The seventh chapter arrives at a unified theory of public pension contracts that is fair to all stakeholders: governments, their employees, and the public. Scholars have concentrated on when a contract exists as central to understanding what changes will survive constitutional contests. Conventional wisdom commands that the earlier a contract is formed, such as upon employment, the less likely modifications can be made. Lawmakers have followed this assumption, leaving pension systems in peril by primarily restricting reforms to new hires. However, courts are stretching the contract concept to move beyond existing case law constraints that set the time of formation. The effect of an enlargement of the contractual commitment is counterintuitive: courts can recognize a pension contract but decide that the reform is not within its terms or, even so, that the terms are changeable. The latter outlook can be conceived as a question of contract duration: career or daily. Specifically, are pension benefits secured by a single career-long contract or a series of contracts earned each day through performance? Judges are only beginning to realize the choice and explain their conclusions. This chapter reframes pension contracts by arguing in favor of periodic agreements—a view it calls “contract minimalism.”

International trade occupies a prime place in the economies of all countries. Developing countries are particularly eager to promote their trade with a view to earning much-needed foreign exchange for financing imports of the latest technology, scientific know-how and sophisticated goods and services from economically and industrially advanced countries. Apart from economic factors, which are no doubt important, the development of international trade on a sustained and enduring basis primarily depends on the confidence and familiarity of international traders with the commercial, legal and arbitration systems of the countries of their trading partners. It is also essential to ensure the proper and timely execution of trade contracts without disputes or disruption in the best interests of the business community. Different countries have differing legal and arbitration systems. Conflict of laws and disparities in the dispute settlement procedures in different jurisdictions have posed practical hurdles in the way of the smooth and swift flow of international trade. Therefore, efforts have been made time and again at the international level to overcome such difficulties and problems through harmonisation and unification of arbitration law and procedures in different parts of the world.

Arbitration establishes a web of contracts between the parties, arbitral institutions and arbitrators. International arbitration cases involve private commercial disputes and arbitral decisions are not binding on third parties.

The primary conceptual underpinning of understanding offender decision making is that they are rational actors. This chapter applies rational-choice approaches that are used to understand everyday criminals to the problem of lone-actor terrorism. The first section poses the question: who are the lone actor terrorists? It is established that they are a broad set of individuals; no profile exists, and they are varied in terms traits and pathways into terrorism. The second section discusses the rationality of lone actor terrorists in terms of the decision-making processes surrounding choosing a target and hostile reconnaissance. Decisions about when, where, and how to carry out a particular attack derive from simple cost-benefit analyses, including anticipated and unexpected costs. The next section discusses how cost-benefit analyses can be used to disrupt lone-actor terrorism through detection and deterrence. The final section consists of several illustrative examples. This is followed by suggestions of basic prevention mechanisms to counter lone-actor terrorism based on the situational qualities of their behaviour.

Since the turn of the century, few issues have shaped political debate and policy-making more than terrorism. As a result, there has been a huge increase in the amount of academic research devoted to investigating the causes and consequences of terrorism. The Cambridge Handbook on the Economics of Terrorism is the first to present a state-of-the art survey of the economics of terrorism. It adopts a rational-choice perspective, according to which terrorists are viewed as rational economic actors, and presents a framework for analyzing the causes and consequences of terrorism. It explores the causes and consequences of terrorism and shines a light on practical counter-terrorism policies and their trade-offs. With contributions from many leading figures in this fast-growing and important field, this book offers an accessible yet comprehensive collection of the economic analysis of terror.

This chapter provides an overview of the economics of terrorism and social media. Recent advances in the economics of information and economics and psychology help summarize the literature on how terrorism and social media interact. I discuss the implications of the transition from mass media to social media for terrorism in general before describing the impact of social media on the industrial organization of terrorism in particular. I also summarize recent work on the impact of terrorism on social media as well as the economics and psychology of national security have provided some solutions. Overall, social media has been an important part of the industrial organization of terrorism as well as its undoing where progress has been made. What we do not know (but ought to know) include topics such as how social media strengthens or weakens anti-terrorism initiatives given newer developments such as encryption and whether or not terrorist cyber-attacks may increase in importance over time as social media grows in scale.

With the removal of boundaries and consequent flourishing of free trade and commerce, arbitration has become the most important method of dispute resolution in international transactions. Bolstered by international conventions, arbitration is now seen as more effective than litigation before a national court. Commercial arbitration, whether national or international, has different features when compared to litigation in ordinary courts. It enables the parties to exercise a high degree of control over the proceedings, terms of reference and composition of the tribunal. In its role as an alternative to national courts, arbitration has proved to be considerably successful. Parties entering into economic agreements often include arbitration clauses in their contracts to ensure that any dispute can be resolved without recourse to expensive and time-consuming litigation. The significance of the study of commercial arbitration, especially international commercial arbitration, lies in the fact that in the contemporary world of changing economic dimensions, it has become a sophisticated mechanism for consensually dealing with international disputes. Beyond its practical importance, international arbitration is worthy of attention because it involves a framework of international rules and institutions. With remarkable success, this provides a fair, neutral, expert, durable and efficient means for resolving difficult transactional problems. These rules have evolved over time in multiple countries through the joint efforts of governments and large corporations. The driving and dominant force of international commercial arbitration comes from a number of factors.

Terrorism has instrumental value in terms of achieving political, ideological, or religious goals; and non-instrumental value, in terms of organizational and psychological motivations. I introduce canonical models of terrorism under asymmetric information that account for both types of goals. As these equilibria identify counterfactuals that would be otherwise unobservable, they illuminate the ‘known unknowns’ that matter for counterterror policy. Finally, I address the signaling value of partial government concessions when voters or terrorists are uncertain about a target government’s type.

Since the turn of the century, few issues have shaped political debate and policy-making more than terrorism. As a result, there has been a huge increase in the amount of academic research devoted to investigating the causes and consequences of terrorism. The Cambridge Handbook on the Economics of Terrorism is the first to present a state-of-the art survey of the economics of terrorism. It adopts a rational-choice perspective, according to which terrorists are viewed as rational economic actors, and presents a framework for analyzing the causes and consequences of terrorism. It explores the causes and consequences of terrorism and shines a light on practical counter-terrorism policies and their trade-offs. With contributions from many leading figures in this fast-growing and important field, this book offers an accessible yet comprehensive collection of the economic analysis of terror.

Motivated by the advantages of arbitration over ordinary litigation before the domestic courts, countries across the world have started to reach a consensus to ensure uniform principles for the recognition and enforcement of arbitral awards under the guidance of the UNCITRAL. At the same time, it should be noted that the arbitration process is not free from certain inherent legal issues. Unlike domestic arbitration, international arbitration involves issues related to different countries. Generally, international arbitration rules permit the parties to choose the substantive law that will govern their disputes. The legality of the arbitral award mainly depends on the propriety of the law applied. A detailed study on the legality of arbitral awards and the scope of challenging awards based on legality is taken up in this chapter. The chapter further analyses the fairness of arbitral awards and the court's power to determine the validity of an arbitral award as regards its fairness. The illegality of arbitral awards as a ground for challenge mainly revolves around the issue of choice of law; which law is to be made applicable to the arbitration of a particular dispute has many a time become a serious question for arbitrators. A situation may arise when parties fail to agree on the law to be applied in an international commercial arbitration; then the tribunal will have to identify a law that suits the intention of the parties. The process of this choice presents a significant problem. Even when the parties have chosen a law for arbitrating their dispute, a question may arise as to whether the tribunal has made use of it properly. Here the problem of interpretation of the law will come into play.

When is terrorism successful? Armed groups launch terrorist attacks against individuals, organizations, and states in order to inspire fear, strengthen themselves, and coerce changes in the behavior of their targets. The debate over terrorism’s effectiveness has focused on changes in state policy, but that is rarely the attacker’s main objective or the tactic’s main impact. Under certain conditions, terrorism helps organizations achieve what they most value—survival and power—by intimidating civilians, inspiring recruits, coercing corporations, and provoking competitors and states into extreme actions that polarize conflicts they would otherwise avoid. This chapter explains when and how terrorism can and has been effective across three levels of analysis—tactical, organizational, and strategic—by combining an original framework with rich historical examples, from the anarchists of the 19th century to ISIS and white supremacists today.

This chapter describes the state of the data on terrorism and isolates some of the key factors associated with the number of terror attacks using a random forest machine learning algorithm. The variables that emerge include several policy outcomes such as health expenditures, anti-government demonstrations, income inequality, democratic accountability, and strikes. Using the example of income inequality we show how model-agnostic machine learning algorithms can uncover nonlinear associations in the determinants and in doing so can improve our measurement and understanding of the nature of causality.

The deployment of 5G has raised diverse national security concerns, leading to policies restricting Chinese companies’ participation in this critical infrastructure. This chapter examines these policies against the background of international investment law, focusing on restrictions against Chinese companies Huawei and ZTE. It evaluates the compatibility of these measures with international investment agreements and explores potential violations of national treatment, most-favored-nation treatment, fair and equitable treatment, and full protection and security standards. The chapter also discusses the justification of these policies under national security exceptions, concluding that international investment law may not be fully equipped to address the evolving geo-economic landscape.

We take stock of the literature on countrywide determinants of terrorism and evaluate the robustness of 61 previously proposed variables. Using extreme bound analysis, we employ the two most used datasets on terrorism: the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and ITERATE. This allows us to analyze both location as well as victim definitions of terrorism. The majority of the variables (34) cannot be considered robustly related to terrorism. The variables passing the criterion for robustness are prime candidates for ensuing studies. They should either be considered as control variables or be scrutinized further regarding causality.

This chapter covers the current state of knowledge on the relationship between terrorism and voter’s preferences and political attitudes. Theoretical models deliver very often ambiguous predictions since, on the one hand, voters may want to punish incumbents for their lack of competence in preventing terrorist attacks but, on the other hand, the “rally-around-the-flag” effect can benefit them. The empirical evidence shows that terrorist attacks change the political preferences of voters and the result of elections. Terrorist attacks usually increase the participation of voters and, in general, the support for right-wing parties since they are perceived by the population as stronger against terrorism than left-wing parties. The effect is stronger the closer is the terrorist attack to the data of the election. Despite these improvements in our knowledge on the empirical relationship between terrorism and political attitudes, there is a need to move to more credible empirical methodologies using natural experiments or agent-based models.

In this chapter, we explore the scholarly literatures on the effects of liberal democratic governance on the likelihood of terrorist violence, and on the threat posed by terrorist campaigns to liberal democracy.  Most disagreements in these literatures stem from the fact that the reciprocal relationship between democracy and terrorism is highly complex and largely contingent upon structural elements and other characteristics of states and terrorist organizations.  In regard to general institutional structure, we maintain that in offering checks against the majoritarian impulse towards authoritarianism, in subjecting policymaking to institutional competition, and in allowing for the responsible and effective exercise of executive prerogative, presidential democracy offers greater resistance to autocratization in the face of terrorism than parliamentary democracy.  We find empirical support for this proposition in analysis of cross-national time-series data on democratic structural integrity and the maintenance of civil rights and liberties for the period 1970-2012.

Like other areas of law and legal practice, the arbitration world is beginning to grapple with how to harness the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) while managing its risks. Analogizing to existing AI tools for analysing case law and judicial behavior, as well as to algorithmic hiring applications, this chapter explores how similar technology could be used to improve the process of selecting investment arbitrators. As criticisms of investment arbitration continue to mount, a new selection tool could help to address systemic concerns about fairness, diversity, and legitimacy. Such a tool could level the playing field for parties in terms of access to information about prospective arbitrators as well as expand and diversify the pool of viable candidates. In addition to providing guidance for the parties making their own selections, the suggested tool could be used by arbitral institutions to help with appointing the tribunal president or even, with the parties’ consent, the entire panel. The chapter provides a framework for thinking through questions of design and implementation and concludes by addressing potential challenges and objections.