost, as violent conflicts result in destruction of economic assets, conflicts usually tell upon the cultivation of foods, procurement and storage of foods and also the distribution and marketing of foods. The disruption in the agrarian sector can lead to serious decline in food availability and consequent famines, which can exacerbate and fuel further conflicts. On the other hand, the distribution and availability of foods can trigger violent conflicts in backward societies as a means to acquire and retain food entitlements, which can in turn jeopardise the agrarian equilibrium. Thus, the relationship between food entitlements and conflicts are a double-edged sword that can lend precarious instability to a backward society. During the last five decades, governments in developing nations have kept a close vigil on their agrarian sector, yet there is a clear indication in the global economy that warns of a looming food crisis, especially in the poorer regions of our globe. Food crises can seriously challenge global peace. Conflicts and hunger are hence complex phenomena. This chapter provides a comprehensive, and possibly the first, study of the economics of food entitlements and potential threats of conflicts in the current conjuncture.

The most powerful observation of Keynes is the potential role of prisoners' dilemma setting the forces for an over-arming by individual nations since each individual decision is correctly based on individual rationality, which unfortunately brings the collective disaster of an excessively armed world. The over-arming only hurts us by reducing our economic well-being, which clears the way for a violent conflict. How do we get out of this collective mess? Keynes suggested the role of negotiation, arbitration and coalition formation and application of moral ethics and penalty mechanism to break the tyranny of the prisoners' dilemma – a strategic concept unknown to Keynes.