Suchergebnisse

Purpose
This study aims to contribute to discussions on peace between hostile nonmajor powers by focusing on the behavior of major powers. Specifically, alliances between nonmajor and major powers are explored to determine whether such ties contribute to transitions to higher levels of peace. Moreover, systemic factors involving power dynamics and relationships between major powers are also evaluated.


Design/methodology/approach
Multiple data sets which altogether covered the era from 1816 to 2010 were analyzed. All pairs of countries that were former foes were considered. Cox hazard regression was conducted.


Findings
Systemic instability is influential at transitions from lowest levels of peace for nonmajor power dyads. Eras where major powers are operating multilaterally appear to play a highly limited role in nonmajor powers attaining stable peace. However, alliances with major powers are relatively more crucial in these discussions for nonmajor powers and contribute to higher levels of peace being attained by nonmajor powers.


Research limitations/implications
Further research in particular with case studies can help to elucidate and extend the statistical findings.


Practical implications
Based on the findings, the design and operations of alliances can create more space to hear a wider range of issues that allies can be facing.


Originality/value
While major powers clearly have considerable capacity and global outreach, there has been little attention to whether and how they contribute to former foes attaining higher quality of peace.

"Empirics of Stable Peace" published on by Oxford University Press.

While there has been extensive interest in the role of democracy in reducing interstate violence, the role of democracy in reaching higher levels of peace has received much less attention. Since many countries have less than amicable relations, it is necessary to consider how the quality of peace can be improved. The quality of peace becomes particularly relevant when assessing relations of countries with a bellicose past. In order to capture improvement in relations, this article relies upon a framework that captures the various levels of peace that countries experience. The study maintains that democracy contributes to former belligerents reaching the highest levels of peace but that it is not helpful at the lower levels especially if only one side is a democracy. The article tests arguments on a dataset that captures the transitions from one level of peace to another for all former belligerents since 1816 and relies upon event history analysis. The results for peace are not the opposite of what is found for war. The findings demonstrate that democracy plays a substantial role in peaceful transitions at all levels. However, while joint democracy is important for reaching the highest levels of peace, democracy can hamper the progress of relations at the lowest levels of peace.

The idea that democracies are less apt to engage in conflict with each other is a central finding in international relations. Yet the operationalization of democracy in this literature has been relatively unreflective. Since the mid-1990s the majority of studies have used Polity. In this article we raise substantial concerns about its use, notably that there is a mismatch between conceptualization of democracy as a regime type and using an interval scale to measure it. If our contention is correct, we would expect to find that models that use a dichotomous coding should either provide different results from Polity or at minimum fit the data better. We then test this contention by comparing the results of tests of the democratic peace using Polity in its interval scalar form and several common dichotomous codings of democracy. The tests are supportive of the contention that dichotomous coding better captures the notion of "democracy." At minimum we believe that findings using Polity should be verified for robustness using a dichotomous coding.