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).
Showing posts with label Quantitative Method. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Quantitative Method. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Monday, July 28, 2008
Oneal and Russett: Assessing the Liberal Peace with Alternative Specifications
Oneal, JR, and B Russett. 1999. “Assessing the Liberal Peace with Alternative Specifications: Trade Still Reduces Conflict.” Journal of Peace Research 36:423.
This article deals with attacks coming from scholars who claim that trade interdependence does not have pacifying effects. These two claims, specifically from Beck et al. (1998) and Barbieri (1998), address potential effects that were not taken into consideration by the earlier work of Russett and Oneal (and Moaz). The authors find that, by extending the analysis to all dyads, there is not a “relationship between interdependence and peace, but the pacific benefits of trade become evident among the politically relevant dyads (those including a major power, or two contiguous states), among whom the great majority of disputes occur…With these sequential modifications we find increasingly strong support for the liberals’ belief that economic interdependence and democracy have important pacific benefits” (423). “We find no evidence that asymmetric trade increases conflict” (423).
“Beck et al. argue that simple logistic regression analysis is inappropriate for cross-sectional and time-series data because observations are not temporally independent. They suggest a method to correct for this problem and show that, with their technique, the beneficial influence of economic interdependence…becomes statistically insignificant” (423-4). “In this article, we address the concerns of our colleagues by adopting their suggestions for testing liberal theory, although we do not regard all of their proposed procedures as appropriate. Nevertheless, when we adopt their methods, we find that interdependence did significantly reduce the likelihood of conflict during the years 1950-92” (424).
“Beck et al. (1998) propose that researchers using logistic regression remedy temporal dependence in their time-series by creating a variable marks the number of years that have elapsed from the most recent occurrence of a dispute and by generating a spline function of the years of peace” (427).
They use COW data.
“We found that interdependence significantly reduced the likelihood of conflict…among contiguous and major-power pairs” (439).
This article deals with attacks coming from scholars who claim that trade interdependence does not have pacifying effects. These two claims, specifically from Beck et al. (1998) and Barbieri (1998), address potential effects that were not taken into consideration by the earlier work of Russett and Oneal (and Moaz). The authors find that, by extending the analysis to all dyads, there is not a “relationship between interdependence and peace, but the pacific benefits of trade become evident among the politically relevant dyads (those including a major power, or two contiguous states), among whom the great majority of disputes occur…With these sequential modifications we find increasingly strong support for the liberals’ belief that economic interdependence and democracy have important pacific benefits” (423). “We find no evidence that asymmetric trade increases conflict” (423).
“Beck et al. argue that simple logistic regression analysis is inappropriate for cross-sectional and time-series data because observations are not temporally independent. They suggest a method to correct for this problem and show that, with their technique, the beneficial influence of economic interdependence…becomes statistically insignificant” (423-4). “In this article, we address the concerns of our colleagues by adopting their suggestions for testing liberal theory, although we do not regard all of their proposed procedures as appropriate. Nevertheless, when we adopt their methods, we find that interdependence did significantly reduce the likelihood of conflict during the years 1950-92” (424).
“Beck et al. (1998) propose that researchers using logistic regression remedy temporal dependence in their time-series by creating a variable marks the number of years that have elapsed from the most recent occurrence of a dispute and by generating a spline function of the years of peace” (427).
They use COW data.
“We found that interdependence significantly reduced the likelihood of conflict…among contiguous and major-power pairs” (439).
Oneal and Russett: The Classical Liberals were Right
Oneal, JR, and BM Russett. 1997. “The Classical Liberals Were Right: Democracy, Interdependence, and Conflict, 1950-1985.” International Studies Quarterly 41:267-294.
(23).
“The liberals believed that economic interdependence, as well as democracy, would reduce the incidence of interstate conflict. In this article, we test both their economic and their political prescriptions for peace, suing pooled-regression analysis of politically relevant dyads for the Cold War era. We find that the pacific benefits of trade, both total and dyadic, have not been sufficiently appreciated” (267).
This article represents an expansion on earlier work by Maoz, Russett and Oneal. This approach is more theoretically grounded in the relationship between regimes and trade affect conflict. It also uses expanded data sets. Finally, it explores the transition from one type of regime to another.
There is a review of the literature beginning with classical liberalism and building towards democratic peace theory. There is a nice overview of democratic peace theory and it would be useful to revisit this article to explore that. The literature review then builds to an account of trade interconnectedness as being a mitigating factor for conflict and how this is not entirely taken into consideration by democratic peace theories, though it should, because it stems naturally from the classic liberalism literature. There have been analyses of the effect of trade interdependence on peace, but the findings have been largely unclear, and there is still a substantial divide between liberal and realist thought on the matter. The direction of causality is also important to take into consideration: before the 19th century, it was not uncommon for nations at war to continue trading. That has since changed, and, if one is not careful to examine the data thoroughly, the decline of trade as a result of conflict could be misinterpreted as being causally connected in different ways.
They use dyads involving at least one great power from the Correlates of War database. They examine the years 1950-85. Use MID data from COW: “A militarized dispute is an international interaction involving threats, displays, or actual uses of military force; it must be explicit, overt, not accidental, and government sanctioned” (273). They have a relatively standard set of independent variables (economic interdependence, democracy, political change, alliances, economic growth, contiguity, etc.).
(23).
“The liberals believed that economic interdependence, as well as democracy, would reduce the incidence of interstate conflict. In this article, we test both their economic and their political prescriptions for peace, suing pooled-regression analysis of politically relevant dyads for the Cold War era. We find that the pacific benefits of trade, both total and dyadic, have not been sufficiently appreciated” (267).
This article represents an expansion on earlier work by Maoz, Russett and Oneal. This approach is more theoretically grounded in the relationship between regimes and trade affect conflict. It also uses expanded data sets. Finally, it explores the transition from one type of regime to another.
There is a review of the literature beginning with classical liberalism and building towards democratic peace theory. There is a nice overview of democratic peace theory and it would be useful to revisit this article to explore that. The literature review then builds to an account of trade interconnectedness as being a mitigating factor for conflict and how this is not entirely taken into consideration by democratic peace theories, though it should, because it stems naturally from the classic liberalism literature. There have been analyses of the effect of trade interdependence on peace, but the findings have been largely unclear, and there is still a substantial divide between liberal and realist thought on the matter. The direction of causality is also important to take into consideration: before the 19th century, it was not uncommon for nations at war to continue trading. That has since changed, and, if one is not careful to examine the data thoroughly, the decline of trade as a result of conflict could be misinterpreted as being causally connected in different ways.
They use dyads involving at least one great power from the Correlates of War database. They examine the years 1950-85. Use MID data from COW: “A militarized dispute is an international interaction involving threats, displays, or actual uses of military force; it must be explicit, overt, not accidental, and government sanctioned” (273). They have a relatively standard set of independent variables (economic interdependence, democracy, political change, alliances, economic growth, contiguity, etc.).
Gartzke et al.: Investing in Peace
Gartzke, E, Q Li, and C Boehmer. 2003. “Investing in the Peace: Economic Interdependence and International Conflict.” International Organization 55:391-438.
“Research appears to substantiate the liberal conviction that trade fosters global peace” (391). These studies are limited. There is an overemphasis on trade, while other transfers are quantitatively larger. “Second, the manner in which economics is said to inhibit conflict behavior is implausible in light of new analytical insights about the causes of war” (391).
“Our quantities results who that capital interdependence contributes to peace independent of the effects of trade, democracy, interest, and other variables (391).
“We begin with a theory of disputes. A valid explanation for the effect of economics on peace must be placed in the context of an account of why most states occasionally resort to military violence” (392).
The authors explore different kinds of interdependence, monetary, trade, democratic, capital, and thoroughly explore the literature.
They use MID data.
Dismisses Barbieri’s findings as being flawed because of the author’s metric for determining economic interdependence: trade share.
“We have reviewed arguments for the effect of economic interdependence on peace. We show that existing accounts do not adequately explain why liberal economies are less likely to fight, but that a signaling argument is consistent with the observation of a liberal peace. We also expand interdependence to include financial and monetary integration, offering a set of variables that measure these processes” (418). They key finding is that increased interdependence reduces the vagueness of information transfers in bargaining between states.
“Research appears to substantiate the liberal conviction that trade fosters global peace” (391). These studies are limited. There is an overemphasis on trade, while other transfers are quantitatively larger. “Second, the manner in which economics is said to inhibit conflict behavior is implausible in light of new analytical insights about the causes of war” (391).
“Our quantities results who that capital interdependence contributes to peace independent of the effects of trade, democracy, interest, and other variables (391).
“We begin with a theory of disputes. A valid explanation for the effect of economics on peace must be placed in the context of an account of why most states occasionally resort to military violence” (392).
The authors explore different kinds of interdependence, monetary, trade, democratic, capital, and thoroughly explore the literature.
They use MID data.
Dismisses Barbieri’s findings as being flawed because of the author’s metric for determining economic interdependence: trade share.
“We have reviewed arguments for the effect of economic interdependence on peace. We show that existing accounts do not adequately explain why liberal economies are less likely to fight, but that a signaling argument is consistent with the observation of a liberal peace. We also expand interdependence to include financial and monetary integration, offering a set of variables that measure these processes” (418). They key finding is that increased interdependence reduces the vagueness of information transfers in bargaining between states.
Barbieri: Economic Interdependence: A Path to Peace or a Source of Interstate Conflict?
Barbieri, K. 1996. “Economic Interdependence: A Path to Peace or a Source of Interstate Conflict?.” Journal of Peace Research 33:29.
“Four propositions about the trade-conflict relationship are easily identified among a broad group of theorists” (30). These are the liberal argument linking trade to peace, the neo-Marxist argument that symmetry in trade promotes peace, the (realist) idea that trade promotes conflict and the final belief that the two variables are not related.
These four positions are explored.
Of interest: “Interdependence generally implies relations of mutual need and, by extension, mutual vulnerability between actors, while dependence denotes asymmetrical relations. A further distinction is made by Keohane and Nye (1977, pp. 8-9), between interdependence and interconnectedness. Interconnectedness merely represents weak linkages among states incapable of having a significant influence eon interstate relations; while interdependence entails a vulnerability and sensitivity not found in less extensive linkages” (33).
Barbieri then puts forth 4 hypotheses that deal with the degree of economic salience in a trading relationship as well as the symmetry.
Uses Mitiliarized Interstate Dispute Dataset.
Thorough review of the literature on the operationalization of interdependence, and the difficulties in identifying interdependence.
The article finds that there is an interesting, curvilinear relationship between interdependence and MID conflict: if there is asymmetrical conflict, the chance of conflict is high. If there is a very high degree of symmetrical interdependence, there is also a very high degree of conflict.
“Four propositions about the trade-conflict relationship are easily identified among a broad group of theorists” (30). These are the liberal argument linking trade to peace, the neo-Marxist argument that symmetry in trade promotes peace, the (realist) idea that trade promotes conflict and the final belief that the two variables are not related.
These four positions are explored.
Of interest: “Interdependence generally implies relations of mutual need and, by extension, mutual vulnerability between actors, while dependence denotes asymmetrical relations. A further distinction is made by Keohane and Nye (1977, pp. 8-9), between interdependence and interconnectedness. Interconnectedness merely represents weak linkages among states incapable of having a significant influence eon interstate relations; while interdependence entails a vulnerability and sensitivity not found in less extensive linkages” (33).
Barbieri then puts forth 4 hypotheses that deal with the degree of economic salience in a trading relationship as well as the symmetry.
Uses Mitiliarized Interstate Dispute Dataset.
Thorough review of the literature on the operationalization of interdependence, and the difficulties in identifying interdependence.
The article finds that there is an interesting, curvilinear relationship between interdependence and MID conflict: if there is asymmetrical conflict, the chance of conflict is high. If there is a very high degree of symmetrical interdependence, there is also a very high degree of conflict.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
O'Brien: Anticipating the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
O'Brien, S., 2002. Anticipating the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: An Early Warning Approach to Conflict and Instability Analysis. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46(6), 791.
This study uses a statistical technique called fuzzy analysis of statistical evidence (FASE) to determine whether or not there are country-level, “macrostructural factors that can contribute to different kinds and levels of intensity of conflict and country instabilities” (791). O’Brien concludes that his method can forecast both the occurrence and intensity of conflicts for the following 5 years with 80% accuracy.
The paper begins by exploring the need for policy relevant scholarship, especially that exploring early-warning systems. The paper highlights a variety of studies that attempt to provide such scholarship. It then explores the State Failure Task Force (SFTF) and their four types of state failure: genocides/politicides, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, and adverse/disruptive regime transitions (792).
The SFTF used a variety of methodological tools, including logistic regressions, neural networks and genetic algorithms to look at patterns in structural data. They found that their best model included only three variables: level of democracy, trade openness and infant mortality rate (793). They were about 66% effective with these variables historically. King and Zeng outperform the SFTF model by including legislative effectiveness and fraction of population in the military.
This study attempts to expand upon these earlier approaches.
He uses KOSIMO data
TRUNCATED HERE
This study uses a statistical technique called fuzzy analysis of statistical evidence (FASE) to determine whether or not there are country-level, “macrostructural factors that can contribute to different kinds and levels of intensity of conflict and country instabilities” (791). O’Brien concludes that his method can forecast both the occurrence and intensity of conflicts for the following 5 years with 80% accuracy.
The paper begins by exploring the need for policy relevant scholarship, especially that exploring early-warning systems. The paper highlights a variety of studies that attempt to provide such scholarship. It then explores the State Failure Task Force (SFTF) and their four types of state failure: genocides/politicides, ethnic wars, revolutionary wars, and adverse/disruptive regime transitions (792).
The SFTF used a variety of methodological tools, including logistic regressions, neural networks and genetic algorithms to look at patterns in structural data. They found that their best model included only three variables: level of democracy, trade openness and infant mortality rate (793). They were about 66% effective with these variables historically. King and Zeng outperform the SFTF model by including legislative effectiveness and fraction of population in the military.
This study attempts to expand upon these earlier approaches.
He uses KOSIMO data
TRUNCATED HERE
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