A hierarchical approach -- Concepts and measures -- International conflict -- Rivalries and alliances -- Intrastate conflicts -- The Cold War -- Organizational formation and evolution -- Regionalization and trade -- Development and globalization -- Contemporary regional orders in the American imperium -- Deterrence and the potential for great power war -- Liberalism and the democratic peace -- Lessons for the American imperium in the decline of the British empire -- American decline, Chinese rise, and the unexpected future.
Regions—geopolitical spaces based on various definitions—have been judged as important for explanations about international politics. Area specialists devote their professional lives to the study of one or, perhaps, two regions. Quantitative international relations scholars use regional controls in empirical models of conflictual or cooperative relations, and they typically find that regions matter, at least statistically. Most states conduct much of their political relationships1 within regions rather than globally (Acharya 2007; Hurrell 2007). At a very minimum, geopolitical context constitutes a strong conditioning effect on how they conduct their external (and often internal) affairs. Yet rarely are explanations of interstate relations embedded in a comparative regional perspective,2 using region as either the primary level or unit of analysis. This is due to a variety of definitional, conceptual, theoretical, and empirical issues that have retarded development of systematic, comparative, and rigorous inquiry at the regional level. Our intention here is not to address those problems fully, nor to resolve them. Instead, we wish to offer a view of the more recent quantitative literature, suggest some trends, and offer a theoretical framework that may be useful to the development of more comparative regional analysis. We take on these tasks in the context of three puzzles of interest concerning international relations. First, what accounts for variation in intraregional cooperative relationships between states? Some regions contain cooperative relationships and institutionalized cooperative relations that are far more extensive than others; additionally, regions also go through cycles of greater or lesser cooperation. Do state level and dyadic findings explain these differences, or, do regional dynamics exist that may provide additional insights? Second, regions vary in terms of the extent of conflict between their members. Can regional dynamics help explain variation in conflicts across regions and across time within regions? Third, we are interested in the literature on diffusion processes, including both conditions that may accelerate diffusion processes and emerging work on firewalls that may retard the diffusion of phenomena, including conflicts and cooperation (Solingen 2012). In particular, we wish to probe the extent to which regions vary in creating such firewalls and their relative effectiveness.
The three main levels of analysis in international relations have been the systemic, the national, and the individual. A fourth level that falls between the systemic and the national is the region. It is woefully underdeveloped in comparison to the attention afforded the other three. Yet regions tend to be distinctive theaters for international politics. Otherwise, we would not recognize that Middle Eastern interstate politics somehow does not resemble Latin American interstate politics or interstate politics in Southern Africa (although once the Middle East and Southern Africa may have seemed more similar in their mutual fixation with opposition to domestic policies in Israel and South Africa, respectively). This book, divided into three parts, first makes a case for studying regional politics even though it must also be appreciated that regional boundaries are also hazy and not always easy to pin down empirically. The second part examines power distributions within regions as an important entry point to studying regional similarities and differences. Two emphases are stressed. One is that regional power assessments need to be conditioned by controlling for weak states which are more common in some regions than they are in others. The other emphasis is on regional power hierarchies. Some regions have strong regional hierarchies while others do not. Regions with strong hierarchies operate much differently from those without them in the sense that the former are more pacific than the latter. The third part of the book focuses on regional differences in terms of conflict behavior, order preferences, rivalries, and rivalry termination. Co-Authors: William R. Thompson, Thomas J. Volgy, Paul Bezerra, Jacob Cramer, Kelly M. Gordell, Manjeet Pardesi, Karen Rasler, J. Patrick Rhamey, Jr., Kentaro Sakuwa, Rachel D. Van Nostrand, and Leila Zakhirova.
