{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.01606600086843248, 'fraction_numerical': 0.009552757273122015, 'mean_word_length': 5.0, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
1st Walter Isard Annual Award for the Best Article in Peace Economics Peace Science and Public Policy

I am delighted to announce the 1st Walter Isard Annual Award for the best article in Peace Economics Peace Science and Public Policy. The award is named after Walter Isard, founder of PEPS, who was widely recognized as the father of both Regional Science and Peace Science. Walter has founded PEPS in 1993 with the aim to create a novel outlet for peace scientists. In particular, PEPS was designed to attract contributions from an interdisciplinary community of scholars from a wide variety of disciplines such as economics and political science, as well as regional science, geography and mathematics. Moreover, PEPS was intended to combine both positive and normative studies alongside policy-oriented papers. Nowadays, PEPS follows the path of Walter Isard but it also enriches it by considering new directions in peace science. Then, the 1st Walter Isard Annual Award goes to “Foreign Investment and State Conflicts in Africa” authored by Roudabeh Kishi, Giuseppe Maggio, Clionadh Raleigh and published in the issue 3 of the 2017 volume. The article focuses on a rather novel aspect of current globalization, namely the impact of FDI on political landscape and above all on violence perpetrated by the state. In particular the analysis focuses on a panel of 45 African countries for the period 1998 to 2014. The authors show that in states with a low regard for civil liberties, or with unhealthy economies, access to investment is to be associated with a higher number of violent actions perpetrated by the state. Such result appears to be robust in different econometric estimations. Therefore, what the authors claim is that access to investment can push illiberal regimes into using violent strategies to secure their internal power. In brief, FDI can trigger more violence in illiberal regimes. This highlights the need for extensive monitoring of state behavior following the receipt of investment, similar to the oversight of conditional aid. Needless to say, this article is a significant contribution to the understanding of current patterns of conflict and violence. Yet, it throws new light on the relationship between economic activity and emergence of violence in African countries.