Starr: Coalitions and Future War

Harvey Starr, Coalitions and Future War: A Dyadic Study of Cooperationand Conflict (Beverly Hills, Calif: Sage Publications, 1975). War is a driver and not only a driven variable. Countries that have been allies during war are more likely to be allies in the future. “This hypothesis propose that war coalition partners will comprise dyads that in future mutual war involvement are more likely to be allies and much less likely to be enemies. In testing this hypothesis we will also be testing the assumption that the war coalition experience is important and ‘unique’. If the war coalition experience, as will be tested below, does not produce future patterns of behavior different from other contemporary and comparable forms of experience then we should not be focusing on war coalitions but upon some other, broader, experience. The assumption, implicit so far, is that the war coalition, as a form of international cooperation, is in some way a unique experience. Thus, in testing the above hypotheses we are testing two things: that war coalitions produce a special type of international experience; and that this experience is unique by producing future patterns of war involvement which tend heavily towards continued allied behavior” (8-9). “Our working hypothesis may now be refined. We may propose that War Coalition Participant dyads will produce ‘t+k’ that are unique—that are statistically different from the patterns produced by Belligerent dyads and Non-Participant dyads. Moreover, War Coalition Participant dyads will be more likely to be come Allies at ‘t+k’, and less likely to become Enemies at ‘t+k’ than Belligerent dyads or Non-Participant dyads” (13). “The most compelling result we have produced so far—the strongest influence—is that of simply being a war coalition partner. That fact is related to an overwhelmingly non-belligerent set of future relationships with one’s war coalition partners. After that we find a variety of tendencies, albeit weak ones, which explain to some degree why 28.3% of the War Coalition Participant dyads that do become involved in future war become involved as Enemies (Or, why 13.5% of all War Coalition Participant dyads ‘go bad,’ and become Enemies in the future)” (50). This quote is from this publication: Skjelsbaek, K (1971): “Shared membership in interngovernmental organizations and dyadic war, 1865-1964” pp31-61 in E H Fedder [ed] The United Nations: Problems and Prospects. St Louis: Center for International Studies ‘The probability of a pair of nations becoming involved in war may be compared to the probability of persons getting lung cancer. In absolute terms both probabilities are very low. However, if a person smokes cigarettes, and a pair of nations substantially reduces its number of shared IGO memberships, the probabilities of getting lung cancer and fighting on opposite sides in a war, respectively, are relatively much higher than they would otherwise have been” (51). “Finally, the very striking difference in groups based on different Major Power-Minor Power composition was revealed. Simply, dyads composed of two major powers were more likely to become Enemies in the future. Of the total 624 War Coalition Participant dyads, 84 were composed of two major powers. Of these Major/Major dyads, a full 36% became Enemies at t+k…Above analyses clearly indicate that major/major dyads are more likely than other dyads to become Enemies. However, after this there is very little that can be said for major/major dyads. They differ from minor/minor dyads across almost every hypothesis, and do so by producing no relationships with most of the variables” (52). “If we look at three of the four best discriminatory variables—major power/minor, border, lastwar—we may be understandably pessimistic in observing that they offer a gloomy picture indeed. None of these variables are truly manipulable in the policy relevant sense that they can be altered easily by the conscious actions of officials. This argues for war as being a heavily ‘systemic’ phenomena, built into the status hierarchy of the international system via the major power/minor power dimension and relationships” (59).

Wright: A Study of War

Quincy Wright, A Study of War, Abridged ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).

Quincy Wright’s quantitative and philosophical treatise on various aspects of international conflict is rightfully decisive in the field. It represents a very early attempt (before data was even readily available) to take a macro-level account of the causes of different kinds of international conflict. However, to my chagrin, I boarded the plane with the abridged version of the book, which leaves out some of the most critical quantitative results which are said to be located in the appendix.

The famous Deutsch quote from the foreword: “War, to be abolished, must be understood. To be understood, it must be studied” (xii).

“In the broadest sense war is a violent contact of distinct but similar entities. In this sense a collision of stars, a fight between a lion and a tiger, a battle between two primitive tribes, and hostilities between two modern nations would all be war” (5).

Wright tends to analyze things in fours, typically with an analysis that takes a social, psychological, technical and legal frameworks. In terms of definitions, he substitutes philosophical for technological. The definitions of war from different frameworks are the following:

Sociological: “…socially recognized form of intergroup conflict involving violence”

Legal: “……usually followed Grotius’ conception of war as ‘the condition of those contending by force as such’” (5).

Philosophy: have focused on the “…degree in which military methods are employed” (6). Here he quotes Clausewitz.

Psychological: “…ignoring form, have found the substance of war in the degree of hostile attitude in the relation of states” (6).

“Whatever point of view is selected, war appears to be a species of wider genus” (7).

“Combining the four points of view, war is seen to be a state of law and a form of conflict involving a high degree of legal equality, of hostility, and of violence in the relations of organized human groups, or, more simply, the legal condition which equally permits two or more hostile groups to carry on a conflict by armed force” (7).

“It is to be observed that this definition implies sufficient social solidarity throughout the community of nations of which both belligerents and neutrals are members to permit general recognition of the behaviors and standards appropriate to the situation of war. Although war manifests the weakness of the community of nations, it also manifests the existence of that community” (7).

There is a general and persistent attempt to trace out a conceptual framework—across time—that can help to identify and map out different components of armed international conflict. Much of this is of no interest to me.

The causes of war, by social system:

Technological: “…war is a violent encounter of powers, each of which is conceived as a physical system with expansive tendencies…War occurs whenever the tension, arising from pressures and resistances on a given frontier, passes beyond the tolerance point and invasion occurs” (108).

Legal: “War may…be conceived as the consequence of the diversity of legal systems. Each state, because it claims legal sovereignty, assumes that its law must prevail whenever it extends, even on the high seas, over foreign territory, or over aliens” (110).

Sociological: “Wars may…be considered consequences of the contacts of diverse cultures” (111).

Psychological: “The tendency for individuals to concentrate their loyalties upon a concrete group and to concentrate their aggressive dispositions upon an external group makes it possible that an incident in the relations of the two groups will acquire a symbolic significance and stimulate mass reactions which may produce war” (113).

“With much oversimplification and with decreasing accuracy as civilization develops, it may be said that wars usually result (1) technologically, because of the need of political power confronted by rivals continually to increase itself in order to survive, (2) legally, because of the tendency fo a system of law to assume that the state is completely sovereign, (3) sociologically, because of the utility of external war as a means of integrating societies in time of emergency, and (4) psychologically, because persons cannot satisfy the human disposition to dominate except through identification with a sovereign group” (114).

“Explanations of war from the deterministic and voluntaristic points of view differ in degree rather than in kind, and they tend to approach each other as the knowledge and intelligence of the entity which initiates war approach zero or infinity. Determinism is a function either of matter or of God. Man, being superior to unconscious matter and lower than the angels, can exercise uncertain choices. If a government had no knowledge at all of the external word, its reactions would be entirely determined by the natural law defining the behavior of entities of its type in contact with an environment of the type within which it exists. It would have no more freedom than would a particle of matter obeying the laws of gravitation and inertia. On the other hand, if a government had perfect knowledge of the universe in which it exists, it would be able to frame policies and adopt methods which were certain to succeed without disabling costs. Proposals which did not conform to these conditions would not be accepted. Wars arise unpredictably because governments know something but not everything. Their image of other governments, of the world situation, and even of themselves, upon which their policies, decision, and actions are based, is always in some measure distorted” (115).

“Wars arise because of the changing relations of numerous variables—technological, psychic, social and intellectual. There is no single cause of war. Peace is an equilibrium among many forces. Change in any particular force, trend, movement or policy may at one time make for war, but under other conditions a similar change may make for peace. A state may at one time promote peace by armament, at another time by disarmament; at one time by insistence on its rights, at another time by a spirit of conciliation. To estimate the probability of war at any time involves, therefore, an appraisal of the effect of current changes upon the complex of intergroup relationships throughout the world” (351).

“War tends to increase both in frequency and in severity in times of rapid technological and cultural change because adjustment, which always involves habituation, is a function of time” (352).

Lee Ray: The Measurement of System Structure

“The Measurement of System Structure,” in Measuring the Correlates of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).

“We can think of few words that are so causally and imprecisely used as system and structure; this semantic permissiveness has even gone so far as to see them used interchangeably. Thus any pattern, order, or regularity—real or imagined—in the referent world may well be graced with the label ‘system’ or ‘structure.’ We mean, of course, to sue them rather more carefully here. By system, we mean an aggregation of social entities that share a common fate (Campbell 1958), or are sufficiently interdependent to have the actions of some consistently affect the behavior and fate of the rest. In addition, our definition of system is clearly distinct from those that focus on ‘systems of action’ and thus fail to specify which social entities constitute the system (Singer 1971). By the structure of the system we mean the way in which relationships are arranged, but this definition leaves unclear the distinction between two kinds of relationships, that is, those based on comparisons between and among states or other entities and those based on links or bonds between them. For example, if we refer to the concentration of military industrial capability in the international system, we are focusing on a structural attribute based on comparisons of the attributes of states. However, if we focus on the bipolarity of the system, we are then discussing a structural attribute that arises out of the links and bonds among states. It should also be pointed out that these two kinds of structural attributed are related in the sense that variation in one may produce variation in the other. For example, a concentration of military-industrial capability in the hands of two dominant states in the system may well lead to its bipolarization” (99-100).

“We have already mentioned one distinction that we find useful, that is, the distinction between structural attributes based on comparisons among states and those based on linkages and bonds. Both kinds of structural variables order states…either vertically or horizontally” (101).

This chapter is very interesting for my work and it contains a slew of relevant citations that need to be checked and reviewed.

Dupuy: Understanding War

Trevor N Dupuy, Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat (New York: Paragon House, 1987).

This book is entirely about combat theory and combat strategy.

Howard: The Causes of Wars

Michael Howard, The Causes of Wars and Other Essays, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1984).

"Whatever may be the underlying causes of international conflict, even if we accept the role of atavistic militarism or of military-industrial complexes or of socio-biological drives or of domestic tensions in fuelling it, wars begin with conscious and reasoned decisions based on the calculation, made by both parties, that they can achieve more by going to war than by remaining at peace" (22).

Wide ranging and often rambling.

Suganami: On the Causes of War

Hidemi Suganami, On the Causes of War (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1996).

The author breaks down approaches to analyzing the causes of war into those that address three distinct questions. The kind of question that the theorists are attempting to address directly drives the approach taken, and the conclusions gleaned.

The three questions are:

“What are the conditions that must be present for wars to occur?”

“Under what types of circumstances have wars occurred more frequently?”

“How did this particular war come about?”

The first question addresses the necessary conditions for war to occur. A necessary condition, like oxygen for fire, can hardly be found to exist for the causes of international war. The second question—regarding the correlates of war—has a much richer set of studies to draw from. The final question deals most explicitly with understanding notions of causality. This is where Suganami fleshes out his own understanding of the causes of international crises.

The other two questions are relatively more straight forward.

“Nearly everyone knows that correlation is not causation” (Haas 1974, 59) (80).

Dickinson: Causes of International War

G. Lowes Dickinson, Causes of International War (Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1984).

“In discussing war it is important to distinguish clearly what we mean by it…We mean the deliberate use of organized physical force by groups of men against other groups” (7).

“It is necessary…to distinguish international war from civil. In some periods of h8istory, the distinction is not easy to draw in practice. But it becomes clear as soon as sovereign states have appeared. International war is, then, war between such states; while civil war is war between groups included in one of them” (8).

The book begins by positioning international war as a strange thing. Yes, people will fight, but that is because they are mad at each other. War, on the other hand, does not require that any of the participants actually dislike one another.

One necessary condition for the occurrence of international conflict is that humans tend to be “social animals”, and that without this sense of community, the drive for war would be less likely.

“We have seen that the community-sense is a condition of the possibility of war. But it is not enough to account for war” (15).

“There is no evidence for the statement, sometimes hastily made, that whenever and wherever there have been men there has been war” (16).

Cashman: What Causes War?

Cashman, Greg. 1993. What Causes War?: An Introduction to Theories of International Conflict. New York: Lexington Books.

This book is a wide ranging overview of the different causes of war organized by levels of analysis.”Clues to the cause of war may be found in a variety of different locations. The causes of war may be said to exist at several levels of analysis. While there are different views of the number and identity of levels of analysis, we will examine theories of war at five levels: the individual, the small group, the state, the interaction between two states, and the international system” (13).

At the level of states—where internal conflict can foment external conflict—Blainey argued that about 50% of wars in the 19th and early 20th centuries were “immediately preceded by civil conflict in one of the belligerent nations” (147). This is referred to as the “kick them while they’re down” theory of war. The “scapegoat” theory of war, or the diversionary conflict theory, has been supported by Rosencrance. Lebow also supports this argument by presenting the case for “brinksmanship crises”. Maoz argues that revolutionary transformations create a context where states are likely to either be the perpetrator of international violence or the recipient. Rummel explored this empirically and found that internal and external conflict are not related. Wilkenfeld argued that this lack of a finding was the result of Rummel grouping all regime types into the same analysis and not breaking them out at all.

There is obviously much more than this brief abstract, though this piece was the one that I was most interested in at the moment.

UPDATE:

ToC:


The individual Level of Analysis: Human Aggression
The Individual Level of Analysis: Psychological Explanations for War
Governmental Decision Making
The State and International Conflict
International interaction: Stimulus-Response Theory and Arms Races
International Interaction: Game Theory and Deterrence
The International System: Anarchy and Power
The International System: Cyclical Theories and Historical Structural Theories of War

UPDATE II:


The book begins by claiming that there is both good news and bad news about "war". First, big wars are less frequent than they used to be. Second, they are more deadly. Third, intra-state wars are more prevalent. Fourth, inter-state wars are incredibly rare, especially when all possible dyads are taken into consideration.

The introduction then goes on to explore different explanations for the causes of war from the perspective of different levels of analysis. These levels are the following: the individual level, the substate level, the nation-state level, the dyadic level, the international system level and then analyses that take place across levels, or multilevel analysis.

The book then thoroughly explores major wars of the 20th and 21st centuries from the perspectives of these levels of analysis.

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.

Clemens: Complexity Theory as a Tool for Understanding and Coping with Ethnic Conflict and Development Issues in Post-Soviet Eurasia

Clemens, WC. 2002. “Complexity Theory as a Tool for Understanding and Coping with Ethnic Conflict and Development Issues in Post-Soviet Eurasia.” International Journal of Peace Studies 7(2): 1-16.

“This paper contends that movement toward or away from resolution of ethnic problems in newly independent states can be more fully explained [than does Snyder, 2000 and the focus on democratization] by concepts derived from complexity theory. These concepts do not contradict explanations rooted in democratization but enrich them and offer linkages to other fields of knowledge. They start with a wider lens than democratization but include it. The concept of societal fitness, a major concern of complexity theory, subsumes political, economic, and cultural strengths. The precise role played by each strength in shaping societal fitness becomes an important but secondary question” (2).

“Generated by scholars from various disciplines, complexity theory integrates concepts from many fields to produce a new slant on evolution. Its exponents seek a general theory able to explain many different types of phenomena” (2).

“The analysis here suggests that complexity theory can enhance our ability to describe and explain the past and present. But the theory has much less utility for projecting alternative futures or prescribing policy. Still, complexity theory can enlarge our vision and complement other approaches to social science” (2).

“Complexity theory is anchored in nine basic concepts: fitness, coevolution, emergence, agent-based systems, self-organization, self-organized criticality, punctuated equilibrium and fitness landscapes” (3).

Fitness: how well does a system deal with complexity? All systems are on a range from highly unstable to highly stable, where fitness is located in the middle.

Coevolution: Everything evolves together, and the more connections that there are, the more difficult it is to understand what is happening.

Emergence: Macro complexity arising from micro complexity.

Agent-Based Systems: Systems where emergence comes from the behavior of individual units.

Self-Organization: The system organizes to create fitness.

Self-Organized Criticality: Claimed to not be essential to complexity theory, but posits a system that exists directly between order and chaos, where it can slip into chaos quicly.

Punctuated Equilibrium: Tipping points, where extinctions happen, mutations etc.

Fitness Landscapes: Fitness of different groups as they coevolve. Thus, the fitness of one group can be negatively or positively impacted by actions taken by another group.

The paper argues that certain countries demonstrate high levels of fitness, as can be seen in HDI scores. Other countries had lower levels of fitness. These countries had different histories from the countries experiencing high levels of fitness, and dealt with minority groups less well. Self-organization takes in democratic politics, market economies and the media. Coevolution explains that countries close to the West evolve with them. Emergence is seen in agreements and regional groups. Agent-Based systems in the fit groups, agents are free. Self-organized Criticality: some countries might not be as stable as they appear! Punctuated equilibrium: don’t expect steady progress. Fitness Landscapes: it might be possible to say something here, maybe not.

“The fundamental insight of complexity theory is its prediction that fitness will be found along the middle range of a spectrum ranging from rigid order to the other extreme—chaos. This insight helps explain why Central Asia is frozen in time, why the Caucasus explodes and why Russia resorts to an iron fist to overcome chaos” (10).

Stott: Climate Change, Poverty and War

Stott, R. 2007. “Climate change, poverty and war.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 100(9) (9): 399-402. doi:10.1258/jrsm.100.9.399.

This article looks at the Global Commons Institute policy prescription for mitigating the impacts of climate change, referred to as Contraction and Convergence. There is little about the link between climate change and conflict, though there are three citations that indicate that climate change will exacerbate the drivers of conflict.

Hendrix and Glaser: Trends and Triggers

Hendrix, Cullen S., and Sarah M. Glaser. 2007. Trends and triggers: Climate, climate change and civil conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa. Political Geography 26, no. 6 (August): 695-715. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2007.06.006.

The Abstract: "The conventional discourse relating climate change to conflict focuses on long term trends in temperature and precipitation that define ecosystems and their subsequent impact on access to renewable resources. Because these changes occur over long time periods they may not capture the proximate factors that trigger conflict. We estimate the impact of both long term trends in climate and short term climatic triggers on civil conflict onset in Sub-Saharan Africa. We find that both operationalizations have a significant impact. Climates more suitable for Eurasian agriculture are associated with a decreased likelihood of conflict, while freshwater resources per capita are positively associated with the likelihood of conflict. Moreover, positive changes in rainfall are associated with a decreased likelihood of conflict in the following year. We also assess the outlook for the future by analyzing simulated changes in precipitation means and variability over the period 2000-2099. We find few statistically significant, positive trends in our measure of interannual variability, suggesting that it is unlikely to be affected dramatically by changes in climate" (695).

There has been much assumed about the link between climate change and conflict, though, "The causal link between climate change and threats to security...is not specified" (696).

One set of literature argues that a decrease in renewable resources will lead to conflict. Another argues that variation in climate will lead to conflict. "We investigate these arguments from two complementary perspectives. First, the effects of climate change on the onset of conflict must be conceived of as (1) long term trends that may lead to a higher baseline probability of conflict, and (2) short term triggers that affect the interannual variability in that probability" (696).

They explore changes in precipitation using the NCAR-PCM model.

"These findings point to two conclusions. The first is that the future for Africa is not necessarily one defined by increasing interannual variability in rainfall, the most significant climatic variable in our analysis of conflict onset. The second regards policy. Our findings suggest that reducing dependence on rainwater for agriculture may mitigate conflict, even as rainfall variability is not predicted to increase over time" (696-7).

Lit Review:

Good review of literature on water availability and conflict.

"Thus framed, we address two open questions in the literature. The first is how to combine stationary trend measures with temporally variant trigger measures in order to model the environmental conditions that lead to conflict. The second regards the neo-Malthusian tendency to assume (a) that resources are dwindling and (b) that fewer resources lead inexorably to conflict" (698).

"...we can generate hypotheses regarding the effects of land degradation, climatic conditions, and freshwater abundance on the likelihood of conflict. Land degradation refers to processes that negatively affect land productivity. If productivity is defined as the expected benefit per unit of effort, then we expect higher levels of land degradation to be associated with lower returns to agriculture and therefore to higher likelihood of conflict, ceterus paribus" (699).

They use PRIO/Uppsala data for their dependent variable.

"Land degradation is defined as the temporary or permanent reduction in the reproductive capacity of land as a result of human action" (701)

"Our findings suggest that interannual variability in rainfall is a more significant determinant of conflict than our measures of climate, land degradation, and freshwater resources. Admittedly, these results may be biased due to stationary in the trend measures, a problem addressed critically in section two but which ultimately proves insurmountable in our analysis due to constraints on available data" (710).

The authors find that the future of Sub-Saharan stability vis-à-vis climate change is relatively positive, as the forecasts to not show large amounts of variability interannual pattern changes. They argue that this is due to a regional bias.

One key take-away from my perspective is that we need to look at interannual variability in forecasts of precipitation.

Nordas and Gleditsch: Climate Change and Conflict

Nordås, Ragnhild, and Nils Petter Gleditsch. 2007. Climate change and conflict. Political Geography 26, no. 6 (August): 627-638. doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2007.06.003.

There is a widening consensus that the impacts of climate change will change the terrain of conflict. This article begins by noting IPCC reports, along with governmental reports issued by US, German, NGO and IO sources.

The authors then review the academic literature on climate change and conflict. They find it generally wanting, as many sources are not peer-reviewed and the total scope of work is sparse. Additionally, much of the literature that does exist is contentious: do nations cooperate around water resource issues, or come to blows?

The authors highlight five articles that help to form a backbone of the study of the relationship between climate change and conflict.

"This literature outlines several possible causal chains from climate change to conflict. The starting-point for most of these is that climate change results in a reduction of essential resources for livelihood, such as food or water, which can have one of two consequences: those affected by the increasing scarcity may start fighting over the remaining resources. Alternatively, people may be forced to leave the area, adding to the number of international refugees or internally displaced persons. Fleeing environmental destruction is at the outset a less violent response to adverse conditions than armed conflict or genocide. But when the migrants encroach on the territory of other people who may also be resource-constrained, the potential for violence arises" (631).

Drivers from climate change of conflict include changes in the availability of resources (food, fuel or water), forced migration, dramatic weather events, moves away from fossil fuels quickly, thus radically changing the price of oil and impacting dependent countries, or reduced economic output as a result of attempts to reduce carbon emissions.

They end with a focus on five points to improve analysis of this relationship: 1. conflict models and climate change models need to be synthesized; 2. what kinds of violence do we expect to emerge from climate change?; 3. there needs to be an accounting of both the positive and negative impacts of climate change; 4. the impacts of climate change need to be increasingly disaggregated; and 5. consequences should not focus on rich countries alone, but the globe.

Lee: Climate Change and Armed Conflict

Lee, James R. 2009. Climate Change and Armed Conflict: Hot and Cold Wars. Routledge studies in peace and conflict resolution. London: Routledge.

There are two areas where conflict arising from climate change is likely: the Equatorial Tension Belt and the Polar Tension Belt. The ETB represents conflicts that will arise from the following causes: the age of the society and the overall environmental impact; the size of populations and the resource pressures implied; the kind of environment-desert or tropics-lend themselves to increased impact from climate change; historical legacy; and resource distribution (9-10). In the PTB, conflict will arise over the need to extract resources that become available due to receding ice stocks.

“Climate change will tend to make the existing Equatorial Tension Belt hotter and drier, and these twin conditions are likely to lead to greater conflict. Forecasts suggest that problems will intensify as demographic and socio-economic factors add further pressures on resources” (10).

The conceptualization of the relationship between climate change and conflict involves a framing of perspectives on the future: some are optimists, some are pessimists. These can be generally grouped into idealist and realist camps.

Some argue that climate change is not going to create substantial impetus for conflict. Others argue that conflict will emerge in certain zones, and not in others. These are referred to as “tame” zones and “untamed” zones (22).

The first tame zone is those that are interdependent because of trade. The second tame zone involve those who are democratic.

Chapter 2 reviews some historic instances of climate change and conflict.

Chapter 3 looks out at forecasts of climate change and conflict.

The beginning focuses on an overview of IPCC reports and findings.

Compares ACTOR forecasts for conflict with historic prevalence of conflict (from Uppsala) and then juxtaposes this with IPCC forecasts for low, intermediate and high temperature change. Again, forecasts of climate change are compared with Fund for Peace forecasts of state failure. IPCC regions are then each specifically explored.

Six scenarios are then deployed.

Kirshner: Globalization, American Power, and International Security

Kirshner, J. 2008. Globalization, American Power, and International Security. Political Science Quarterly 123, no. 3: 363-389.

How will increasing globalization affect American security? "Switching from polo on horseback to water polo does not change the principals or the objectives, but the contest is still profoundly transformed by the change in setting. Some players, for example, might have been much better riders than they are swimmers" (363).

"This paper draws three principal conclusions: First, globalization, in aggregate and on average tends to reduce the autonomy and capacity of states, although in some ways states may find their powers enhanced. Second, because the processes of globalization affect various states (and their relative capacities) differently, globalization affects the balance of power between states. In particular, as the biggest fish in a more open pond, the United States emerges as relatively more powerful than other states. However, and third, the United States, nevertheless, finds its own autonomy and capacity encroached upon by the processes of globalization, and will attract both more violent resistance and political opposition to its international ambitions" (363).

Definition: "...an array of phenomena that derive from unorganized and stateless forces but that generate pressures that are felt by states" (364).

This paper argues that globalization is a contingent phenomena that is not unique to history in the broadest sense. However, while it may not be unique, that does not mean that it is not one of the most pressing issues of the day.

This article in an excellent overview of globalization and security issues, though it does not focus enough on what I am currently working. ABSOLUTELY read this if you are interested in globalization, conflict, balance of power, the US and the changing nature of power politics.

Gilpin: The Theory of Hegemonic War

Gilpin, R., 1988. The Theory of Hegemonic War. Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 18(4), 591-613.

“The essential idea embodied in Thucydides’ theory of hegemonic war is that fundamental changes in the international system are the basic determinants of such wars. The structure of the system or distribution of power among the states in the system can be stable or unstable. A stable system is one in which changes can take place if they do not threaten the vital interests of the dominant states and thereby cause a war among them…An unstable system is one in which economic, technological, and other changes are eroding the international hierarchy and undermining the position of the hegemonic state” (592).

Gilpin highlights three characteristics of hegemonic stability theory from the above quotation. The first, is that hegemonic stability theory relies on a different set of drivers than does other systemic level theories of the cause of war: it relies on exploring the broader changes in political and economic drivers. Secondly, states in an international system, broadly speaking, will interact strategically. Finally, hegemonic war does change and threaten the stability and structure of the international system.

“In summary, according to Thucydides, a great or hegemonic war, like a disease, follows a discernible and recurrent course. The initial phase is a relatively stable international system characterized by a hierarchical ordering of states with a dominant or hegemonic power. Over time, the power of some subordinate state begins to grow disproportionately; as this development occurs, it comes into conflict with the hegemonic state. The struggle between these contenders for preeminence and their accumulating alliances leads to a bipolarization of the system…As this bipolarization occurs the system becomes increasingly unstable, and a monic war, like a disease, displays discernible symptoms and follows an inevitable course.” (594-5).

Kirshner: The Changing Calculus of Conflict?

Kirshner, J., 2007. The Changing Calculus of Conflict? Security Studies, 16(4), 583-597.

Kirshner addresses Brooks Producing Security text in four parts. Firstly, he looks at what the book has added to the field. Next, he critically evaluates those potential contributions. Thirdly, he questions the underlying theme of the book: that the globalization of production has altered the cost of conflict. His main contention is that the argument si oversold. Finally, Kirshner argues about how globalization may be possibly altering the changing nature of conflict.

Brooks argues that the globalization of production is fundamentally a more important and causal phenomena affecting the world today, more important, than, for example, international trade. “In particular, the fragmentation of the production process across some states is fundamentally different from simpler forms of transnational production (and an entirely different animal from overseas investments in extracting raw materials)” (584). Brooks also points out that the embellishment of truly autarchic defense production is now so costly as to be prohibitive. “Interdependence is not uniformly good or bad but influences international politics in different ways depending on its interactions with additional variables” (586).

Kirshner does not believe that Brooks is ultimately successful in explaining how much the calculus of conflict has changed in the face of globalization. While Brooks is clear that globalization of production does imply three problems: namely, the impossibility of fully autonomous defense production, reduced benefit economically for military adventure and deep regional economic integration, he doesn’t make the case for how strongly these three security questions may affect the changing calculus of conflict in globalization.

Maoz and Russett: Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace

Maoz, Z. & Russett, B., 1993. Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946-1986. American Political Science Review, 87(3), 624-638.

“Democratic states are in general about as conflict—and war—prone as non-democracies, but democracies have rarely clashed with one another in violent conflict. We first show that democracy, as well as other factors, accounts for the relative lack of conflict. Then we examine two explanatory models. The normative model suggests that democracies do not fight each other because norms of compromise and cooperation prevent their conflicts of interest from escalating into violent clashes. The structural model asserts that complex political mobilization processes impose institutional constraints on the leaders of two democracies confronting each other…” (624). They find that democracy has a mitigating effect on conflict, that both of their models support this causally and that the normative model is more robust.

Normative Model:

Two assumptions: “States, to the extent possible, externalize the norms of behavior that are developed within and characterize their domestic political processes and instiotutions” and “The anarchic nature of international politics implies that a clash between democratic and nondemocratic norms is dominated by the latter, rather than by the former” (625).

Structural Model:

Two assumptions: “International challenges require political leaders to mobilize domestic support to their policies. Such support must be mobilized from those groups that provide the leadership the kind of legitimacy that is required for international action” and “Shortcuts to political mobilization of relevant political support can be accomplished only in situations that can be appropriately described as emergencies” (626).

They also explore other possible explanations for the observed peace between certain countries. It could be determined by relative wealth. It could also have to do with alliances since WWII. These are taken into consideration in their statistical model.

They then explore the IV of democracy using Polity IV numbers and the DV of war using COW numbers. They find that their three hypotheses stand up to scrutiny (H1: general Dem Peace, H2: Norm model, H3: Structure model) and that the normative model is more robust than the structural model.

Mansfield: The Distribution of Wars Over Time

Mansfield, E., 1988. The Distribution of Wars Over Time. World Politics.

“Political scientists and other scholars have displayed a lively interest in the distribution of wars over time. A variety of research has been conducted on the subject, and the implications of these studies are important: only through empirical research can we hope to identify patterns, trends, and possible causes of warfare…In this paper, I shall try to determine the extent to which various well-known empirical findings concerning the distribution of war over time are sensitive to the particular data set employed. I then will present preliminary tests of some additional hypotheses concerning the factors influencing the probability of war, and ascertain whether—and, if so, how—the results depend on the inclusion of all wars or only of wars involving major powers” (21).

Mansfield makes the point that different data sets about war come to different conclusions about the causes of war and the conditions of peace based on what is coded as being a war and what is not coded as being a war. This clearly affects the results of different statistical analyses. The causes for this discrepancies lies with three things: how to define war, the level at which war is analyzed and finally how wars are dated (27-8).

He fits the data of the various authors to a Poisson distribution and finds that they mostly fit nicely, though de Mesquita’s did not.

Mansfield also compares Kondratieff cycles and the onset of great-power wars. Goldstein argues that there is no correlation between either upswings or downswings in the economy and the onset of war. Other authors disagree and argue that there is a correlation between upswings and war. Mansfield argues (briefly) that there is a correlation between long-range economic cycles and wars.

He tests the relationship between trade interdependence and war. Mansfield finds that there is an increased likelihood of war when a country moves either from being more open vis-à-vis trade or less open and conflict.

He tests the relationship between hegemony and war and finds that there is a correlation between the existence of a hegemon and the increased likelihood of war, though his overall finding is that this is not significant and that the existence of a hegemon nether necessitates peace or war.

Jervis: Theories of War in an Era of Leading Power Peace

Jervis, R., 2002. Theories of War in an Era of Leading Power Peace. American Political Science Review, 96(1), 1-14.

“The motor of international politics has been war among the leading states” (1).

“But I would argue that war among the leading great powers…will not occur in the future, and indeed is no longer a source of concern for them” (1).

“Security communities are not unprecedented. But what is unprecedented is that the states that constitute this one are the leading members of the international system and so are natural rivals that in the past were central to the violent struggle for security, power, and contested values”
(1).

“Five questions arise. First, does the existence of the Community mean the end of security threats to its members and, more specifically, to the United States? Second, will the Community endure? Third, what are the causes of its construction and maintenance? Fourth, what are the implications of this transformation for the conduct of international affairs? Finally, what does this say about theories of the causes of war?” (2).

Does the Community mean the end of security threats? Of course not entirely, though they become quite unlikely among the Community.

Explanations for the origin and continuation of the Community: Constructivists: changing norms and identities; Liberals: increased information, the base of power is very broad, the public will suffer from war and they make the decisions, more likely to be linked via trade, international organization membership; Realists: American hegemony is what ties the Community together, nuclear weapons make war a “feckless option” (7).

“Whatever its explanation, the very existence of a security community among the leading powers refutes many theories of the causes of war or, at least, indicates that they are not universally valid. Thus human nature and the drive for dominance, honor and glory may exist and contribute to a wide variety of human behaviors, but they are not fated to lead to war” (11).

“For most scholars, the fundamental cause of war is international anarchy, compounded by the security dilemma…As we have seen, different schools of thought propose different explanations for the rise of the Community and so lead to somewhat different propositions about the conditions under which anarchy can be compatible with peace. But what is most important is that the Community constitutes a proof by existence of the possibility of uncoerced peace without central authority. Because these countries are the most powerful ones and particularly war-prone, the Community poses a fundamental challenge to our understanding of world politics and our expectations of future possibilities” (11).