Miller: States, Nations and the Great Powers

Miller, Benjamin. 2007. States, Nations, and the Great Powers: The Sources of Regional War and Peace. Cambridge studies in international relations 104. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

“”I argue that if we approach the question of war and peace from the regional perspective, we may gain new insights which are otherwise obscured. The new theory developed here thus offers an explanation of the variations between war and peace within and among regions. It explains why some regions are particularly war-prone , while others are so peaceful that war among the regional states has become practically unthinkable” (1).

“What I call the ‘state-to-nation-balance’ is the key underlying cause that affects the disposition of a region toward war…The state-to-nation balance refers to the degree of congruence between the division of the region into territorial states and the national aspirations and political identifications of the region’s peoples. This balance also refers to the prevalence of strong versus weak states in the region. There is a nation-to-state imbalance when there is a lack of congruence between states and national identifications and at least some of the regional states are weak states” (2).

“…I argue that the old and apparently irreconcilable divide between systemic and regional/domestic explanations of state behavior may be bridged, and this books offers a theoretical synthesis that shows how a fruitful and compelling theoretical coexistence may be created within different schools of IR scholarship, and between IR scholarship and comparative politics” (3).

Both regional and global drivers explain the occurrence of international conflict. “Regional/domestic factors are responsible for hot outcomes; global factors are responsible for cold outcomes” (13).

Argues that there are “outside-in” and “inside-out” explanations for the cause of international conflict. The main drawback of these accounts is that they don’t take each other into consideration.

The author argues that most previous theory has treated the causes of war and peace as being separate. Instead, we should be looking at why certain regions are more or less war-prone than others, which takes into consideration both drivers of peace and war.