Explanation Of War Research Articles

When does liberal peace fail? Trade and nationalism

Liberal peace research maintains that trade interdependence promotes interstate peace. In this study, I introduce nationalism as an important domestic factor and examine how it fares against trade as an explanation for war and peace and their interaction effects. I propose that when state leaders promote nationalism to bolster political legitimacy, they may not be incentivized to foster liberal peace through trade and instead may be willing to conflict with trading partners. A cross-national, time-series statistical analysis shows that nationalist leaders are likely to cause the pacifying effect of trade to fall apart and increase the likelihood of (fatal) militarized disputes, but not necessarily open warfare. These findings suggest that when politico-security interests of nationalist leaders collide with global economic interests, the former prevail over the latter in the context of low-level conflict, but not necessarily high-level conflict. Even nationalist leaders appear to be cautious of engaging in all-out bloody war with trading partners—the economic pain is greater than the gain. Nevertheless, the overall analysis indicates that liberal peace theory may be not as sure a safeguard as previously believed since it is ineffective in lowering the risk of dyadic disputes short of war in the era of rising nationalism.

Western orientalism and the threat from Russia

Contemporary security discourse on the belligerence of Russia is often understood through cultural terms. Russian culture and its way of war are seen to be a fundamental cause of tension. This cultural divide is increasingly described in civilizational terms in which a liberal democratic West is opposed by an irrational Russian-East, ever resistant to modernity. This perspective is known as orientalism. The following paper argues that orientalism and its cultural explanations of war are problematic. Western orientalist portrayals of Russia increase the chances of militarization and limits the scope of negotiation.

Toward a Structural Theory of War in Africa

ABSTRACTThis essay offers the outlines of a systemic explanation of war in Africa, treating the African state system as the underlying cause of conflict. The essay lays out the logic of structural theory and how it applies to Africa, focusing on the constituent parts of the African state system. Specific attention is paid to three unique aspects of the African state system: juridical statehood, neopatrimonial politics, and strained center-periphery relations. These elements combine to create conflict zones that are characterized by wars across states. This essay provides an explanation for how the Africa weak state system conditions the propensity for war in Africa and the nature and durability of those wars.

A Remark on the Scientific Explanation of War

A Remark on the Scientific Explanation of War

‘The Masters of War’: Finding ways to talk about the First World War today

This article sets out to challenge conventional descriptions and explanations of war and teaching about war. It draws on raw data from three qualitative arts-based projects to illustrate the complexity of cognitive and affective understandings of the place of war, past, present and future, through the jarring dissonance of ‘mash-up’ – a strategy that deliberately juxtaposes text from varying sources on top, around and side-by-side with other text. It is best read aloud – more than once.

Mediation in the shadow of an audience: How third parties use secrecy and agenda-setting to broker settlements

How does mediation work? Uncertainty is one of the main rationalist explanations for war. When a leader faces domestic pressure and mediation involves secrecy and agenda-setting, mediation by a third party in crisis bargaining can reduce the risk of war by reducing uncertainty and locking in concessions. As a result, mediation improves the prospects for peace at the price of costlier settlements, and should talks fail, the leader and her audience are more likely to win in any ensuing war. The theory holds implications for mediation, audience costs, and democracies in showing that an enemy with no audience costs can demonstrate resolve credibly in mediation. The argument is also closely related to the delegation literature, in showing that when a principal faces external pressure, she can reduce her risk of worse outcomes by delegating to an uninformed agent who, with considerable discretion, can extract credible information from an adversary.

Wars of Succession

ABSTRACTI analyze a model of bargaining, war, and endogenous leadership turnover in which (1) leader attributes affect war outcomes and (2) war can insulate settlements from renegotiation. Shifts in bargaining power caused by leadership turnover are endogenous and discontinuous, but sufficiently decisive war outcomes can solve the associated commitment problem. In contrast to other models where the shadow cast by a hawkish successor encourages moderation toward a dovish incumbent, the foreign state attacks instead—despite a dovish incumbent’s known preference for peace—using war to lock in a settlement that would otherwise be lost to future leadership turnover. I discuss the theory’s implications for widening the empirical scope of the commitment problem explanation for war to limited wars over relatively lower stakes and for integrating the politics of leadership turnover with the study of strategic rivalries.

War, violence, and the military during late socialism and transition. Five case studies on the USSR, Russia, and Yugoslavia

The text introduces five case studies on war and the military in the USSR and Yugoslavia in historical perspective. It argues that the armed forces were at the core of socialist statehood and that their role and their change in late socialism and post-Communism are thus far understudied. Discussing the similarities as well as the differences between the Soviet, the Russian, and the Yugoslav case, the introduction seeks new explanations for war and military violence in these countries. Rather than pointing exclusively to ethnic mobilization and nationalism, it views the transformation and collapse of the Communist party-state and its army as a precondition for violence and civil war. It places these cases using innovative methodological approaches to the research on physical violence, war, and military. These studies explore the experience and the representation of violence, army service, combat, and war in late socialism and scrutinize individual actors and their behavior within violent spaces. In retrospect the emerging wars in the post-Soviet space – from Chechnya to the Donbas – and in Yugoslavia are at least as crucial for the region as Gorbachev's reforms. They help to better understand the conflicts of the present.

The rationalist puzzle of war

Current rationalist explanations of war have been influenced by the treatment of war as a bargaining problem. This treatment introduces what is termed the ‘puzzle of war’. The puzzle of war depends on the proposition that the exogenous costs of war guarantee the existence of an ex ante bargaining range of mutually acceptable peaceful outcomes that are preferable to war. This article examines how this puzzle has been constructed and justified in order to support this proposition. Two conclusions are reached: the costs of war are neither necessary for the existence of a peaceful settlement when an allocation or division is exogenous, nor are the costs of war sufficient for the existence of a bargaining range, when equilibrium is endogenous.

Constructing States, Constructing the International

Secular Morality and International Security: American and British Decisions about War. By Maria Fanis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011. 240 pp., $63.18 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-472-11755-0). Why leaders decide to use military force has long been a central concern for those who study international relations (IR). The scholarly literature has examined a vast array of causes or reasons (depending on your methodological assumptions), stretching from the psychological, to the economic, to the cultural. Competing IR theories endlessly debate this question, with little agreement in sight. Maria Fanis asks that central question, why state leaders choose war or diplomacy in their conflicts with each other. Rather than a tired rehearsal of disciplinary positions, she provides a clear and empirically grounded answer: state leaders make decisions about force because of moral impulses that arise from the narrative histories of their own communities. Situating herself in a broadly constructivist framework, Fanis argues that it is not free-floating global or international norms that structure decisions, but state-based norms that connect to the histories of particular communities. Her approach thus complements and advances the work of others who have emphasized the importance of state identity for constructivist explanations of war and peace (Lang 2002; Steele 2008). The strength of Fanis' work is in her detailed empirical investigation. As the subtitle of the work indicates, the book focuses on American and British decision making. Rather creatively, she chooses cases from the nineteenth century and, even more creatively, chooses cases in which war did (for example, the War of 1812) and did not take place (for example, the Oregon crisis). This results in four rich and …

Borrowed Power: Debt Finance and the Resort to Arms

Military expenditures are often funded by debt, and sovereign borrowers are more likely to renege on debt-service obligations if they lose a war than if they win one or if peace prevails. This makes expected debt service costlier in peace, which can affect both crisis bargaining and war termination. I analyze a complete-information model where players negotiate in the shadow of power, whose distribution depends on their mobilization levels, which can be funded partially by borrowing. I show that players can incur debts that are unsustainable in peace because the opponent is unwilling to grant the concessions necessary to service them without fighting. This explanation for war is not driven by commitment problems or informational asymmetries but by the debt-induced inefficiency of peace relative to war. War results from actions that eliminate the bargaining range rather than from inability to locate mutually acceptable deals in that range.

Rationalist Experiments on War

Private information and the commitment problem are central to the rationalist theory of war, but causal evidence is scarce, as rationalist explanations for war are difficult to test with observational data. I design laboratory experiments to isolate the effects of private information and the commitment problem on the risk of conflict. I find that the commitment problem sharply increases the incidence of conflict, but there is no significant difference in conflict incidence with or without private information in the shadow of shifting power. I also investigate the realism of the positive experimental results with a case study of Japan's decision-making on the eve of the Pacific War. The permutation of formal, experimental and historical methods applies the strength of one method to compensate for the weakness of another. Convergent results from the different methods strengthen the causal inference.

From Social Classes to Ethnicities: Ethnocentric Views in History Textbooks in Post-Soviet Russia

The dramatic transformations experienced by Russia in the 1990s were accompanied by the radical changes in views of the past. Whereas social class struggle was emphasized by the Soviet Marxist historiography, ethnicity became the focal point of the post-Soviet one. This replacement was especially sensitive for historical education at school where an image of the class enemy was forced out by that of ethnic enemy. It is in this context that an ideology of national-liberation movement was replaced by an idea of the clash of cultural values as a universal explanation of wars and ethnic conflicts. This new paradigm is analyzed with reference to images of the North Caucasian highlanders in the post-Soviet history textbooks, especially with respect to their participation in the Caucasian war in the early 19th century and their deportation in 1943–1944. I will also discuss how the new North Ossetian and Ingush history textbooks represent ethnic neighbors – the Ingush by the Ossetians and the Ossetians by the Ingush. I will argue that cultural fundamentalism and ethnocentrism, which make up the basis of the post-Soviet historiography, cultivate soil for cultural racism – the most powerful type of racism in the contemporary world.

A Systematic Approach to Cultural Explanations of War: Tracing Causal Processes in Two West African Insurgencies

Summary Many accounts of cultural factors in armed conflicts are dependent on circumstantial details. Alternative quantitative approaches suffer from confusion of correlation and cause. This paper describes and exemplifies a third approach to the analysis of cultural factors in war—causal process tracing. Six key steps in implementing causal process tracing are outlined and applied to recent episodes of armed conflict in Cote d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone. The virtue of the method lies in establishing a systematic framework for the comparison and evaluation of cultural mechanisms, thus providing an escape from hazards associated with subjective regression.

Classification of Interstate Wars

One of the recent lessons suggested by the scientific study of war is that different wars have different causes. Related to this lesson is the belief that war is multicausal and that there are different paths to war. Both these claims imply the need to create a typology of war and set the domain of various explanations of war. This article constructs a scientific typology and classifies all interstate wars from 1816 through 1997. Wars are classified along three dimensions—their size, the issues that give rise to them, and the behavior of states before the war. The classification portrays what are the similarities and dissimilarities in the underlying causes of each type of war. The analysis demonstrates that a clear typology of wars (mutually exclusive and logically exhaustive) can be created and is empirically informative.

NATIONAL REBIRTH OUT OF YOUNG BLOOD

This paper deals with anthropological and psychological explanations of war as a sacrificial ritual enhancing individual or group cohesion during the Finnish Civil war 1917–1918. Analysis of both bourgeois and Social Democrat press and party archives show how fantasies of a bloody solution appeared as early as the summer of 1917. Sacrifice of young men was seen as a national renewal, removing the suffocating atmosphere of the political stalemate and mutual suspicions. Individual self‐sacrifice was praised as a proof to build a nation, not due to its instrumental value. Both parties were able to deny the consequences of their war preparations and aired relief as the war began. The war was experienced as a purity crusade of younger generations against the vices of elder men, whose egoism had endangered the national existence.

The Social (and Religious) Meanings that Constitute War: The Crusades as Realpolitik vs. Socialpolitik

This paper aims to present a different, and thus a more complete, explanation for “wars” in general and the Crusades to the Holy Land in particular than the one given by realist and rationalist theories. It makes its theoretical contribution in the context of a recent debate among several IR scholars, such as John Ruggie, Marcus Fischer, Rodney Bruce Hall, and Friedrich Kratochwil, forwarding the constitutive nature of the explanation of war. Furthermore, it wishes to incorporate into IR research a more sensitive historical research on the Middle Ages and the Crusades, based on French historiography and the Annalists, highlighting the “ mentalite ” as a cognitive structure that constituted particular interests, patterns of politics, and ultimately the wars of the Crusades. To show the evolution of social institutions, such as norms of Just War, Christian chivalry, and the idea of the Last Emperor into social praxis, this paper also focuses on the crusading life itself through the Hohenstaufen Emperors, Henry VI and Frederick II.

‘Home’ and ethnicity in the context of warHesitant diasporas of Bosnian refugees

This article examines the meanings of ‘home’ in the lives of Bosnian refugees living in diaspora after the extremely destructive war in Bosnia. Through careful reading of life stories written by two refugees living in Finland, it highlights the dynamic process of negotiating belonging in diasporic situations. It pays special attention to the ambivalent role of ethnicity in the memories of these writers and their understanding of ‘good homes’. The reading does not support the popular ‘ancient hatred’ explanation of war in Bosnia; the violence of the war does not grow organically from the lives of ethnically mixed communities. Rather, it is brought to the communities by politicized discourses interpreting the language of ethnicity in extremely violent and exclusive ways. This article’s orientation is towards ‘hesitant diasporas’ because of refugees’ hesitation between their country of origin and their new country of settlement as their ‘homes’ in a changing situation.

Domestic Coalitional Analysis and the Democratic Peace

Democratic do not wage wars against one another has developed into a thriving research programme in international relations. The programme includes both supporters and detractors who apply statistically oriented, formal-modelling, and case-study methods.1 The last has particular affinity with historical analysis. Spencer R. Weart, in testing the theory against evidence running from antiquity to the twentieth century, finds unqualified support for it.2 This article scrutinizes the democratic peace from the perspective of the relationship between domestic political processes and international behaviour. It explores an alternative, and in some cases complementary, explanation for war and peace that derives from a domestic coalitional approach to politics. The framework pays special attention to the effects of internationalization, in its economic and political dimensions.

The Concept of Security: Should it be Redefined?

This essay addresses the debate on the expansion of the concept of security, which emerged especially after the end of the Cold War. My argument is based on a distinction between the phenomenon to be explained and the explanations, which include all the relevant competing causal factors affecting the explained phenomenon. The subject matter, that the security field addresses, is the threat of organized inter-group violence, and the ways to manage and to prevent it. Here a somewhat broadened version of the traditionalist security concept is in order, which should treat peace as a central element of the field alongside war. Yet, regarding the competing explanations of war and peace, the door should be kept wide open to a great variety of causal factors, theories and explanations, on the condition that they logically and empirically affect war and peace.