Domestic Politics and War Outside the Democratic Peace

Abstract

Domestic Sources of Global Change by Zeev Maoz is an important book that takes already vibrant research on domestic politics and international conflict in new and meaningful directions. Although Maoz has authored some of major works on democratic peace thesis (Maoz and Abdolali 1989; Maoz and Russett 1993), this volume is not about rise of democracy and its international consequences. The first hint that such is case is found in Maoz's opening statement that the more things change, more things remain same (plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose). Rather, in ways that expand greatly on his 1989 'Joining Club of Nations essay, Domestic Sources of Global Change focuses on international ramifications of another equally important, although less studied, dynamic of domestic political systems: regime change. The book's contributions to international relations literature are twofold. First, it offers a wide-ranging theoretical framework that suggests reciprocal effects between transformations in international system (global and regional) and those in domestic political systems. Second, it contains an impressive set of systematic, empirical analyses of key elements of framework using now standard data on political regimes and on wars and militarized international disputes during nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By linking these theoretical and empirical contributions, Maoz points convincingly to another connection between domestic politics and war that does not involve democratic peace. This alternative is less at odds with realism yet broadens rather than sidetracks ongoing research by adhering to conventional research design found in democratic peace literature. Domestic Sources of Global Change is organized as follows. Its opening chapter addresses two theoretical questions that remain central throughout book: (1) what constitutes significant global change, and (2) what are sources of global change? Maoz's major theoretical innovation is a set of three models that are distinguished in terms of source of global change: systemic, regional, and national. The next five chapters, which constitute bulk of book, develop specific aspects of these models and empirically test a rough sequence of them. Chapters 2 and 3 examine linkages between state formation and international systems, showing that new states emerge in clusters (the 1990s are not unique) as a result of external and domestic pressures and that new states with revolutionary origins destabilize international politics either by initiating conflict or by attracting it. In chapters 4 and 5, Maoz shifts his focus to explain conflict proneness of old