Conflict Propensity Research Articles

Governance strategies to remedy the natural resource curse

Rising commodity prices in recent years have deepened awareness of the paradox of the resource curse – resource‐rich countries consistently facing high levels of poverty, corruption and instability. There is relatively less recognition of the autocratic roots underlying much of this curse, however. Resource‐rich autocracies, on average, are subject to lower levels of well‐being, higher volatility, a greater propensity for conflict and humanitarian crisis, and more corruption than resource‐rich countries on a democratic path. The resource curse persists because sharp inequalities of power limit opportunities for corrective action. Recognising the governance root to the natural resource curse dictates that remedial strategies for resource‐rich democratisers should differ from those for resource‐rich autocracies. In the latter, effective reform strategies must increase the cost of rent‐seeking by the privileged minority and improve the capacity for collective action among the disadvantaged majority. While resource‐rich autocracies do not rely on international assistance for budgetary support, they generally must tend to reputational and investment concerns. Accordingly, there is an important role for international actors – governmental, civil society organisations and the private sector – to play in reversing the resource curse.

Violent Adolescence: State Development and the Propensity for Militarized Interstate Conflict

This article examines how economic development influences interstate conflict. Rather than theorizing a linear relationship between economic development and state behavior in militarized conflicts, this article hypothesizes a non-linear relationship where both extreme poverty and prosperity reduce this risk. This occurs because states at an intermediate level of development have both the opportunity and willingness to pursue territorial claims, which makes them most prone to militarized interstate conflicts. The changing orientation of economies from agricultural and extractive activities eventually to service-based economies alters the cost–benefit calculations concerning territorial acquisition. Developed states, more reliant on services for their economic growth, are less likely to push territorial claims, decreasing their involvement in interstate conflict. Meanwhile, the poorest states, although they have more to gain through territorial expansion, have a decreased ability to pursue their objectives through military force. The authors examine all states between 1870 and 1992 at the monadic level of analysis. In general, the statistical analysis confirms the hypotheses. States at an intermediate level of development are most prone to initiate and participate in militarized conflicts, including those over the issue of territory and those that result in battlefield deaths. High levels of economic development mitigate the effects of military power and population growth that increase the risk of interstate violence. This project helps explain why past studies have linked development to both war and peace, as well as suggesting possible flashpoints in the future. Finally, the results also suggest that other models in the literature theorizing linear functions for economic development and conflict are misspecified.

Nodding Along or Fighting for 'Us': Do Conflict Management Style and Propensity to Initiate Negotiations Influence Group Identification and Effectiveness?

The impact individual differences have on social interactions such as negotiations and group processes has been largely discounted and doubted by scholars in recent years (e.g., Bazerman, Curhan, Moore, & Valley, 2000; Davis-Blake & Pfeffer, 1989). For example, negotiation researchers have consistently concluded that individual difference variables such as cognitive ability and conscientiousness, which are proved to be highly valid of work performance in general (Barrick & Mount, 1991; Schmidt & Hunter, 1998), have literally no impact on negotiated outcomes (Bazerman et al., 2000; Thompson, 1998; Thompson, 1990). However, others have found that cognitive ability and personality traits such as extraversion do have an impact on work team effectiveness (e.g., Barrick, Stewart, Neubert, & Mount, 1998; Barry & Stewart, 1997) despite the fact that the effective sizes of them are generally small. Given the inconsistency among these conclusions, we believe that further investigation is necessary and propose to test a new set of individual differences variables which suggests that people vary in their interaction with others. In our study, instead of focusing on the personality traits one may possess, we examine the impact of interpersonal styles (i.e., variations in stable preferences in dealing with social situations) on group outcomes.

Structure, Politics, and Ethnonationalist Contention in Post-Franco Spain: An Integrated Model

Previous models of nationalism have been unable to adequately account for variation in forms or levels of contentious nationalist activity. Building on the most important theoretical tools from the literatures on social movements and nationalism, an alternative model is proposed in which structure, politics, and action assume equal roles in an interdependent causal system. It is further proposed that violent and nonviolent contention, though conceptually distinct phenomena, are the products of a fundamentally similar set of factors. The model posits that sociostructural ‘root causes’ are vital to the development of ethnonationalist contentious politics, but indirectly via mobilization. The direct determinants of protest and rebellion are a conjunction of organizational mobilization and political opportunity structures. In particular, a shared identity gives groups of people the basis for organizational mobilization; mobilizational resources provide the means for such mobilization; grievances lend the reason; and a series of political factors structure the opportunities of mobilized groups to contend in a conventional, violent or nonviolent manner. The opportunity structures are then themselves transformed by the nature of the contention that takes place. Using a 3SLS structural equation model and original data from the 17 autonomous communities of Spain between 1977 and 1996, the results show that structure, politics, and action are, as predicted, three fundamental components of an interdependent causal system. The vital, yet indirect role of grievances and group identity in the generation of ethnonationalist conflict is confirmed, and a number of powerful relationships obtain with the individual elements of the political opportunity structure. Higher levels of democracy are related to increased protest, more intense repression is associated with lower levels of contentious activity, and the level of regional autonomy has no apparent impact on conflict. In the short term, moreover, Spain’s major democratic transition is shown to exacerbate existing conflict propensities.

Can Strategic Interaction Divert Diversionary Behavior? A Model of U.S. Conflict Propensity

Current conflict research increasingly suggests the relevance of unobserved strategic processes in determining how and why states engage in conflict. Alastair Smith's (1996, 1998) work, in particular, highlights the likelihood that diversionary foreign policy behavior is inhibited by the very fact that democratic leaders' political needs are abundantly apparent to their potential targets. So, the very factors that give democratic leaders the incentive to divert also give their targets incentives to maintain low profiles. Yet, few empirical tests of this proposition exist in diversionary work or elsewhere. This article seeks to provide such a test in the context of Fordham's (1998a) innovative explanation for American diversionary behavior. I test the strategic interaction hypothesis in a Zero-Inflated Poisson (ZIP) model and evaluate the utility of the ZIP model for modeling an unobserved process. The results suggest both the importance of strategic interaction and the power of the ZIP model in accounting for strategic interaction in world politics.

Paying the Piper? Implications of Social Insurance Payments for Conflict Propensity

State leaders must often address domestic and foreign-policy concerns simultane-ously, though doing so can be complicated and risky. One way in which leaders can seek to satisfy domestic demands and pursue foreign policy goals simultaneously is by implementing policies that complement one another; i.e., the implementation of one policy influences the ease with which the other policy can be implemented. For instance, one manner in which leaders can placate domestic audiences is via distributive policies such as social insurance payments that provide economic security to individuals. By providing economic security guarantees, leaders may gain greater discretion over other policy areas, including foreign policy. However, while the social insurance effort may satisfy an audience and enable a leader to take foreign- policy action, especially high payment levels may indicate that a leader must devote an inordinate portion of his budget to domestic concerns, making foreign policy more difficult to implement. Thus, guarantees of economic security might provide leaders with greater foreign policy latitude until domestic expenditures reach sufficient levels that foreign-affairs budgets are reduced. We employ zero-inflated event count models to estimate the relationship between social-insurance levels and the number of Militarized Interstate Disputes in which states engage. Our analyses include 69 states between 1975 and 1990. Our models support the hypothesis that lower levels of social insurance lead to greater numbers of disputes, but that, after a certain level of insurance effort is passed, dispute involvement declines. Our findings suggest a differential effect of social insurance on a leader's ability to act in the foreign policy arena and support the notion that leaders may employ the welfare state to enhance their foreign-policy capabilities, though they appear to meet with conditional and limited success.

Time to Fight

Democratic peace arguments make compelling claims about the importance of regime type for explaining conflict but do not explain the variation in conflict propensity among states that share a common regime type. The authors develop a veto-player approach to capture the effects of executive constraint and argue that in parliamentary democracies, cabinet structure and allies influence states' conflict behavior. A hazard analysis is used to examine the time before a government's first initiation of force in 569 cabinets in 18 countries from the end of World War I to 1990 ( N = 25,238 cabinet months). Results show that minority governments have a smaller hazard for initiating a conflict than either coalition or majority cabinets. However, the likelihood of conflict initiation for coalition and majority cabinets is the same. States with allies are less likely to initiate force. Across states of relatively uniform political culture, institutional measures of constraint effectively predict variation in conflict behavior.

Back to Kant: Reinterpreting the Democratic Peace as a Macrohistorical Learning Process

The contemporary international relations literature links the democratic peace hypothesis to Kant’s famous peace plan. Yet, whether attempting to prove or disprove the hypothesis, most quantitative studies have lost sight of important dimensions of the Kantian vision. I reinterpret the democratic peace as a dynamic and dialectical learning process. In order to assess the dynamic dimension of this process (while controlling for exogenous dialectical reversals), I rely on quantitative evidence drawn from popular data sets. In conformance with the Kantian perspective, the conflict propensities among democracies exhibit a steadily falling trend since the nineteenth century. Yet, in partial opposition to Kant’s expectations, other dyads also experience a significant, although weaker, pacifying trend. A series of tests shows that these findings are robust to epochal effects, various control variables, and “maturity effects” measuring the age of democratic dyads.

Domestic politics and interstate disputes: Examining US mid involvement and reciprocation, 1870–1992

Increasingly scholars have become interested in conflict behavior that falls short of war. Chan (1997), for example, has insisted that a concern for less intense engagements is crucial for fully understanding the conflict‐proneness of different regimes. Chan (1997) furthermore noted that scholars have generally failed to account for whether a state was the initiator or target of a dispute. Such a distinction, however, is crucial for discriminating the pacific effects of democratic culture and institutions. In this paper, I investigate the domestic determinants of US MID involvement and reciprocation from 1870 to 1992. I find that politics does not stop at the water's edge. Unlike Gowa (1998) who found no relationship between the use of force and dissatisfaction with the status quo, I uncover an association between US domestic conditions and whether the US was an initiator or target of a MID. Not only is the US more likely to be targeted during periods of domestic political weakness, but Democratic administrations also appear to be challenged to a greater extent than their Republican counterparts. Furthermore, when targeted, the US is much more likely to reciprocate when the initiating state is a non‐democracy suggesting that regime type continues to play an important role in conflict propensity even after a demand has been made.

The Democratic Peace and Rivalries

This article reexamines the democratic peace in a longitudinal fashion. We extend the democratic peace proposition beyond isolated militarized disputes or wars to longer term interstate rivalries. Rivalries of all types are rare among democratic dyads; there is only one case of enduring rivalry between consistently democratic states, and most conflictual relationships between democracies remain confined to isolated conflict. Second, we assess the effect of regime change on rivalry behavior when a regime change precipitates or ends a jointly democratic dyad. Enduring rivalries that include both joint democratic and nondemocratic periods exhibit significantly lower dispute propensities while both rivals are democratic, although proto-rivalries show much smaller differences. Importantly, the pacifying effect of democracy appears to strengthen over time after the transition to joint democracy, which is consistent with the onset and deepening of democratic norms. Both proto- and enduring rivalries show a decreasing propensity for militarized conflict within a year of the transition to joint democracy, and this propensity decreases almost to zero within five years. Our results generally confirm and extend the robust effects of the democratic peace.

Agreeing to Disagree: Domestic Institutional Congruence and U.S. Dispute Behavior

Domestic and international politics are linked so that domestic structure and domestic political preferences affect international conflict behavior. In particular, states' policy preferences can be characterized by the congruence of policy preferences between political institutions. As a state's policy preferences become more congruent, as policy preferences between political institutions are more similar, the state's conflict behavior changes. I hypothesize that as the domestic political institutions in a state share similar policy preferences or policy goals, disputes become more likely and tend to last longer. I employ event count and continuous-time hazard models to analyze U.S. conflict propensity and conflict duration during the period 1945-1992. Using the Militarized Interstate Dispute data set (version 2.1), I model U.S. militarized dispute behavior as a function of congruence between the policy preferences of the U.S. President and the Congress. The models reveal a strong relationship between preference congruence and both the amount of conflict and the duration of the disputes in which the U.S. engages. The congruence hypotheses are robust across a variety of measures. The results add substantial strength and substance to claims that domestic political characteristics affect international conflict. The theory and empirical analyses also refine the domestic-international linkage by allowing scholars to consider the effect of normal political change in a single state on that state's foreign policy decisions.

Eliciting collaboration from “risky” states: The limits of conventional multilateralism in security affairs

The emergence of an increasing number of states with a high conflict propensity constitutes a major challenge to international relations theory. While realist approaches dismiss the capacity of international governmental organisations to deal with risky states, liberal approaches largely focus on the successful multilateral management of peace. In this article, we examine how international institutions can counter the threats posed by risky states. Our analysis shows that current scholarship on multilateralism does not pay sufficient attention to the wider strategic context of international co-operation in security affairs. In particular, we argue that liberal approaches underestimate the ability of actors external to an institution to disrupt the collective attempts to elicit co-operation from risky states. The article offers a model-based typology of multilateral mechanisms and discusses the limits of current strategies from the viewpoint of non-co-operative game theory.

Determinants of Satisfaction with Partnership in International Joint Ventures:

The joint venture arrangement continues to emerge as a dominant business format in developing countries. However, it has a high propensity for partner conflict, dissatisfaction and failure. This study examine U.S.-Saudi joint ventures by developing and empirically testing a model of partner satisfaction whose conceptual framework is rooted in the marketing channels literature.

Security and Peace in Post-Cold War Europe

This paper discusses security and development issues in Europe's recent history and immediate future. The issue is how the security system affects the pattern of economic development and, conversely, the long-run effects of development on security. To understand this relationship a longer historical perspective is needed. Too much attention has been given to the EC `1992 project' compared to the more unplanned `integration' or political homogenization of greater Europe. Three distinct phases in terms of security orders are distinguished: the Hundred Years' Peace (1815-1914), the Cold War security system (1949-89) and an emerging system called the New European Security Order. We are at present entering a turbulent transition period in which several paths are open. A number of risk factors are identified and analysed. The way the security order is established and immediate security crises managed will influence the possibilities of developing a stable peace order, defined as a structure free from major contradictions and low conflict propensity. A European Peace Order, as distinct from a European Security Order, would presuppose a global peace order, the crucial feature of which will be regionalization on various levels of the world system in accordance with the model of `benign mercantilism', including Europe itself, where subregionalism may emerge as a new form of balance of power politics as an alternative to Pax Germanica.