The Soviet ruling elite, the nomenklatura, used both cooption and political repression to encourage loyalty to the communist regime. Loyalty was critical both in defusing internal opposition to the rule of the nomenklatura and in either deterring or defeating foreign enemies of the Soviet Union. The cost of coopting people into the Communist Party was a decrease in the standard of living of members of the nomenklatura, whereas the cost of political repression was the danger that members of the nomenklatura would themselves be victimized. We assume that the nomenklatura determined the extent of cooption and the intensity of political repression by equating perceived marginal bene®ts and marginal costs. We use this assumption to construct an account of the historical evolution of policies of cooption and political repression in the Soviet Union.

Using a formal general equilibrium framework, this paper analyses how sanctions imposed on the contestants in civil conflict affect the welfare of these contestants and the allocation of resources to conflict. It is shown that weak sanctions can hurt the contestant they are supposed to help, while strong sanctions augment the expected welfare of their intended beneficiaries. Moreover, sanctions are more likely to be successful if the contestant who is subject to sanctions can expect to derive a positive income in case of compliance. The likelihood of success rises as this income increases.

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In many historical cases, victory by a challenger for political dominance over an initially dominant group has ended civil conflict. But in other places, victory by a challenger has provided only a temporary respite, a brief intermission before the resumption of civil conflict. This article uses a theoretical model of civil conflict to identify the factors that determine whether civil conflict is ended or never ending. This theory focuses on how the values that rival groups attach to political dominance relate to each other and to the technology of conflict. These relations determine whether there is civil conflict and, if there is civil conflict, whether civil conflict ends whenever the initial challenger group becomes politically dominant or whether civil conflict is never ending. For example, the authors find that for civil conflict to be never ending, the ratio of values attached to political dominance can be neither too large nor too small. The implications of the theory seem to be consistent with the evolution of 20th-century civil conflicts in such diverse places as Russia, China, Iran, South Africa, the Balkans, Israel/Palestine, and many parts of central Africa.