Brauer was a U.S. Institute of Peace Scholar for the academic year 1988-89. He earned a Ph.D. degree in economics in 1989 from the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA, with a thesis on “Military Expenditures, Arms Production, and the Economic Performance of Developing Nations.” As from 1991, he has held a professorship at the business school of then-Augusta College in Augusta, Georgia, now called Augusta University. He has held visiting professorships and fellowships at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, the Australian Defence Force Academy, Chulalongkorn University, the Universidad del Rosario, the Institute for Economics and Peace, and the University of Barcelona. From 1998 to 2005 Brauer served as vice-chair of Economists for Peace and Security, an international association of professional economists concerned with issues of peace and security. In 2006 he co-founded , which he has co-edited since then. He also co-edits the Routledge Studies in Defence and Peace Economics monograph series and serves on the editorial boards of several international, peer-reviewed journals, including Defence and Peace Economics. He is Research Affiliate at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Previously, he was Research Associate in Policy Research in International Services and Manufacturing at the University of Cape Town and served on the Research Committee of the Institute for Economics and Peace. In 2015, he was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA.
Research and writings
Brauer’s work during the 1990s and into the mid-2000s focused on conventional aspects of defense and conflict economics such as issues related to disarmament, military expenditure, arms production, arms trade, and arms trade offset agreements, usually but not exclusively in the context of developing countries. As from the mid-2000s, Brauer’s work increasingly focused on peace economics and economic aspects of small arms generally and firearms in particular. In 2009, for example, Brauer and colleague John T. Marlin developed a methodology to estimate the economic value of worldwide peace and in 2012, he and J. Paul Dunne published a textbook on macroeconomic aspects of peace economics for the U.S. Institute of Peace. Brauer's work on firearms culminated in 2013 in a major, 100-page-long study on the U.S. civilian firearms industry published by the Small Arms Survey, Geneva. His research on arms, and the methodology he developed to estimate firearms sales in the United States, has been used by newspapers and others in the debate on firearms proliferation in the US and beyond. During the late 2000s, Brauer also turned to larger themes: Castles, Battles, and Bombs is an economic interpretation of the second millennium of military history and War and Nature explores the effects of war on the natural environment. In the early 2010s Brauer began work with Prof. Charles H. Anderton of the College of the Holy Cross exploring economic aspects of the prevention of genocides and other mass atrocities.
Books (selected)
Brauer, J. & Chatterji, M. eds.. Economic Issues of Disarmament. New York: New York University Press and London: Macmillan Press.
Brauer, J. & Gissy, W. eds.. Economics of Conflict and Peace. Aldershot, UK: Avebury Press.
Brauer, J. & Hartley, K. eds.. The Economics of Regional Security: NATO, the Mediterranean, and Southern Africa. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers.
Brauer, J. & Dunne, J. P. eds.. Arming the South: The Economics of Military Expenditure, Arms Production, and Arms Trade in Developing Countries. New York: Palgrave.
Brauer, J. & Dunne, J.P. eds.. Arms Trade and Economic Development: Theory, Policy, and Cases in Arms Trade Offsets. London: Routledge.
Brauer, J. & Van Tuyll, H.. Castles, Battles, and Bombs: How Economics Explains Military History. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.
Brauer, J. & Dunne, J.P.. Peace Economics: A Macroeconomic Primer for Violence-Afflicted States. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press.
Anderton, C.H. & Brauer, J.. Economics Aspects of Genocides, Other Mass Atrocities, and their Prevention. New York: Oxford University Press.
