Radical Interdependence: Buddhist Philosophical Foundations for Social Theory

This Chapter asserts that a Buddhist perspective provides a systematic and genuine alternative to Western models of IR not so much because it arose in Asia, but because it is founded on distinctive first-order philosophical principles or substructures that differ from those that dominate in the West. The chapter explains this fundamentally different worldview through the concept of “radical interdependence”—the basic Buddhist “truth” about the nature of our existence that departs from most Western understandings of reality and interdependence. Buddhism offers a different starting point for thinking about the world we live in, one it characterizes as deeply interdependent. Moreover, Buddhism maintains that the failure to appreciate the full extent of interdependence limits our human potential and is the ultimate source of all conflicts, up to and including interstate war, whereas an understanding the truth of radical interdependence is the key to imagining a different vision for politics and IR.

New Under the Sun? Reframing the Gray Zone in International Security

Interstate war has been on the decline since the end of the Second World War. After the Cold War ended without a grand conflagration, civil conflicts and the war on terrorism have appeared to displace interstate war as the most pressing loci of security studies. Interstate aggression has become untenable, some have argued. Cooperative grievance resolution and the powerful incentives of economic interdependence have produced a decline in the outbreak of war. Revered scholars of international security have even asked whether we should bother studying the phenomenon anymore. Intrastate conflicts, it seems, are the order of the day. We argue that the contraction of interstate war is more a function of the weight we have accorded 20th century warfare in our conceptualization of interstate war than a real decrease in states’ willingness to employ force to achieve foreign policy ends. A broader approach to interstate war is needed to capture a more consistent conceptualization of the phenomenon. We suggest a framework under which gray zone strategies represent not an emergent phenomenon but a longstanding set of tools within the broader phenomenon of interstate conflict.

Interstate War Battle dataset (1823–2003)

Extant scholarship on interstate war and conflict resolution predominantly utilizes formal models, case studies, and statistical models with wars as the unit of analysis to assess the impact of battlefield activity on war duration and termination. As such, longstanding views of war have not been tested systematically using intraconflict measures, and deeper studies of war dynamics have also been hampered. I address these gaps by creating and introducing the Interstate War Battle (IWB) dataset, which captures the outcomes and dates of 1,708 battles across 97 interstate wars since 1823. This article describes the sources used to create these data, provides definitions, and presents descriptive statistics for the basic battle data and several daily-level measures constructed from them. I then use the data to test the implications of two major theoretical perspectives on conflict termination: the informational view, which emphasizes convergence in beliefs through battlefield activity; and Zartman’s ripeness theory, which highlights costly stalemates in fighting. I find suggestive evidence for informational views and little support for ripeness theory: new battlefield outcomes promote negotiated settlements, while battlefield stagnation undermines them. The IWB dataset has significant implications, highlights future research topics, and motivates a renewed research agenda on the empirical study of conflict.

Terrain and war: Measuring topographic and land cover heterogeneity in interstate wars, 1816–2003

This article introduces the War Terrain Indices and Geospatial Representation Dataset (WARTIGER). This dataset addresses a dearth of quality terrain data in the study of interstate war outcomes. It introduces three primary sets of variables for all interstate wars between 1816 and 2003, including disaggregated versions of the First and Second World Wars. The first, spatial extent, approximates the total area of a given war. The second measures topographic heterogeneity using a terrain ruggedness index. The third estimates land cover heterogeneity and presents a trafficability index. These data allow for an accurate and temporal assessment of the role of terrain as they relate to the correlates of war outcomes.

Introducing the Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset: Political institutions in the long 19th century

The Historical Varieties of Democracy dataset (Historical V-Dem) contains about 260 indicators, both factual and evaluative, describing various aspects of political regimes and state institutions. The dataset covers 91 polities globally – including most large, sovereign states, as well as some semi-sovereign entities and large colonies – from 1789 to 1920 for many cases. The majority of the indicators come from the Varieties of Democracy dataset, which covers 1900 to the present – together these two datasets cover the bulk of ‘modern history’. Historical V-Dem also includes several new indicators, covering features that are pertinent for 19th-century polities. We describe the data, coding process, and different strategies employed in Historical V-Dem to cope with issues of reliability and validity and ensure intertemporal and cross-country comparability. To illustrate the potential uses of the dataset we describe patterns of democratization in the ‘long 19th century’. Finally, we investigate how interstate war relates to subsequent democratization.

Visions of Peace in International Relations

In this article, we engage with IR's recently rediscovered interest in peace and connect it with the visual turn in international relations. We move the field's focus on representations of war to representations of peace and develop the concept of peace photography. We suggest both understanding photography as a social agent promoting visions of peace and incorporating analysis of peace photography into IR's emerging agenda on peace. Our illustrative examples show that it is insufficient to think about and analyze visual images only in connection with representations of large scale violence and interstate war. In contrast, we provide an alternative approach which aims to broaden our understanding of (the study of) peace in IR. First, we explore a positive conception of peace at the individual and everyday level of analysis. Second, we advocate methodological pluralism by examining different analytical sites of peace photography. Third, we concentrate on the potentialities of peace photography in Colombia and Brazil—notorious spaces of everyday violence. We argue that the analytical perspectives developed in this paper have also relevance beyond our examples: If peace photography can be found here, than it can also be found elsewhere. Put differently, everyday visions of peace constitute particular instances of the international.

Perfect Deterrence Theory

This chapter introduces perfect deterrence theory and contrasts it with classical deterrence theory, which is the prevailing realist theory of interstate war prevention. How and under what conditions war might be prevented is the principal question addressed by both theories. The assumptions, empirical implications, and policy prescriptions of the two approaches to deterrence are discussed. Classical deterrence theory is shown to have both logical and empirical problems. Perfect deterrence theory, which is composed of a number of interrelated game models that are analyzed under a common set of preference assumptions, is not only logically consistent but empirically robust as well.