Heuristics for the location of inspection stations on a network

This article considers the preventive flow interception problem (FIP) on a network. Given a directed network with known origin‐destination path flows, each generating a certain amount of risk, the preventive FIP consists of optimally locating m facilities on the network in order to maximize the total risk reduction. A greedy search heuristic as well as several variants of an ascent search heuristic and of a tabu search heuristic are presented for the FIP. Computational results indicate that the best versions of the latter heuristics consistently produce optimal or near optimal solutions on test problems. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 47: 287–303, 2000     

French Arms Exports and Intrastate Conflicts: An Empirical Investigation

The aim of this article is to evaluate how French Major Conventional Weapons (MCW) exports impact on the conflict intensity of recipient countries. The recent increase in French arms exports seems to contradict the French political discourse on the promotion of regional stability. We run zero-inflated ordered probit model in order to analyze the role of the arms trade on the intensity of civil conflicts in 144 countries from 1992 to 2014, using SIPRI and UCDP/PRIO data. Our results suggest that French MCW exports tended not to exacerbate intrastate conflicts during this period. This finding is robust to changes in the empirical framework. We propose two lines of explanations: France seems to be prone to choosing partners that respect human rights and selling more ‘defense-oriented’ MCW than the rest of the world.     

Morts pour la France: Demographic or Economic Factors?

This article offers a comprehensive analysis of the database ‘Mémoire des hommes’, which is a record of more than 1 million French soldiers officially recognized as dead during the World War I (WWI). Integrating this source with the 1911 census, we evaluate the potential numbers of recruits by French regional department. From this, a model identifies the factors affecting the number of deaths. While demographic factors are the principal determinants, adding significant economic, political and spatial factors reduces the unexplained variance between regions and significantly improves the explanation of the disparity in the number of deaths by region.