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2nd Walter Isard Annual Award for the Best Article in Peace Economics Peace Science and Public Policy

We are delighted to announce the 2nd Walter Isard Annual Award for the best article in Peace Economics Peace Science and Public Policy (PEPS). As it is widely known, the award is named after Walter Isard, founder of PEPS and an acknowledged founding father of Peace Science. Walter founded PEPS in 1993 with the aim to create a novel outlet for peace scientists. In particular, PEPS was intended to attract contributions from a growing interdisciplinary community of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines such as economics and political science, as well as regional science, geography and mathematics. Accordingly, PEPS is open to all contributions with the potential to deepen our understanding of peace and its components. And, following the Peace Science tradition, PEPS welcomes both positive and normative studies alongside policy-oriented papers. The editors of Peace Economics, Peace Science and Public Policy have decided to award this year’s award to the article “Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Microfinance and Democratic Engagement” authored by Samuel Wai Johnson Jr of George Mason University. The paper was published in the 3rd issue of the 2018 volume. In this paper, Johnson Jr. empirically studies the comparative effects of microfinance group lending, and individual lending technologies on measures of women’s political capital in the fragile conflict-affected setting of Liberia. He theoretically builds and tests the hypothesis that group lending microfinance has a greater effect on client’s political capital than individual lending microfinance. The theory rests on the premise that group lending microfinance programs, which come with requirements to form groups and hold regular meetings, nudge clients towards social intermediation and communal activism whereas individual lending microfinance programs lack the mechanism to influence members to organize communal loan groups or develop skills for cooperative entrepreneurship or collective action. The empirical tests of this hypothesis are based on data collected from a skilfully designed survey that was administered to Liberian female clients of group and individual microfinance lending programs as well as a control group of microentrepreneurs who were qualified for loan membership in either microfinance program but had not been admitted. Johnson Jr. measures the political capital of these women by whether they had registered to vote and whether they had ever contacted their legislators. The results of the statistical analyses indicate that these measures are positively correlated with the time a woman remains in the group lending microfinance program. The editors commend the study for its attention to building a strong theoretical base; for its clarity of definitions and concepts; for directing attention to and improving our understanding of a simple and practical tool, i.e. microfinance lending, which can be of great use in rebuilding social and political capital in post-conflict societies; for its data collection efforts and for its contribution of this new data set that future studies can benefit from; and finally for the clear presentation of all its arguments and results.