A Study of War.

In this contribution to the literature on the causes of war, Douglas Lemke asks whether the same factors affect minor powers as affect major ones. He investigates whether power parity and dissatisfaction with the status quo have an impact within Africa, the Far East, the Middle East and South America. Lemke argues that there are similarities across these regions and levels of power, and that parity and dissatisfaction are correlates of war around the world. The extent to which they increase the risk of war varies across regions, however, and the book looks at the possible sources of this cross-regional variation, concluding that differential progress toward development is the likely cause. This book will interest students and scholars of international relations and peace studies, as well as comparative politics and area studies.

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Regions of war and peace

▪ Abstract International relations theory has long seen the origins, conduct, and termination of war as a bargaining process. Recent formal work on these issues draws very heavily on Rubinstein's (1982) seminal analysis of the bargaining problem and the research that flowed from it. There is now what might be called a standard or canonical model of the origins of war that sees this outcome as a bargaining breakdown. This essay reviews this standard model and current efforts to extend it to the areas of (a) multilateral bargaining, which is at the heart of old issues such as balancing and bandwagoning as well as newer ones such as the role of third-party mediation; (b) the effects of domestic politics on international outcomes; (c) efforts to explicitly model intra-war bargaining; and (d) dynamic commitment problems.

Bargaining theory and international conflict

In this article I argue that much of the inconsistency in the scholarly literature on conflict escalation can be attributed to selection bias. To control this bias statistically, I use a censored probit model to evaluate hypotheses about conflict escalation over the time period of 1950-1985. I report four results. (1) Power parity and economic development are found to influence conflict nonmonotonically. (2) Although joint democracy and joint satisfaction with the status quo are found to have robust pacifying effects on the onset of conflict, the results suggest that they are unrelated to the escalation of disputes to war. (3) Allied pairs of states appear less likely to escalate their disputes. (4) Finally, the unified model suggests that it is essential for researchers interested in the escalation behavior of states to consider first how states become involved in disputes. Conflict onset and escalation appear to be related processes. any scholars have sought to isolate the causes of escalation, but discrepancies between the theoretical expectations and the empirical results persist. I attribute these discrepancies to a selection effect. Pairs of states do not become entangled in hostilities randomly. They instead select or are selected into disputes by a strategic process. Following previous empirical research focusing on selection effects (Achen 1986; Smith 1996a, 1996b, 1998, 1999; Gartner and Siverson 1996; Leeds and Davis 1997; Signorino 1999), I employ a statistical model to control for the interdependent relationship between the onset of disputes and escalation to war over the time period of 1950-1985. The results suggest that controlling for the selection effect statistically stipulates a link between the formal and empirical studies of escalation. The scholarly literature on what causes escalation is mixed. Although some suggest that joint democracy inhibits escalation (Rousseau et al. 1996), others find that joint democracy actually makes dyads more escalatory (Senese 1997). There is also some disagreement about the effect of military capabilities on conflict onset compared to escalation (Morgan 1984, 1990, 1994; Morrow 1989; Fearon 1994b; Bueno de Mesquita, Morrow, and Zorick 1997). It seems reasonable to suspect that the factors that influence conflict onset may also affect escalation directly and/or indirectly. If this is the case, it is important to consider how the factors that influence onset and escalation may be related to each other. Constructing a unified statistical model offers a first cut at modeling the process of conflict. Similar to the formal literature (Morrow 1989; Bueno de Mesquita and Lalman 1992; Fearon 1994a, 1994b; Smith 1998, 1999) that describes explicitly the selection process by which states get into and escalate disputes, I address the same issue from an empirical perspective (Smith 1996b, 1998, 1999; Signorino 1999). Modeling such selection empirically manages sources of bias and allows one to make truer inferences about the conflict generating process.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2669294.pdf

A Unified Statistical Model of Conflict Onset and Escalation

Although multinationals operate under cross-border jurisdictions, the relevance of interstate security relations to international business has received little attention. Despite the impressive accumulation of knowledge in international business and international relations, the two intellectual communities have largely ignored the insights from each other. In this article, we seek to bridge this gap. We argue that interstate military conflict and security alliances, as two central features of interstate security relations, often change both government policies toward international business and investor expectations of political risk. From the perspectives of both states and investors, military conflict should reduce bilateral investment whereas security alliances increase it. Our empirical analysis applies the system GMM estimator to a gravity model of bilateral investment flows for 1117 directed dyads among 58 countries from 1980 to 2000. Among 18 countries whose per capita real incomes remain consistently above 12,000 constant dollars, the security factors do not affect bilateral investment; in the high-income/low-income dyads, interstate military conflict and security alliances significantly influence bilateral investment as expected. The findings depict two separate realms in which international politics does and does not interfere with international business, helping us improve political risk assessments and understand the interactions between states and firms.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fjibs.2009.91.pdf

Dyadic military conflict, security alliances, and bilateral FDI flows

Two contrary "balance of power" explanations of escalation of interstate conflict to war are tested: (1) parity in power preserves peace and (2) rough parity in power encourages escalation to war. Unlike other tests of these propositions, the assessment of the "balance of power" includes information on political capacity of a state, political geography, and different types of alliance formations. During 1815-1939, conflicts between approximately equal, nonseparated great power opponents were much more likely to escalate to war than were conflicts between unequals.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2111123.pdf

William Brian Moul

Papers

Balances of Power and the Escalation to War of Serious Disputes among the European Great Powers, 1815-1939: Some Evidence