Much of the empirical international relations research implicitly equates peace with the absence of war. Moreover, causes of war are seen as sufficient for understanding peace. Such an approach turns peace into a nonevent. The stable peace literature has challenged this perspective in several ways. Firstly, peace is multilayered and additional dimensions are considered beyond violence. Secondly, it attempts to explain movements among different levels (or qualities) of peace. This study reviews the stable peace literature. It also considers alternate conceptualizations of peace. Findings from comparative case studies are considered next to those from the emerging quantitative literature that explicitly focuses on peace. Attention to internal peace and links between micro and macro levels of analysis are some of the areas highlighted as needing greater attention.
Article
Michael Mousseau and Xiongwei Cao
The democratic peace—the absence of war between democratic nations—shook the field of International Relations when it emerged as a widely accepted true fact roughly a quarter-century ago. In the context of the rapid spread of democracy that coincided with the end of the Cold War, the promise was vast: A world of democracies would be a world in peace. The democratic peace had a crucial weakness, however: a convincing explanation. While many potential explanations were developed, only a few produced supportive evidence, and not one yielded evidence supportive enough to render it widely convincing.
Into this void emerged the contractualist peace—the dearth of militarized conflict between nations with advanced market-oriented economies. Unlike the democratic peace, the contractualist peace was not discovered after the fact but predicted ex ante. Economic norms theory predicts societies that are market oriented to embrace democracy as the best means to ensure their state’s impartiality in the enforcement of contracts. These societies also seek global markets, and any nation interested in global markets can have no economic incentive of attacking another nation that abides by market rules. On the contrary, contractualist nations are friends, for among nations seeking global markets each is always better off when the other is better off, as wealthier nations make better customers than poorer ones.
Economic norms theory thus explains the democratic peace as spurious, with contractualist economy causing both democracy within nations and the peace among them. Early examinations of the economic norms explanation tested for an interaction of democracy and development as a proxy measure for contractualist economy and yielded supportive but not widely convincing results. Then a direct measure of contract-intensive economy was discovered, and the result was striking: Whereas prior studies showed that no two democracies ever fought each other in war defined as one thousand or more battlefield-connected deaths, it now appears that no two contractualist nations have ever experienced even a single battlefield-connected death. About half of all democracies lack contractualist economies, and these nations fight each other about as often as everybody else: There is no democratic peace.
Defenders of the democratic peace have made multiple attempts to rescue their observation, but the evidence against them remains overwhelming. Instead it appears that it is market-oriented development that causes both democracy and peace. The implications are more substantial than the democratic peace, since the contractualist peace is far deeper than the democratic one, rooted in common interests and perfect peace rather than mere constraints that only diminish the probability of militarized conflict. It is also more practical, suggesting that global peace can be achieved without a war-inducing crusade to democratize the world: It can be achieved by a peace-inducing campaign for global economic development.
Article
Soli Vered and Daniel Bar-Tal
Intractable conflicts are demanding, stressful, painful, exhausting, and costly in both human and material terms. To adapt to these conditions, societies that are engaged in protracted, violent conflict develop an appropriate socio-psychological infrastructure that eventually becomes the foundation for the development of culture of conflict. The infrastructure fulfills important functions for the societies involved but can be a major socio-psychological barrier to peaceful resolution of the conflict. Transforming the nature of the relations between two societies that were in hostile and violent rivalry requires a dramatic societal change, replacing the socio-psychological repertoire among society members and establishing a new culture of peace. Peacemaking is a slow, arduous process; however, if successful, the previous rivals may establish stable and lasting peaceful relations.
Article
Paul F. Diehl and Gary Goertz
Few theoretical formulations are specifically devoted to accounting for peace, as opposed to war. Nevertheless, the occurrence of peace requires a different explanation than that for war. There are multiple conceptual definitions of peace, and to a significant extent these lead to different theoretical explanations. Peace, except for its “negative peace” variant, fits poorly into various “grand” international relations theories such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism. Nevertheless, there is a relatively small, but emerging, middle-level set of theoretical works that directly addresses the transformation of hostile relations to peaceful ones, in both negative and positive varieties.
Article
Douglas M. Gibler
The first argument that the democratic peace may, in fact, be the product of a larger, territorial peace among states was published in 2007. The argument was based on the strong findings associating territorial issues with conflict. Territorial issues may, in fact, be so salient to the domestic population that they force political centralization and the maintenance of non-democratic governments. This also implies that democracies are likely to be members of a group of states that have resolved their latent territorial issues with neighbors; absent these threats to the state, democracies are faced with few issues over which to fight. That argument is described here, providing a comprehensive discussion of why territorial issues are so salient to the domestic population and the effects of that salience on the polity.
Article
Kentaro Sakuwa
The pattern of international conflict and peace differs from region to region. Regions differ from each other not only in terms of the simple presence or absence of war but also the degree to which war or any sort of military conflict is likely in the long run. Arguments have been offered to explain the spatial heterogeneity in war and peace. One approach to explaining regional peace is additive—the peacefulness of international politics is essentially analyzed and explained at either monadic or dyadic level variation. Notably, the dyadic approach to international conflict and peace has been dominant in the contemporary international relations. For example, two states that are economically dependent, both democratic, with vastly different levels of capabilities, and involved in neither a territorial dispute nor rivalry are likely to develop peaceful relationships. From this perspective, the regional degree of peace is explained by summing up the peacefulness of dyads within a region.
Although this approach to regional peace has been dominant in the field, other approaches go beyond this simple additive approach. The first such explanations base their theoretical arguments on dyadic or monadic mechanisms, but focus on regionwide conditions such as consistency between national and state borders. Regional conflict and peace are ultimately explained by these regional historical conditions. The second group of explanations draw on the notion of spatial contagion through such mechanisms as domestic instability and war expansion in which international and civil wars provide opportunities for further conflict in the neighborhood in various ways. Conflict diffuses through spatial contagion and war joining, which in turn produces a zone of conflict. The third strand of explanations involve more explicit analyses of interdependence between units—states or dyads—which does not necessarily have to take place in the spatial context but often so. For example, pacifying international trade may result from “flying geese” learning and socialization processes within a neighborhood, thus making a whole region peaceful. Furthermore, studies that draw on techniques of network analysis tend to directly model dyad-to-dyad interdependence as an important source of conflict and peace. In short, there are various approaches to explain the regional variation of international conflict and peace from both additive monadic or dyadic approaches and more complex approaches that assume regional clustering of material conditions and interdependence between micro-units in space.
Article
Maline Meiske and Andrea Ruggeri
Peacekeeping is one of the principal activities and foreign policy tools implemented by the international community to create and “maintain international peace and security.” Peacekeeping operations have grown in size and scope since the late 1980s and have included traditional peacekeeping, multidimensional peacekeeping, and peace enforcement. Peacekeeping operations pursue far-reaching objectives ranging from humanitarian assistance and the repatriation of refugees, over the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration of former combatants, to liberal democratic assistance policies. The proliferation and increased scope of peacekeeping operations imply greater significance of peacekeeping as a tool of foreign policy. As such, peacekeeping operations are not deployed solely according to matters of global peace and security, but the deployment of and contribution to peacekeeping operations is increasingly shaped by individual state’s foreign and security policy considerations. An increasing literature studying the supply side of peacekeeping offers a broad range of arguments for why countries contribute to peacekeeping operations referring to realism, liberalism, alliance politics, or domestic politics. Foreign and security policy goals that states try to attain by participating in peacekeeping operations include status enhancement and influence in the international system, the reduction of the threat of conflict diffusion into its own territory and of a potential influx of refugees, or the stabilization of political relations, international trade, and alliance politics. The existing literature leaves some lingering questions and methodological challenges that require further attention. Of particular importance are questions related to the politics of tool choice and the effectiveness of peacekeeping as a tool of foreign policy. Methodological challenges exist regarding data availability and collection as well as the appropriate modelling of cooperation between different organizations conducting peacekeeping operations and the interdependence of countries’ decisions regarding their choice of peacekeeping as a tool of foreign policy.
Article
T. David Mason
Once a civil war ends, there is high probability that the nation will relapse into renewed war within a few years. For a nation where a civil war has recently ended to relapse into renewed conflict, some dynamic process of contention must emerge that makes a resumption of armed conflict one—but not the only—possible outcome of that contentious episode. We can conceive of the dynamics by which contentious politics can lead to civil war recurrence as a function of three conditions. First, one or more dissident groups must emerge with the organizational and military capacity to mount and sustain an armed challenge to the postwar state. Second, one or more of those groups must have the incentive to resort to armed conflict rather than abide by the post–civil war order. Third, conditions and events in the postwar environment must evolve in a manner such that one or more of these groups must determine that they have an opportunity to revolt. This framework can be used to analyze how, in existing research, the outcome and key attributes of the now-ended civil war and conditions in the postwar environment affect whether dissident groups will resume armed conflict or sustain the peace.
Article
Paul Jackson
Africa is a place of enormous variation and its countries have had very different postcolonial experiences. However, it is clear that since the 1940s peace has been elusive for many across the continent. A series of wars driven by poverty, identity, political economy, and failing states led to a widespread crisis of governance and extensive international intervention. Reductions in the security capabilities of states have also led to the growth of violent transnational groups, particularly those related to Islamic extremism in the Maghreb, Nigeria, and Somalia but also criminal networks involved with drug and people smuggling. This wide variety of conflicts also generated an equally wide range of responses as the international community began to develop ways of combating conflicts through reform of its own peacekeeping capacity. The optimism of the 1992 Agenda for Peace, which called for the UN to become the central instrument in the prevention and ending of conflicts, has given way to a more sanguine approach, as mixed results have led to diverse outcomes for African countries and Africa’s own peace and security architecture. In the end, despite the rapid development of important local and localized bottom-up peacebuilding initiatives, the state remains central to the overarching aims of peace and stability across the continent. It is here where the variations in performance can be found in conflict prevention, peacekeeping, and post-conflict reconstruction.
Article
Gabrielle Lynch
The term “peaceocracy” refers to a situation in which an emphasis on peace is used to prioritize stability and order to the detriment of democracy. As such, the term can be used to refer to a short-lived or longer-term strategy whereby an emphasis on peace by an incumbent elite is used to close the political space through the delegitimization and suppression of activity that could arguably foster division or conflict. At the heart of peaceocracy lies an insistence that certain actions—including those that are generally regarded as constituting important political and civil rights, such as freedom of speech and association, freedom of the press, and freedom to engage in peaceful protest and strike action—can spill over into violence and foster division and must therefore be avoided to guard against disorder. Recent history suggests that incumbents can effectively establish a peaceocracy in contexts where many believe that widespread violence is an ever-present possibility; incumbents have, or are widely believed to have, helped to establish an existing peace; and the level of democracy is already low. In such contexts, a fragile peace helps to justify a prioritization of peace; the idea that incumbents have “brought peace” strengthens their self-portrait as the unrivaled guardians of the same; and semi-authoritarianism provides a context in which incumbents are motivated to use every means available to maintain power and are well placed—given, for example, their control over the media and civil society—to manipulate an emphasis on peace to suppress opposition activities. Key characteristics of peaceocracy include: an incumbent’s effective portrait of an existing peace as fragile and themselves as the unrivaled guardians of order and stability; a normative notion of citizenship that requires “good citizens” to actively protect peace and avoid activities that might foster division and conflict; and the use of these narratives of guardianship and disciplined citizenship to justify a range of repressive laws and actions. Peaceocracy is thus a strategy, rather than a discreet regime type, which incumbents can use in hybrid regimes as part of their “menu of manipulation,” and which can be said to be “successful” when counter-narratives are in fact marginalized and the political space is effectively squeezed.
Article
Reparations are among the most tangible, victim-centric, and personal of processes in the transition from violence to peace, symbolizing the recognition that an individual has been harmed and has rights in the eyes of the state or international community. Reparations are also an inherently political project, transforming official visions of violence, responsibility, and victimization into material and psychological benefit. Despite the power of reparations to shape transitions from violence to peace, they have been too often ignored in practice, leaving most victims of gross violations of human rights and serious violations of international humanitarian law without reparation. Partly as a consequence, research has tended to focus more on “harder” processes, like trials and truth commissions, than on the “stepchild of postconflict justice.” Yet, there have been significant developments in reparations theory and practice that motivate key outstanding questions for researchers.
Reparations derive their symbolic power from the law, which is an imperfect tool for responding to the varied forms of violence experienced in conflict and to the diverse, sometimes contradictory, priorities and needs that people hold. In such contexts, there is an inherent tension between expanding reparations programs to be inclusive and adaptable and preserving their fundamental distinction as a justice process. This is a difficult balance to strike, but there are frameworks and questions that can offer useful guidance. In particular, the lenses of economic violence and positive peace are useful for articulating the role of reparations in postconflict transitions, offering conceptual expansion beyond transitional justice’s traditional concern for political violence without delving too far into the customary terrain of development or postconflict reconstruction.
Yet, the specific mechanisms through which the inward and outward feelings and attitudes and broader social changes that reparations are expected to produce remain undertheorized in transitional justice scholarship, in large part because of a lack of empirical evidence about how recipients experience them in practice. Does the restoration of civic trust, for example, depend upon recipients of individual reparations telling their neighbors about their payments? Does recognition as a citizen depend upon a beneficiary publicly self-identifying as a victim? Questions like these about the particular variables that drive reparations outcomes represent the next frontier for transitional justice researchers interested in the role of reparations in the transition from violence to peace.
Article
Robert U. Nagel and Govinda Clayton
Mediation is now the most popular form of conflict management, and it has proven to be an
effective means of resolving inter- and intrastate disputes. This article offers an overview of
mediation in foreign policy. We first highlight which actors tend to perform mediatory roles,
emphasizing the relative strengths and weaknesses of individual, state, and international
organization mediators. Next we discuss the supply and demand of mediation, identifying the key
conditions that promote third parties’ efforts to offer mediatory assistance and belligerents to
accept the help of an intermediary. We then discuss the process and varying methods used by
mediators, highlighting the range of actions from relatively soft facilitative mediation, up to more
manipulative approaches. Finally we discuss the outcomes that mediation tends to produce and the
conditions that influence the effectiveness of this preeminent foreign policy tool.
Article
Jessica Di Salvatore and Andrea Ruggeri
Peacekeeping has been one of the main conflict management tools used by the international community to restore or safeguard peace and security. Since 1948, the United Nations has established 70 peace operations and has substantially evolved, adopting approaches to peace that extend beyond purely military concerns. Indeed, the promises of peacekeeping as effective instrument of conflict reduction may, to some extent, explain the evolution toward multidimensional missions and the unprecedented number of peacekeepers deployed in the last decade. As consequence, the growing importance of peacekeeping effectiveness has sparked a new wave of research that empirically investigates whether and under which conditions UN peacekeeping works.
Peacekeepers are mostly deployed in conflict or postconflict environments where violence is either ongoing or lingering. Thus, violence remains a priority for peace missions. Consequently, peacekeeping is deemed successful or effective according to whether it curbs conflict in several dimensions. Effective missions are those responsible for decreasing the intensity of battle violence, protecting civilians, and containing conflict diffusion and recurrence in the postwar phase. Each mission, however, is deployed in different contexts and operates under variable conditions that affect the operation’s capacity to influence conflict. Concerning mission features, peacekeeping success is more likely when large contingents are deployed under robust mandates. Mission type, size, and composition signal credible commitment from the international community and empower peacekeepers to halt violence while guaranteeing the implementation of peace agreements. These nuanced understandings of peacekeeping stem from the availability of new data on both conflict and peace operations at the national and subnational levels of analysis. Moreover, the empirical study of the effectiveness of peace operations has recently been flanked by simulation-based forecasting, field experiments, and surveys investigating local-level outcomes of peace missions.
Unsurprisingly, the focus on violence and conflict outcomes as indicators of success is debatable. First, in dealing with violence, peacekeeping operations produce spillover effects that are largely neglected, such as refugee flows and terrorist violence. Second, given the wide range of functions performed by UN peacekeepers, including electoral assistance, economic reconstruction, and state building, it is reasonable to include these aspects when defining effectiveness. Third, and relatedly, no assessment of short- versus long-term implications of peacekeeping for political, social, and economic development in the host country has been forthcoming. While reducing infant mortality, inequality, and crime are not necessarily tasks for peacekeepers, it is vital to study whether and how UN missions may have shaped the quality of peace in host countries.
Article
On the one hand, the idea of a capitalist peace is a set of loosely integrated but testable propositions. On the other hand, it is part of a wider, libertarian philosophy of life. The wider conception aims at minimizing government. Although there has been a proliferation of variables assessing capitalism and economic interdependence—from economic freedom via contract intensity to the avoidance of state ownership or protectionism—the most frequently analyzed proposition about the capitalist peace says that trade makes military conflict and war less likely. By and large, the evidence supports this proposition in dyadic designs as well as in monadic designs. This cross-design validity of the proposition is important because it distinguishes the peace by trade proposition from the democratic peace proposition. Most researchers agree that war is extremely unlikely in dyads where both nations are democracies. But only a minority contends that democracies are less frequently involved in military conflict than other states. The dyadic and the monadic findings are compatible because military conflict looks even more likely between an autocracy and a democracy than between two autocracies. Whereas the democratic peace is limited in application, the pacifying impact of trade or economic interdependence is more general. Moreover, the democratic peace may be embedded in a wider economic or capitalist peace. There is strong evidence that democracy rests on a foundation of capitalism or economic freedom and the prosperity that has been gained only by capitalism or some degree of economic freedom. Moreover, economic freedom and prosperity contribute to the avoidance of civil war. Better still, not only does economic freedom promote economic growth and prosperity among those nations where people enjoy economic freedom, but the economic freedom of rich countries provides poor countries with the advantages of backwardness and catch-up opportunities.
Capitalist peace theory evolves. It has been suggested that the pacifying impact of trade rests on the expectation that trade, or access to resources and markets, will continue. This suggestion requires a new look at economic sanctions, too. By interfering with trade, sanctions must undermine the expectation of future benefits of trade and globally interconnected markets. Given the rareness of evidence in favor of the effectiveness of economic sanctions in eliminating undesirable policies of other nations, a capitalist peace perspective implies the recommendation to use sanctions much less frequently than politicians do. They are likely to eliminate a pacifying factor when it is most urgently needed.
The wider or visionary perspective on the capitalist peace is useful not only in connecting it with the issue of sanctions, but also in demonstrating the inherent limitations of capitalism as a tool to achieve peace. From a static perspective, capitalism, economic freedom, or trade may exert some pacifying impact, as argued previously. But capitalism is a dynamic economic order. It is about “creative destruction.” Capitalism is not egalitarian. Nations grow at different speeds. They rise and decline. Capitalism and unequal economic growth upset pecking orders and contribute to power transitions that are related to risks of war, especially great power war. Whether the contribution of capitalism to power transitions—or its pacifying impact—prevails cannot be judged with much confidence.
Article
Benjamin E. Goldsmith
Historically one of the world’s most conflict-prone regions, since the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979, East Asia has enjoyed a relative interstate peace. Implications of some of the relevant “East Asian peace” literature for theories of international relations need assessment. The central conclusion is that, contrary to often expressed dissatisfaction with the state of IR theory, it is possible to identify a core of theoretical knowledge that has considerable explanatory power for war and peace in East Asia, and is also based on general theory with considerable support across global regions. This diverges somewhat from the well-known argument of Lake in 2011: It is not the “-isms” that lead us astray, but how we use them. Unlike Lake, but consistent with Legro and Moravcsik (1999), it is argued that broad theoretical constructs are needed, and indeed useful ones exist, while mid-level or problem-focused analysis is no substitute for a theory-based research program. What is often lacking is an effort by empirical researchers to clearly and coherently tie their research design to theoretically important claims.
Empirical political science as a whole is becoming more sophisticated in its methods and capabilities for causal inference, and it is also becoming more relevant and useful for policy makers. We should devote as much attention to the theoretical contributions of our research. The article addresses the role of theory in IR, the ways that empirical analysis of East Asia (and other regions) can contribute to theory building and theory testing, the existing literature on East Asian peace, some informed speculation about how the potential for mid-term military conflict between the United States and China might be assessed, and thoughts about current and potential contributions to IR theory based on the study of the East Asian peace.
Theorizing in social science is hard, and any scholar’s dissatisfaction with existing theory should be heavily tempered with acknowledgment that s/he has not proposed a more powerful one. Regional analysis, and comparative regional analysis, can provide important potential gains by challenging current theory with hard tests. East Asia not only is a crucially important part of the world for the future of interstate peace, it also presents challenging and useful empirical puzzles for our theories.
Article
Marc L. Hutchison and Daniel G. Starr
The territorial peace theory predicts that neighboring states with stable borders not only avoid conflict but that the removal of territorial threat facilitates the democratization process within those countries. The strongest and most controversial implication of this argument is that the observed peace between democracies (e.g., the democratic peace) is actually epiphenomenal or spurious to the removal of contentious territorial issues between contiguous states.
Building on observations within the international conflict literature, the territorial peace theory argues that disagreements over borders and other territorial issues are considerably more likely to lead to conflict than other types of issues because of their salience to both government elites and the domestic public. During crises in involving external territorial threats, opposition parties and the public turn to the government for protection and rally in support allowing the state to further centralize the regime and develop large standing armies which, in turn, can be wielded to repress the citizenry and maintain the status quo. Thus, states sharing unstable borders and experiencing high levels of territorial threat tend to become or remain autocratic as they are constantly defending their borders, centralizing their power, and maintaining their state control by repressing their citizenry. Conversely, in states with settled stable borders, they not only experience less conflict but ameliorating the territorial threat subsequently reduces government incentive to maintain a high level of centralization, thereby facilitating democratization. Thus, it predicts that both democracy and peace should form around stable borders and observe regional and temporal clusters. Empirical support for the theory has been consistently strong across a wide range of studies and researchers increasingly apply its arguments to explain a wide variety of different political phenomena.
Critics of the territorial peace cite some methodological and theoretical weaknesses. These critiques highlight difficulties replicating the results of early models of the territorial peace theory, point out empirical inconsistencies related to the effect of joint democracy on conflict onset, and cite several methodological and empirical issues. Defenders of the theory argue the theory has become more nuanced and more effectively operationalized over time and that these critiques may no longer be relevant. Finally, other critics charge that the use of large N statistics rather than comparative case studies detracts from the strength of the argument of the territorial peace. However, rather than framing the theories as competitors in opposition to one another, Andrew Owsiak contends that the disagreements between the democratic peace and territorial peace may be reconciled and demonstrates how the key factors from each theory compliment the other. His approach offers a promising pathway moving forward to further deepen our understanding of conflict onset, peace, and democratization.
Article
Dov Levin and Carmela Lutmar
The practice of foreign imposed regime change (FIRCs) is old, multicausal, and multifaceted. FIRCs have two main characteristics: they include some form of violent use of force to execute them (either covert or overt in nature), and their consequence is a change in the leadership of the polity in which they take place. FIRCs are frequently claimed to have major effects on their targets, such as inducing shifts towards the regime type preferred by the intervener, inducing intra-state violence, increasing cooperation with the target, and improving the economic welfare of the intervener. A review of the literature on the causes and effects of such interventions as well as the main existing datasets of FIRCs shows that significant progress has been made in our understanding of these phenomena with research on some aspects of FIRCs, such as their utility as a tool of inducing democratization, reaching a near scholarly consensus in this regard. Scholars studying this topic can adjust their current approaches (such as agreement upon a list of FIRCs, and the avoidance of conceptual over-stretching) in order to enable continued progress.
Article
Nukhet Sandal
Religion was a relatively overlooked factor in the study of political science until the 21st century. Even when the focus on religion increased in the aftermath of 9/11, a majority of the scholarship still dealt with religion and violence. “Religion and peace” has arguably been a less popular topic, yet there is still a vibrant literature that has contributed to our understanding of religion and social dynamics, especially given the significant number of religiously inspired organizations that are active in postconflict processes, such as Network of Engaged Buddhists, Sant’Egidio, and American Jewish World Service. Religion can play a critical role in conflict resolution and negotiation, especially in settings where secular approaches fall short of resolving the tensions, and where religious actors are seen as more neutral than the political actors. Peacebuilding literature has also recognized the importance of religion. Every religious tradition has its own sources of nonviolence within itself, and under the right conditions, these sources can help with reconciliation, peacebuilding, and transitional justice. At the same time, involvement of religious actors in postconflict processes poses its own challenges. Religious actors are rarely fully neutral, their assistance usually comes with conditions attached, and their involvement in political processes can undermine their moral authority. In addition, there are religious leaders who work against reconciliation to protect their own status in conflict settings. Recognizing that it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of faith-inspired initiatives, more scholarship is needed to explore the dynamics of religious initiatives in postconflict processes. There are gaps especially when it comes to non-Christian actors’ involvement in peace processes, and how the faith-inspired initiatives of individuals differ from those of religious institutions and organizations.
Article
Hyo Joon Chang and Scott L. Kastner
Recent studies on commercial liberalism have paid more attention to microfoundations linking economic interdependence to peace. Using a bargaining model of war, these studies have specified and tested different causal mechanisms through which economic ties function as a constraint, a source of information, or a transformative agent. Recent scholarly efforts in theoretical development and some empirical testing of different causal processes suggest the need to consider scope conditions to see when an opportunity cost or a signaling mechanism is likely to be salient. Future research can be best benefited by focusing on how economic interdependence affects commitment problems and empirically assessing the relative explanatory power of different causal arguments.
Article
Puzzles for the scholar of international relations abound in Latin America, whether one focuses on unexpected outcomes or examines purported causal variables that, when properly specified, do not lead where theory expects. In fact, the Latin American experience is a great case to illustrate two problems in the empirical application of international relations theories: theoretical formulations tend to be poorly developed and articulated, and the empirical evaluations of those theories are not rigorously designed.
The empirical record of Latin American interstate violence is more present and varied than generally accepted by scholars and policy makers. The relationship between conflict and the region’s use of international fora to peacefully resolve some conflicts obscures this record. Puzzles also arise when explaining why the region has the empirical record it does since the causal logic underlying the variables is generally misspecified in studies of Latin American security relations. These analytic errors render most explanations offered in the literature drawing on Latin American cases incorrect. Indeed, the failed explanations themselves offer new puzzles for scholars of international relations. Scholars of international relations can, therefore, benefit from studying the actual empirical history of Latin American interstate relations with the correctly specified causal variables offered by the various theories of international relations.
