Bruce M. Russett

Triangulating peace : democracy, interdependence, and international organizations

Triangulating Peace tackles todays most provocative hypothesis in the field of international relations: the democratic peace proposition. Drawing on ideas originally put forth by Immanuel Kant, the authors argue that democracy, economic interdependence, and international mediation can successfully cooperate to significantly reduce the chances of war.

Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946–1986.

Democratic states are in general about as conflict- and war-prone as nondemocracies, but democracies have rarely clashed with one another in violent conflict. We first show that democracy, as well as other factors, accounts for the relative lack of conflict. Then we examine two explanatory models. The normative model suggests that democracies do not fight each other because norms of compromise and cooperation prevent their conflicts of interest from escalating into violent clashes. The structural model asserts that complex political mobilization processes impose institutional constraints on the leaders of two democracies confronting each other to make violent conflict unfeasible. Using different data sets of international conflict and a multiplicity of indicators, we find that (1) democracy, in and of itself, has a consistent and robust negative effect on the likelihood of conflict or escalation in a dyad; (2) both the normative and structural models are supported by the data; and (3) support for the normative model is more robust and consistent.

Civil Wars Kill and Maim People-Long After the Shooting Stops

Political scientists have conducted only limited systematic research on the consequences of war for civilian populations. Here we argue that the civilian suffering caused by civil war extends well beyond the period of active warfare. We examine these longer-term effects in a cross-national (1999) analysis of World Health Organization new fine-grained data on death and disability broken down by age, gender, and type of disease or condition. We test hypotheses about the impact of civil wars and find substantial long-term effects, even after controlling for several other factors. We estimate that the additional burden of death and disability incurred in 1999, from the indirect and lingering effects of civil wars in the years 1991–97, was approximately equal to that incurred directly and immediately from all wars in 1999. This impact works its way through specific diseases and conditions and disproportionately affects women and children.We thank the Weatherhead Initiative on Military Conflict as a Public Health Problem, the Ford Foundation, and the World Health Organization, NIA (P01 17625-01), for financial support and Gary King, Thomas Gariepy, Melvin Hinich, Kosuke Imai, Roy Licklider, Jennifer Leaning, Greg Huber, Lisa Martin, Christopher Murray, Joshua Salomon, and Nicholas Sambanis for comments. Our data are available at http://www.yale.edu/unsy/civilwars/data.htm and at the Virtual Data Center web site, http://TheData.org, when it becomes operative.

The Kantian Peace: The Pacific Benefits of Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations, 1885–1992

The authors test Kantian and realist theories of interstate conflict using data extending over more than a century, treating those theories as complementary rather than competing. As the classical liberals believed, democracy, economic interdependence, and international organizations have strong and statistically significant effects on reducing the probability that states will be involved in militarized disputes. Moreover, the benefits are not limited to the cold war era. Some realist influences, notably distance and power predominance, also reduce the likelihood of interstate conflict. The character of the international system, too, affects the probability of dyadic disputes. The consequences of having a strong hegemonic power vary, but high levels of democracy and interdependence in the international system reduce the probability of conflict for all dyads, not just for those that are democratic or dependent on trade.

The Third Leg of the Kantian Tripod for Peace: International Organizations and Militarized Disputes, 1950–85

Immanuel Kant believed that democracy, economic interdependence, and international law and organizations could establish the foundations for “perpetual peace.” Our analyses of politically relevant dyads show that each of the three elements of the Kantian peace makes a statistically significant, independent contribution to peaceful interstate relations. These benefits are evident even when the influence of other theoretically interesting factors—such as relative power, alliances, geographic contiguity, and economic growth—is held constant. Increasing the number of shared memberships in intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) by one standard deviation reduces the incidence of militarized disputes by about 23 percent from the baseline rate for a typical pair of bordering states. If both members of a dyad are democratic, conflict is 35 percent less likely than the baseline; increasing both the dyadic trade–GDP ratio and the trend in trade by a standard deviation reduces the chance of conflict by 38 percent. Together, all the Kantian variables lower the probability of a dispute by 72 percent. We check for reverse causation and find reason to believe that a feedback system is at work, with IGOs reducing conflict and low-conflict dyads joining IGOs. Democracies and interdependent states are more likely to join IGOs with one another, bringing together the three elements of a system for Kantian peace.

What Makes Deterrence Work? Cases from 1900 to 1980

The use of military force to achieve foreign policy objectives is an enduring feature of international politics. Force, or the threat of force, may be used either to change the status quo or to maintain it. Threatening the use of force to maintain the status quo often takes the form of deterrence, defined by Patrick Morgan as “the threat to use force in response as a way of preventing the first use of force by someone else.”1 Deterrence sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails. Failures are attested to by numerous international wars of history. In the nuclear age, a failure could cost us our lives. The conditions of successful deterrence thus require thorough logical and empirical analysis.

Clash of Civilizations, or Realism and Liberalism Déjà Vu? Some Evidence

We assess the degree to which propositions from Samuel Huntingtons The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order can account for the incidence of militarized interstate disputes between countries during the period 1950-92. We find that such traditional realist influences as contiguity, alliances, and relative power, and liberal influences of joint democracy and interdependence, provide a much better account of interstate conflict. Pairs of states split across civilizational boundaries are no more likely to become engaged in disputes than are other states ceteris paribus. Even disputes between the West and the rest of the world, or with Islam, were no more common than those between or within most other groups. Among Huntingtons eight civilizations, interstate conflict was significantly less likely only within the West; dyads in other civilizations were as likely to fight as were states split across civilizations, when realist and liberal influences are held constant. The dominance of a civilization by a core state, democratic or not, does little to inhibit violence within the civilization. Contrary to the thesis that the clash of civilizations will replace Cold War rivalries as the greatest source of conflict, militarized interstate disputes across civilizational boundaries became less common, not more so, as the Cold War waned. Nor do civilizations appear to have an important indirect influence on interstate conflict through the realist or liberal variables. They help to predict alliance patterns but make little contribution to explaining political institutions or commercial interactions. We can be grateful that Huntington challenged us to consider the role that civilizations might play in international relations, but there is little evidence that they define the fault lines along which international conflict is apt to occur.

Alliance, contiguity, wealth, and political stability: Is the lack of conflict among democracies a statistical artifact? 1

Scholars increasingly are accepting the empirical generalization that democracies almost never go to war with each other, and infrequently even engage in militarized disputes with each other. It has not been clear, however, whether the rarity of conflict between democracies is caused by some aspect of being democratic, or whether it is caused by some other variable or variables that may be correlated with democracy. Using data on all independent states for the period 1946–1986, we examine the effects of political system type, distance, wealth, economic growth, alliances, and political stability. The results suggest that, although most of the other variables do have an effect, as hypothesized, there still seems to be an independent effect of political system type: democracies engage in militarized disputes with each other less than would be expected by chance. The effect may be enhanced by political stability; that is, states which can be perceived as stable democracies are less likely to be involved in di...

Public Opinion and the Common Defense: Who Governs Military Spending in the United States?

We measure the extent to which military spending policy reflects public opinion, while controlling for other reasonable influences on policy. We use survey data as an indicator of aggregate public opinion on military spending and find evidence that changes in public opinion consistently exert an effect on changes in military spending. The influence of public opinion is less important than either Soviet military spending or the gap between U.S. and Soviet military spending and more important than the deficit and the balance of Soviet conflict/cooperation with the United States. We also examine the hypothesis that public opinion does not influence the government but that the government systematically manipulates public opinion. We find no evidence to support this hypothesis.

The Mysterious Case of Vanishing Hegemony, or, Is Mark Twain Really Dead?

The literature on hegemonic stability commonly assumes that American hegemony has drastically declined in recent years. Is that assumption justified? If one distinguishes between power base and control over outcomes, the American position regarding the latter, in particular, has not declined substantially, and especially not if one considers security goods as well as economic goods. The substantial continuity of outcomes in the post-World War II era stems in large measure from the degree to which the goods provided have been private goods that particularly benefit the United States rather than collective goods, as is widely assumed. These benefits, especially those from “cultural hegemony,” have helped the United States to sustain much control over outcomes.