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SIPRI Director writes on entrepreneurship and conflict

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SIPRI Director Professor Tilman Brück, together with Wim Naudé and Philip Verwimp, has written a Policy Brief for the United Nations University's World Institute for Development Economics Research, entitled 'Business and the barrel of a gun: understanding entrepreneurship and violent conflict in developing countries'.

In the Policy Brief, the authors argue that while the impacts of violent conflict on investment, production, incomes and inequality have been widely studied on an aggregate level, comparatively less is known about the more diverse impacts of such conflict at the micro (particularly firm) level.

Understanding such impacts can improve policies to mitigate the human and financial costs of violent conflict in developing countries.

The Policy Brief discusses lessons from recent studies to address this gap, and concludes:
 

'Hence there is a positive message in this policy brief in that entrepreneurial activity may quickly rebound once hostilities cease. Thus support for entrepreneurship during post-conflict reconstruction may be called for and justified. How this support is tailored, however, is a topic that is not addressed in this policy brief and remains a topic for future research.'

Download 'Business and the barrel of a gun: understanding entrepreneurship and violent conflict in developing countries' from the UN University website.

Brück, Naudé and Verwimp have also co-edited two journal issues on entrepreneurship and conflict: a special issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution (Feb. 2013) and an issue of the Journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship (2011).