Well defined property rights and legal institutions that enforce property rights and private contracts constitute some of the most important achievements of a modern state. The importance of such institutions becomes evident when observing areas in which property rights are absent or incompletely defined. Interest groups, for instance, pursue their distributional goals in the political process, and sovereign countries pursue their goals in international conflicts. Research is needed to better understand the processes of redistributional conflict in the absence of well-defined property rights. Moreover, a better understanding of what makes regimes with well defined property rights possible and stable is needed.