Benjamin A. Most

International Relations Theory, Foreign Policy Substitutability, and "Nice" Laws

Two logical problems appear to have impeded the development of an integrative understanding of international and foreign policy phenomena. The first has to do with the potential for foreign policy substitutability: through time and across space, similar factors could plausibly be expected to trigger different foreign policy acts. The second concerns the potential existence of “sometimes true,” domain-specific laws. It is the logical opposite of the substitution problem, suggesting that different processes could plausibly be expected to lead to similar results. Neither problem appears to be well understood in the current literature; if anything, both are ignored. Nevertheless, they are potentially important. Together, they suggest that scholars who are interested in developing a cumulative base of integrative knowledge about foreign policy and international relations phenomena need to rethink both their focus on middle-range theory and their application of the standard approaches. We recommend reconsideration of some of the “grand” theoretical approaches found in the “traditional” literature. A new synthesis of tradition and science and of grand, middle, and narrow approaches appears to be needed. Finally, in contrast to the arguments of proponents of a systems-level approach, we argue that the most fruitful avenues for theorizing and research are at the microlevel in which the focus is on decision making, expected utility calculations, and foreign policy interaction processes.

The Substance and Study of Borders in International Relations Research

While international borders are important in understanding the “shape” of the international system and are part of those structural characteristics which affect the interaction opportunities of nations, little attention has been paid to their conceptualization, operationalization, and measurement. This paper undertakes four tasks to help fill this gap. The first is to indicate the potentially theoretical role that borders may play in international relations, discussing the relationships between distance/contiguity and interaction opportunities. The second task entails the conceptualization and measurement of international borders. The third task involves using the data derived from this framework to describe the international system in terms of borders for the period 1946‐1965. The fourth task is to indicate the utility of a border data set by addressing questions which have been posed in the international relations literature. Research results are presented for several questions concerning the relationships between borders and war, borders and alliances, and the diffusion of war.

Contagion and Border Effects on Contemporary African Conflict

In previous research the authors investigated the processes of war diffusion based on interaction opportunities as operationalized by interstate borders. Studies of international borders, the relationship between borders and the onset of war, and the operation of diffusion/contagion effects on bordering nations were undertaken for all nations in the international system during the 1946-1965 period. The purpose of this article is to replicate the results of the original analyses by focusing on one regional subsystem—Africa— during a different time period, 1960-1977, and using different war data sets. The present study successfully replicates the original: Borders are found to be dynamic, and the border-war hypothesis and the spatial diffusion expectations are confirmed for Africa in the later period.

Conceptualizing “Warâ€

The purpose of this discussion is to focus on two problems that appear to have hindered the development of a solution to what Zinnes (1978, 1980) has termed the “puzzle” regarding the war proneness of nations. Specifically, it suggests that scholars who are interested in understanding and explaining international conflict should recognize: (1) While many analysts have focused on factors internal to nations—“national attributes”—as possibly sufficient conditions for war, the existence of such relationships is logically precluded by the way in which analysts have defined wars. (2) While scholars are trained to search for generalizable patterns that hold both through time and across space and often seem to believe that the isolation of such associations is the sine qua non of the systematic analysis of international conflict, simple logic and already existing theory suggest that patterns of that variety may not in fact exist. While neither of these contentions is original or complex, it is argued that a general failure to understand or recognize such rather basic, logical problems has impeded the development of a base of verifiable, replicable, and generalizable knowledge about the causes of international conflict.

The Forms and Processes of War Diffusion Research Update on Contagion in African Conflict

As part of an ongoing project, we have investigated the existence of conflict diffusion in the post-World War II international system. The initial systemwide tests of our Warring Border Nation model of positive spatial diffusion were replicated successfully in a study of conflict in the African region that appeared in this journal. Although both the systemwide and African regional studies demonstrated the existence of conflict diffusion, the present article begins to specify exactly which processes are operative by unpacking the earlier results and their attendant methodologies. To describe what positive spatial diffusion looks like in Africa—the states for which it holds and the conditions under which it does so—we present a series of analyses that exclusively utilize the variables that are central to the argument: borders, types of borders, and factors related to the “treatment” of having a Warring Border Nation.

Polarity, preponderance and power parity in the generation of international conflict

Almost a decade ago one of the authors introduced the concepts of “opportunity” and “willingness” in this journal (Starr, 1978). We have since devoted considerable attention to clarifying these concepts and their relationship to international conflict. In a series of recent articles we have focused on the micro/decision making/willingness level. In the present discussion we expand more fully on the macro/system/opportunity level, demonstrating through the use of logic and simulation that such decision processes operate within structures which appear logically to set limits, ceilings or constraints on the amount of conflict which is possible. We do so by using the different positions regarding polarity and conflict, and the parity vs. preponderance debate as starting points; (and come to some non‐obvious conclusions on the roles of power and system structure).

Power, vulnerability, and Zinnes's interaction puzzle

Zinness interaction puzzle asks why data‐based studies of arms races and crisis interaction discover little or no responsiveness among contending states. The difficulty of mapping threats to responses in a bilateral conflict can block analysts’ efforts to investigate the nature of these interactions. Moreover, analyses of foreign policy decisionmaking have difficulty incorporating power as a formal variable, and systemic analyses of power often abstract interaction processes from the discrete options available to policymakers. Theoretical research that takes these difficulties seriously can benefit from analytical techniques that integrate the substi‐tutable options available to policymakers with the traditional concept of power ratios. The analytical framework developed in this paper suggests that the two types of analysis can be integrated parsimoniously. It highlights the concepts of power and vulnerability in a system of states where the options foreign policymakers pursue importantly affect these tw...