We are pleased to send you the first e-letter of the Economics of Civil War, Crime, and Violence research project. The project is managed by Paul Collier (Director, World Bank Development Research Group) and Ibrahim Elbadawi (Development Research Group) and was launched at a workshop in Washington on two days last February. Participants to the workshop included World Bank staff, practitioners from international organizations, and academics from several countries. To learn more about this research go to:

People In addition to bringing you updates on our project, we will use this newsletter to create a network of researchers working on conflict issues worldwide, whether or not they are formally affiliated with the project. To learn more about the people working in this project or to contact one of the project participants go to:

Papers
Papers from the project are already on-line and they include some important new insights into the relationship between measurable political and conomic variables and the likelihood of civil war:

Related Links
An additional target of this newsletter and of our project more broadly is to facilitate conflict research. We will therefore try to provide a comprehensive list of links to sites of interest to conflict researchers and practitioners. Some initial links can be found at:

We welcome your suggestions of additional material to include in the web site and future editions of this e-letter. We are especially interested in learning about new papers and data sets, and in helping to share this information with others.  If you have questions or suggestions about substantive aspects of the research project, or would like to request links from our web site to yours, please contact Nicholas Sambanis (nsambanis@worldbank.org), the newsletter editor and a core member of the research team.

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