Mehrdad Vahabi is Associate Professor at the University of Paris VIII and associate member of Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne (CES). His interests include political economy, economics of conflict, institutional economics, post-socialist transition and comparative economics. He is the author of The Political Economy of Destructive Power (2004) and has published in many peer journals including Public Choice, the Cambridge Journal of Economics, the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Bulletin of Economic Research, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, the Canadian Journal of Development Studies, Louvain Economic Review and Revue d’économie politique.