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.” From 1991 to 2017, he held a professorship at the business school of then-Augusta College in Augusta, Georgia, now Augusta University.
[2] Also until 2020, he co-edited (with Prof. Keith Hartley) the Routledge Studies in Defence and Peace Economics monograph series, and he served on the editorial boards of several international, peer-reviewed journals, including Defence and Peace Economics.
In 2015, he was inducted into the Martin Luther King Jr. Collegium of Scholars at Morehouse College, Atlanta, GA.[3][4] 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.
[14] During the late 2000s, Brauer turned to larger themes: Castles, Battles, and Bombs (2008) is an economic interpretation of the second millennium of military history (written with military historian Hubert van Tuyll) and War and Nature (2009) 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.