Development and War

Abstract

How truly global are international politics? Are the causes of war within the international system uniform across regions and times? Standard analyses of the sources of conflict in the international system assume they are and seek out general patterns across enormous all-dyad data sets. Understandably, collection of detailed information about the contexts of different times or places is impossible when one must gather data about a million observations. hypotheses evaluated against the evidence contained in these data sets almost never allow for the possibility of regional or temporal context being important. general theory underlying such analyses is almost always based on the experience of the Western, or at best developed, world and is assumed to offer insights into timeless and placeless realities of world politics. When researchers do investigate their claims within an international subsystem, they unfortunately most often restrict themselves to consideration of the great powers.1 In the course of such analyses we have learned a lot about widely important correlates of international conflict. But we have ignored the questions raised above. In short, we do not know how truly global international politics are. We do not know if the causes of war are similar across regions or times. We have failed even to ask. Others do ask. More accurately, others assert that the general patterns international relations (IR) researchers claim exist based on their all-dyads analyses do not really exist. area specialists' complaints that It doesn't happen that way in Madagascar are only the most pedestrian of such instances. Far more pertinent are arguments specifying why Western-biased Great Power-based IR theories are of limited applicability in other spatial or temporal domains. For example, with respect to neorealism's fundamental concept of security, Mohammed Ayoob (1991:263) writes: The application of this historically conditioned definition of the concept of security to the analysis of Third World situations has, however, created major conceptual problems. This is so because the three major characteristics of the concept of state security as developed in the Western literature on international relations--namely, its external orientation, its strong linkage with systemic security, and its binding ties with the security of the two major alliance blocs-are, if not totally absent, at least thoroughly diluted in the Third World. Thus, the explanatory power of the concept, as traditionally defined, is vastly reduced when applied to Third World contexts. In a volume about Africa in the international system, Christopher Clapham (1996:3) contends: relations has tended, understandably enough, to look at the world from the viewpoint of its most powerful states ... Yet most of the world's states . . . are poor, weak and subordinate. Most of the people in them are poorer, weaker and more subordinate still. International politics affects these states and people in ways that often differ appreciably from the ways in which it affects the