The domestic origins of no-war communities

Abstract

This article is concerned with groups of states that do not fight each other and, moreover, hold stable expectations that war between them is unlikely to occur in the future. Such no-war communities can be seen as a particular, minimalist form of the concept of international security communities as coined by Karl Deutsch and further developed by Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett. The security community literature has identified several potential communities across the globe but failed to offer a conclusive explanation for how these emerged because, as I shall argue, insufficient attention has been paid to the domestic conditions of state capacity. This article proposes an alternative path to community in which a lack of state capacity forms the common knowledge foundation between states. Under certain conditions, a low level of capacity to fight can assure states of their common desire to avoid war and gives rise to mutual recognition and toleration. I demonstrate the argument based on two cases that have commonly been seen as the most likely candidates for security communities beyond Europe, the regions of South America and Southeast Asia.