Interstate competition and political stability

Previous theories of globalization have examined factor mobility’s effect on the political conflict between social classes. But factor mobility also increases competition between state rulers in provid- ing services for citizens. I ask how this interstate competition affects the process of political change. In a simple model, interstate competition substitutes for democracy, by forcing rulers to invest in pub- lic goods so as to avoid capital and labor leaving the country. As a result, citizens are less willing to struggle for democracy, and rulers are less willing to oppose it, when interstate competition is strong. Therefore, there is less conflict over the level of democracy. The theory is tested on a post-war panel of countries, using neighboring countries’ financial openness as a proxy for factor mobility. As the theory predicts, states experience fewer changes in their level of democracy when their neighbors are financially open

Bargaining Theory, Civil War Outcomes, and War Recurrence: Assessing the Results of Empirical Tests of the Theory

Once ended, a significant number of civil wars recur. One influential empirical international relations theory on which scholars have drawn in an effort to provide an explanation for this phenomenon is the bargaining model of war. Devised initially for the study of interstate war, the theory posits that bargaining problems may prevent belligerents from reaching a deal that enables them to avoid a costly war. Bargaining problems also have been identified as contributing to the recurrence of armed intrastate conflict. Working within the framework of bargaining theory, a number of scholars have claimed that the most effective way to inhibit a return to civil war is to end the conflict via military victory as such an outcome is thought to help solve key bargaining problems. However, a growing number of empirical tests cast doubt on this proposition. An analysis of the results of these tests as well as new scholarship on civil war termination highlight some of the limitations inherent in employing a theory devised for the study of interstate war to analyze questions related to civil wars

Interstate Competition and Political Stability

Previous theories of globalization have examined factor mobility’s effect on the political conflict between social classes. But factor mobility also increases competition between state rulers in providing services for citizens. I ask how this interstate competition affects the process of political change. In a simple model, interstate competition substitutes for democracy, by forcing rulers to invest in public goods so as to avoid capital and labor leaving the country. As a result, citizens are less willing to struggle for democracy, and rulers are less willing to oppose it, when interstate competition is strong. Therefore, there is less conflict over the level of democracy. The theory is tested on a post-war panel of countries, using neighboring countries’ financial openness as a proxy for factor mobility. As the theory predicts, states experience fewer changes in their level of democracy when their neighbors are financially open.

Testing Clausewitz: Nationalism, Mass Mobilization, and the Severity of War

Drawing on Clausewitz's classical theory, we argue that the emergence of mass nationalism following the French Revolution profoundly altered the nature of the units constituting the interstate system, thereby transforming the conduct of interstate warfare. To validate these assertions—and thus to test Clausewitz—we rely on quantitative evidence at the macro level, with a particular focus on the global distribution of interstate war sizes, measured in terms of battle deaths, over the past five centuries. Drawing on extreme value theory, we demonstrate that temporal discontinuities in the shapes of the tails of such distributions can be used to draw inferences about the nature of the mechanisms underlying the bloodiest events in world history. This approach allows us to show that the interstate system experienced a fundamental shift in the mechanisms underlying the production of war sizes: a shift that can be dated to the years 1770-1810, and that resulted in a systematic increase in war severity. These same tools also allow us to rule out a number of alternative explanations for this shift (including changes in population sizes and changes in weapons technology), while providing evidence for a specific account of war severity rooted in the mobilizational capacities of state

Global interdependence and eliminating war in the twenty first century

Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to [email protected], referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 18-19).The logic is intuitive: as nations' interests become more global, as international trade and world economies become more complexly linked, the costs of war to nations should increase as well. Moreover, as this increasing inter-connectedness shifts the sources of conflict and of interstate power, warfare should be limited as well. Indeed, the increasing interdependence of nation-states has been discussed by scholars and observers as a potential limiting factor on interstate war. However compelling, this notion has yet to be well tested quantitatively. In addition, it is not clear what the combined effect of several individual indicators of global interdependence would have on war. The underlying concern of this research is the possibility of eliminating war by studying the relationship between war propensity and global interdependence. For the purposes of this study, two indicators of interdependence are used: annual international trade (an indicator of economic interdependence) and political alliances (to measure political interdependence). Using these two measures of the interdependence of nation-states, this study examines whether the dependence of a state's wealth on the international market and its level of political interconnectedness are associated with its likelihood to engage in interstate conflict

Fighting at Home, Fighting Abroad

Although research on conflict has tended to separately study interstate conflict and civil war, states experiencing civil wars are substantially more likely to become involved in militarized disputes with other states. Scholars have typically focused on opportunistic attacks or diversionary wars to explain this domestic–international conflict nexus. The authors argue that international disputes that coincide with civil wars are more often directly tied to the issues surrounding the civil war and emphasize intervention, externalization, and unintended spillover effects from internal conflict as important sources of international friction. They empirically demonstrate that civil wars substantially increase the probability of disputes between states. An analysis of conflict narratives shows that the increased risk of interstate conflict associated with civil wars is primarily driven by states' efforts to affect the outcome of the civil war through strategies of intervention and externalization and not by an increase in conflicts over unrelated issues. </jats:p

War and Relatedness

We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We examine the empirical relationship between the occurrence of interstate conflicts and the degree of relatedness between countries, showing that populations that are genetically closer are more than prone to go to war with each other, even after controlling for a wide set of measures of geographic distance and other factors that affect conflict, including measure of trade and democracy.

War and Relatedness

We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We examine the empirical relationship between the occurrence of interstate conflicts and the degree of relatedness between countries, showing that populations that are genetically closer are more prone to go to war with each other, even after controlling for a wide set of measures of geographic distance and other factors that affect conflict, including measures of trade and democracy.conflict, genetic distance, common issues, rival issues

Unspeakable Suspicions: Challenging the Racist Consensual Encounter

[Excerpt] In recent years, law enforcement officials have honed a new technique for fighting the War on Drugs: the suspicionless police sweep of stations and vehicles involved in interstate mass transportation. Single officers or groups of officers approach unfortunate individuals in busses, trains, stations and airline terminals. A targeted traveller is requested to show identification and tickets, explain the purpose of his or her travels, and finally, at times, to consent to a luggage search. As long as a reasonable person would understand that he or she could refuse to cooperate, the encounter between the law-enforcement official and the traveller is deemed consensual, not subject to the constraints of the Fourth Amendment

Civil War from a Transnational Perspective

Civil war is the dominant form of armed conflict in the contemporary international system, and most severe lethal armed conflicts in the post-Cold War era have been civil rather than interstate. Still, it would misleading to see these conflicts as purely domestic, as many contemporary civil wars such as Syria display clear transnational characteristics, including inspirations from events in other countries, links to actors in other countries, as well as often international interventions. Moreover, civil wars often have important implications for other states, including security concerns and economic impacts. This chapter reviews the growth and core findings in the literature focusing on the transnational dimensions of civil war. I focus in particular on how factors outside a particular state can influence the risk of conflict within states as well as some of the central consequences of domestic conflict for other states or relations between states. I conclude that this line of research has helped expand our understanding of both civil conflict and interstate war, and that a comparative focus on varieties conflict and attention to the possible transnational dimensions of civil war deserve a prominent role in future research