Committed To Peace: Liberal Institutions and the Termination of Rivalry

2007 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 17-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRANDON C. PRINS ◽  
URSULA E. DAXECKER

Rivalry is characterized by mutual mistrust, anger and fear, and becomes increasingly intractable as confrontations between rivals militarize. The empirical record confirms that rivalries account for the vast number of militarized interstate disputes and wars in the international system. Although considerable attention has been spent on the initiation, duration or termination of rivalries, to date no comprehensive theoretical framework for their persistence or failure exists. Following Fearon, a rationalist explanation of rivalry termination is developed. It is argued here that the adoption of liberal institutions helps alleviate the commitment problems arising in rivalry. Free-market reform, democratic institutions and membership in international organizations all build trust and increase defection costs among rival states, and therefore help to shorten the duration of rivalry. Using a Cox proportional hazard model and Thompson's data on rivalries, it is shown that change towards democracy, as well as the joint effect of democracy and economic development increase the likelihood of rivalry termination. Also, joint membership in international organizations with mechanisms for dispute settlement reduces the duration of rivalry.Arobustness check using Diehl and Goertz's list of rivalries produces similar results.

2006 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
SEUNG-WHAN CHOI ◽  
PATRICK JAMES

Mass media play a central role in political life. Media not only transfer information; they also facilitate communication. These functions may ameliorate conflict, crisis and war in world politics. Accordingly, this study looks into the impact of media openness on international conflict. Based on a cross-sectional, time-series dataset for interstate dyads from 1950 to 1992, logistic regression analysis shows that an indicator of media openness has a strong dampening effect on Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) and fatal MIDs. Moreover, this connection is significant even in the presence of a composite indicator of democracy (that measures its institutional attributes using the Polity data), economic interdependence and joint membership in international organizations. The results suggest that the successful neo-Kantian triad is complemented effectively by the presence of media openness.


Author(s):  
Liesbet Hooghe ◽  
Gary Mark ◽  
Tobias Lenz ◽  
Jeanine Bezuijen ◽  
Besir Ceka ◽  
...  

This chapter presents profiles on the delegation and pooling of authority in eleven multi-regional or global international organizations (IOs). Each profile explains how the coding scheme is applied to the IO by charting a path from the primary and secondary evidence to scoring judgments. They tell the reader how the assembly, executive, secretariat, consultative body, and dispute settlement of each IO are composed, what decisions each body makes, and how they make decisions. The profiles chart these developments annually since 1950. The authors indicate four kinds of uncertainty in superscript: α‎ for thin information; β‎ for a case that falls between the intervals on a dimension; γ‎ for disagreement among sources; δ‎ for inconsistency between written rules in the IO. Each profile is followed by tables summarizing the authors’ observations. Data and codebooks for the Measure of International Authority (MIA) are available on the authors’ websites.


Author(s):  
Harold A. Trinkunas

Latin America has long aspired for an interstate system based on the principles of nonintervention and adherence to international law. Over time, the region has become increasingly free of war, and interstate disputes are frequently settled via diplomacy or by international courts. But it has achieved a largely “negative” peace as peaceful relations in the region are neither the result of nor have produced deeper commercial integration, effective regional organizations, or epistemic security communities. This chapter examines realist, liberal, and constructivist explanations to explain the sources of peace and peaceful change in Latin America, as well as how structural changes in the international system have affected the region. In particular, it analyzes how Latin America’s relative weakness in terms of material capabilities has led it to rely on diplomacy, “soft balancing,” and norms entrepreneurship in international law to secure its interest in a progressively more peaceful and rule-bound international order.


2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Megan Shannon

I explore whether international organizations (IOs) promote peaceful conflict management. Using territorial claims data, I find that organizations with interventionist capabilities encourage disputing members to attempt peaceful conflict resolution. Then, to more fully uncover the causal relationship between IOs and conflict management, I investigate the influence of IOs on bilateral dispute settlement separately from third party settlement.The analyses reveal that institutions do not promote bilateral negotiations between members, indicating that the socialization and trust-building capabilities of IOs are limited. However, institutions foster multilateral talks, demonstrating that IOs broker bargaining with third party diplomatic intervention.


Author(s):  
Tobias Lenz

Abstract How and with what effects do institutions diffuse between international organizations (IOs)? An emerging literature extends a key insight of the study of diffusion processes among states to the international level, establishing that the adoption of institutions in IOs is regularly conditioned by the choices of other IOs. Yet, this literature neglects a key contextual difference between the two settings: unlike in the hierarchically structured organizations that have dominated the literature on diffusion, institutional creation, and change in IOs are the result of decentralized bargaining among sovereign governments. This paper develops a heuristic model that shows how diffusion between IOs shapes decision-making within them through its impact on the institutional preferences of individual governments. The model establishes that, unlike in diffusion processes among states, convergence is an unlikely outcome of diffusion between IOs. By implication, studies that take institutional convergence as their starting point are likely to underestimate the pervasiveness of diffusion effects. I demonstrate these arguments with a case study of the establishment of a regional dispute settlement system in Mercosur, a regional organization in Latin America.


Author(s):  
Crook John R

This chapter considers two broad categories of dispute settlement: roles and procedures that seek to resolve disputes on non-legal grounds, and those involving application of legal principles and procedures. While legal writers tend to equate ‘dispute settlement’ with settlement through legal procedures, other non-legal procedures such as diplomatic negotiations, mediation, and good offices are more often used. Indeed, it is generally recognized that negotiation is the simplest and most frequently used mode of international dispute settlement. However, the line between these two categories can be far from clear, and settlement of a dispute can involve both legal and non-legal processes.


Author(s):  
James P. Muldoon

The evolution of international administration in theory and practice mirrors the pattern of development of international organizations and the institutionalization of governance for the international system, which can be divided into three time periods: 1815–1945, which marks the initial organization and bureaucratization of the international system; 1945–91, the period of rapid growth of international organizations and reconstitution of the international system that had been destroyed by World War II; and, 1991–present, which represents the end of the Cold War and a transformational moment for the international system as globalization and the technological revolution challenge the structure and function of international governance system. The bureaucratization of the international system is due to the effectiveness of this type of organization for administration and government on the national level. However, the structure and function of international administration is different from national administration. The bureaucracies of today’s international organizations reflect both the changes in the environment in which they observe and the nature of the issue areas they are tasked to manage. Meanwhile, the creation of the United Nations (UN) in 1945 marked the transition from the first stage to the second in the development of international organizations and the system of governance for a new international order. Finally, the end of the Cold War and the dramatic changes in the world’s political, economic, and social landscape brought about by globalization revived interest in international organizations, and the role that they would play in the “new” world order.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-345
Author(s):  
Abdulmalik M. ALTAMIMI

AbstractThis paper aims to provide a comprehensive legal analysis, reminding the reader of the missing roles and potential of the the Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC]. Interstate disputes threaten the very existence of the GCC. Moreover, they call into question the GGC's mechanisms for co-operation and for ensuring the peaceful settlement of disputes. For instance, the GCC's Charter, commercial arbitration rules, and the Basic Law of the Economic Judiciary Commission all provide provisions for peacefully settling disputes between GCC Member States and their citizens. GCC states are also members of the League of Arab States [Arab League], another important regional organization with dispute settlement procedures. However, GCC and Arab League judicial and quasi-judicial mechanisms have not been invoked to date, arguably because the states prefer a diplomatic settlement. This paper reviews the GCC's mechanisms for co-operation and dispute settlement, referencing public international law to formulate recommendations to reform the GCC.


2020 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 1013-1021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua W. Busby

Abstract The COVID-19 outbreak is the most serious test of the international system since the 2008 global financial crisis. Rather than cooperate to contain and respond to a common threat, the world's leading powers—the United States and China—have increasingly blamed each other through wildly speculative theories about the origins of the virus. The World Health Organization sought to coordinate a global response, but it has been hamstrung and has come under attack. Given past cooperation between major powers to mobilize and eradicate smallpox and previous US leadership to fight HIV/AIDS and the 2014 West African Ebola crisis, the limited cooperation and lack of leadership are puzzling. What explains the anemic global response to date? This article draws from structural international relations theory to suggest a partial but somewhat dissatisfying answer. International organizations are inherently weak and now face opposition by major powers. The international system simultaneously incentivizes states to cooperate and address common threats, but it also encourages countries to take care of themselves, potentially at the expense of others. Which of these motives dominates cannot be explained by structural theory, thus requiring us to look to other factors such as the attributes of states and leaders themselves.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document