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Nations at War: A Scientific Study of International Conflict
... Instead of uncovering new, durable, systematic patterns , as is the case in most other quantitative subfields of political science (and public health, of which this field is also a part [King and Murray 2000]), students of international conflict are left wrestling with their data to eke out something they can label a finding. As a consequence, those with deep qualitative knowledge of the subject are rarely persuaded by conclusions from quantitative works (see Bueno de Mesquita 1981; Geller and Singer 1998; Levy 1989; Rosenau 1976; Vasquez 1993). The field has a number of important successes to its credit, such as the democratic peace, and many important and very promising research programs , but the discontinuity between the beliefs of most experts and many quantitative results remains. ...
We address a well-known but inffequently discussed problem in the quantitative study of international conflict: Despite immense data collections, prestigious journals, and sophisticated analyses, empirical findings in the literature on international conflict are often unsatisfying. Many statistical results change from article to article and specification to specification. Accurate forecasts are nonexistent. In this article we offer a conjecture about one source of this problem: The causes of conflict, theorized to be important but often found to be small or ephemeral, are indeed tiny for the vast majority of dyads, but they are large, stable, and replicable wherever the ex ante probability of conflict is large. This simple idea has an unexpectedly rich array of observable implications, all consistent with the literature. We directly test our conjecture by formulating a statistical model that includes its critical features. Our approach, aversion of a "neural network" model, uncovers some interesting structural features of international conflict and, as one evaluative measure, forecasts substantially better than any previous effort. Moreover, this improvement comes at little cost, and it is easy to evaluate whether the model is a statistical improvement over the simpler models commonly used. Government Version of Record
Während die etablierte Forschung zum Demokratischen Frieden sich fast ausschließlich auf potentiell friedensfördernde demokratische Institutionen und Normen konzentriert hat, betrachtet ein jüngerer Forschungsstrang die „Kehrseite” demokratischer Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik: die Beteiligung von Demokratien an Kriegen und militärischen Interventionen und dabei insbesondere die erhebliche Varianz innerhalb der Gruppe demokratischer Staaten. In Abgrenzung von bestehenden Ansätzen, welche primär die jeweilige politische Kultur zur Erklärung der Kriegsneigung von Demokratien
heranziehen, richtet dieser Beitrag den Blick auf institutionelle und präferenzbasierte Faktoren, wie der Ausprägung parlamentarischer Rechte und verfassungsrechtlicher Beschränkungen, der politischen Ausrichtung von Regierungen, der öffentlichen Meinung und dem Machtstatus des jeweiligen Landes. Basierend auf Fallstudien zu den Kriegen im Kosovo, in Afghanistan und im Irak wird die Frage untersucht, unter welchen Kontextbedingungen und politischen Konstellationen sich Demokratien militärisch beteiligen bzw. von einer Beteiligung absehen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen unter anderem, dass die Kombination von konservativen Regierungen mit schwachen parlamentarischen Rechten ausreichend für eine Kriegsbeteiligung im Irak war. Für die Einsatzentscheidungen in Afghanistan spielten parteipolitische Faktoren hingegen eine untergeordnete Rolle. Gleichzeitig wird jedoch deutlich, dass eine Parlamentsbeteiligung kein hinreichender Grund für eine militärisch zurückhaltende Außenpolitik ist. Das Papier argumentiert, dass die gewählte Fragestellung mit methodischen Ansätzen die sich auf die Messung der Effekte singulärer Faktoren beschränken nur unzureichend beantwortet werden kann. Daher wird mit Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fs/QCA) ein Ansatz gewählt, der sowohl kausale Interaktion als auch Equifinalität abbilden kann. Mit Hilfe von fs/QCA werden dabei unterschiedliche „demokratische Pfade“ zur Beteiligung bzw. Nichtbeteiligung an militärischen Einsätzen identifiziert und theoretisch erörtert. Abschließend werden die Ergebnisse für die jeweiligen Konflikte eingeordnet in die breitere Diskussion um demokratische Außen- und Sicherheitspolitik.
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Social conflict entails a variety of social phenomena, including international conflict, civil war, genocide, organized violence, insurgencies and rebellions, terrorism, riots, etc. Given the heterogeneity of social phenomena encompassed by this notion, it is not surprising that a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches have been applied to study it, ranging from formal game theoretic models to the hermeneutics of narratives. Social conflict has also been studied by means of complex systems research methods, such as agent-based social simulation. We conduct a review of the main formal-theoretical approaches to social conflict including agent-based modeling. We promote the usage of agent-based social simulation for it affords shedding light onto the nature of generative processes related to social conflict. We discuss the implications of such an approach to the study of social conflict against orthodox research designs and point toward its advantages which may facilitate development of more adequate conflict prevention and conflict management procedures.
Mueller (1989) says that war is merely an idea. If war begins in the minds of men, then thinking has to be properly conditioned a priori to the performance of violent acts. This paper is an attempt to solve a puzzle of origins of international conflict based on two propositions: (1) Conflict is an inherent aspect of societal systems. (2) The occurrence of international conflict is contingent in the character of our leadership, their normative images of themselves and "the others", and their desire to maintain themselves in power. Neither the occurrence nor the outcome of conflict is completely and rigidly determined by objective circumstances. Political leaders are held accountable for their foreign policy actions, and because they desire to maintain themselves in power they choose policies with an eye to their personal political future. That means that they choose in such a way that they do not precipitate an internal overthrow of their authority while also avoiding external removal. Thus decisions to go to war are endogenous to the domestic political setting of the leaders. The potentially powerful political consequences of the diversionary action are demonstrated in case studies of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin which illustrate the conditions under which domestic political opposition and elite insecurity led to the external use of force in two wars in Chechnya.
The convergence of three distinct but interconnected trends - unrelenting globalization, growing worldwide electronic connectivity, and increasing knowledge intensity of economic activity - is creating powerful new opportunities and challenges for global politics. This rapidly changing environment has information demands that surpass existing capabilities for information access, interpretation, and overall use, thus hindering our abilities to address emergent and complex global challenges, such as terrorism and other security threats. This reality has serious implications for two diverse domains of scholarship: international relations (IR) in political science and information technology (IT). Unless IT advances remain "one step ahead" of emergent realities and complexities, strategies for better understanding and responding to critical global challenges will be severely impeded. For example, more so now than ever, the U.S. Office of Counter-Terrorism and the newly-created Office of Homeland Security rely on intelligence information from all over the world to develop strategic responses to security threats. However, relevant information is stored in various regions throughout the world and by diverse agencies in different media, formats, and contexts. Intelligent integration of information is fundamental to developing policies to anticipate and strengthen protection against terrorist threats or attacks in the United States. This Project's activities, and relationships with its collaborators, will be coordinated through a newly formed joint Laboratory for Information Globalization and Harmonization Technologies (LIGHT). LIGHT will address information needs in the IR domain, focusing on the conflict realm, which deals with emergent risks, threats, and uncertainties of potentially global scale and scope related to: (a) crises, (b) conflicts and war; and (c) anticipation, monitoring and early warning. The goals of this initiative are to: (1) improve understanding of the types of IR information needs for decision making and institutional performance under varying degrees of risk and uncertainty; (2) design and implement the System for Harmonized Information Processing, to facilitate access to and correct interpretation of essential information that is critical to policy and research in the IR realm, as well as to other similarly complex domains, and (3) advance developments in the use of information technologies to facilitate such interdisciplinary research and to contribute to new education approaches, tools, and methods. Increasingly, addressing problems central to national and global interests in complex domains such as IR requires the use of technologies that easily combine observations from disparate sources, using different interpretations, for different purposes, and by a wide range of users. Critical advances in IT capabilities must span multiple domains (e.g., economic, political, geographic, commercial, and demographic), diverse contexts (i.e., meanings, languages, assumptions), and a multiplicity of contending agents (i.e., states, governments, corporations, international institutions). The technology-related research will focus on acquiring and enhancing information to serve user requirements both over individual domains (i.e., a single shared ontology) and across multiple domains, which are necessary for addressing complex challenges. The core innovation is reflected in the notion of a Collaborative Domain Space (CDS), within which applications in a common domain can share, analyze, modify, and develop information. For applications that span multiple domains we provide for a Collection of CDSs to link shared concepts in distinct domains. Moreover, we will develop the System for Harmonized Information Processing that incorporates CDSs as a basis for knowledge representation and includes all the necessary reasoning algorithms required to support information processing over a range of heterogeneous sources and applications. The development of the system described above builds upon prior work. The political science IR work will draw on an earlier Internet-based experimental "platform" for exploring forms of information generation, provision, and integration across multiple domains, regions, languages, and epistemologies which are relevant to complex but domain-specific applications, the Global System for Sustainable Development (GSSD). The IT component builds on work on the Context Interchange project (COIN) focused on the integration of a range of distributed heterogeneous information sources (e.g., financial, supply chain, disaster relief) using ontologies, databases, context mediation algorithms, and wrapper technologies. Both groups have considerable experience with the organization and management of large scale, international, distributed, and diverse research projects, including cross-national (e.g., China, Middle East, Europe) and institutional (private, public, national and international) agencies. The anticipated results will apply to any complex domain with multiple entities that rely on heterogeneous distributed data to address and resolve compelling problems. This initiative is supported by a network of international collaborators from (a) scientific and research institutions, (b) business and industry, and (c) national and international agencies. Expected research products include: a software platform, IR-based knowledge repository, and diverse applications in policy, research, and education which are anticipated to significantly impact the way complex organizations, and society in general, understand and manage critical global challenges.
Abstract will be provided by author.
Students of world politics disagree about the approaching outlook for war. Are we in the midst of an era of peace with a declining prospect of war, or are we facing a future characterized by increasing “ethnic” conflicts? This puzzle has led scholars to call for a more comprehensive examination of the phenomenon of war. A discussion concerning this need for a new look at war had also arisen within the Correlates of War Project. For more than three decades the Correlates of War Project's database has served the research needs of most of the quantitative world politics community, especially in identifying and trying to account for several classes of war (inter-state, extra-systemic, and civil) throughout the international system since 1816. However, a number of the disagreements in the literature concerning the prospects of war derive from the tendency of many researchers to rely on only one of our data sets (e.g., inter-state war). Here we wish to stimulate a broader view of war by examining the interplay among the three major types of war.
A recent National Research Council study found that: "Although there are many private and public databases that contain information potentially relevant to counter terrorism programs, they lack the necessary context definitions (i.e., metadata) and access tools to enable interoperation with other databases and the extraction of meaningful and timely information" [NRC02, p.304, emphasis added] That sentence succinctly describes the objectives of this project. Improved access and use of information are essential to better identify and anticipate threats, protect against and respond to threats, and enhance national and homeland security (NHS), as well as other national priority areas, such as Economic Prosperity and a Vibrant Civil Society (ECS) and Advances in Science and Engineering (ASE). This project focuses on the creation and contributions of a Laboratory for Information Globalization and Harmonization Technologies (LIGHT) with two interrelated goals: (1) Theory and Technologies: To research, design, develop, test, and implement theory and technologies for improving the reliability, quality, and responsiveness of automated mechanisms for reasoning and resolving semantic differences that hinder the rapid and effective integration (int) of systems and data (dmc) across multiple autonomous sources, and the use of that information by public and private agencies involved in national and homeland security and the other national priority areas involving complex and interdependent social systems (soc). This work builds on our research on the COntext INterchange (COIN) project, which focused on the integration of diverse distributed heterogeneous information sources using ontologies, databases, context mediation algorithms, and wrapper technologies to overcome information representational conflicts. The COIN approach makes it substantially easier and more transparent for individual receivers (e.g., applications, users) to access and exploit distributed sources.
The convergence of three distinct but interconnected trends - unrelenting globalization, growing worldwide electronic connectivity, and increasing knowledge intensity of economic activity - is creating powerful new opportunities and challenges for global politics. This rapidly changing environment has information demands that surpass existing capabilities for information access, interpretation, and overall use, thus hindering our abilities to address emergent and complex global challenges, such as terrorism and other security threats. This reality has serious implications for two diverse domains of scholarship: international relations (IR) in political science and information technology (IT). Unless IT advances remain "one step ahead" of emergent realities and complexities, strategies for better understanding and responding to critical global challenges will be severely impeded. For example, more so now than ever, the U.S. Office of Counter-Terrorism and the newly-created Office of Homeland Security rely on intelligence information from all over the world to develop strategic responses to security threats. However, relevant information is stored in various regions throughout the world and by diverse agencies in different media, formats, and contexts. Intelligent integration of information is fundamental to developing policies to anticipate and strengthen protection against terrorist threats or attacks in the United States. This Project's activities, and relationships with its collaborators, will be coordinated through a newly formed joint Laboratory for Information Globalization and Harmonization Technologies (LIGHT). LIGHT will address information needs in the IR domain, focusing on the conflict realm, which deals with emergent risks, threats, and uncertainties of potentially global scale and scope related to: (a) crises, (b) conflicts and war; and (c) anticipation, monitoring and early warning. The goals of this initiative are to: (1) improve understand
Three important trends - unrelenting globalization, growing worldwide electronic connectivity, and increasing knowledge intensity of economic activity - are creating new opportunities for global politics, with challenging demands for information access, interpretation, provision and overall use. This has serious implications for two diverse domains of scholarship: Information Technology (IT) and International Relations (IR) in political science. Unless IT advances remain "one step ahead" of such realities and complexities, strategies for better understanding and responding to emergent global challenges will be severely impeded. For example, the new Department of Homeland Security will rely on intelligence information from all over the world to develop strategic responses to a wide range of security threats. However, relevant information is stored throughout the world and by diverse agencies and in different media, formats, quality, and contexts. Intelligent integration of that information and improved modes of access and use are critical to developing policies designed to identify and anticipate sources of threat, to strengthen protection against threats on the United States, and to enhance the security of the nation.
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