Frank Whelon Wayman

Inter-State, Intra-State, and Extra-State Wars: A Comprehensive Look at Their Distribution over Time, 1816–1997

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 Projects 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. Historical developments of the past half-century, and especially since the end of the Cold War, have rendered the original COW war typology increasingly incomplete. Consequently, we developed a modified typology of war and attempted to format the descriptive variables in ways that would facilitate a more comparative and comprehensive analysis of warfare. While the reader should be reassured that Inter-state Wars remain as previously defined, we introduce the term “Intra-state War” in place of our original Civil War category, and the term “Extra-state War” in place of our initial Extra-systemic War category, allowing us to reclassify several such wars. This revised typology coupled with an update of the data allows us to take a fresh look at the question whether, from the perspective of the past two centuries, war is in fact becoming less common. The article concludes with a series of analyses that describe the patterns and trends of all types of war—reflecting the new typology—since the Congress of Vienna. These analyses reflect a disquieting constancy in warfare and hint at patterns of interchangeability or substitutability among the types of war.

Capabilities, Allocations, and Success in Militarized Disputes and Wars, 1816–1976

This article examines the relationship between the material capabilities of adversaries, their allocation of resources to the military, and the outcomes of wars and militarized disputes, 1815–1976. Using data from the Correlates of War project, the authors compare the military, industrial, and demographic capabilities of the two sides in wars and in militarized disputes involving major powers. They find that an advantage in industrial capabilities is more strongly associated with victory than is an advantage in military or demographic capabilities. Turning to the allocation of resources to the military, the authors consider: (a) the military expenditures of each side in proportion to its industrial capability, and (b) the military personnel as a fraction of the total population. As for the latter, a heavier allocation is associated with victory in war but defeat in disputes. Less ambiguous and more suggestive, a heavier allocation of expenditure to the military is associated with defeat in both wars and in disputes.

Explaining the Onset of Mass Killing, 1949-87

This article aims to demonstrate that differences in the two major datasets can significantly affect the results of predictions of mass political killing. Mass political killing (such as Hitler’s killing of some six million Jews, or the Rwanda genocide of 1994) has been studied for decades with the aid of valuable datasets measuring ‘democide’ and ‘genocide and politicide’, respectively. Without attempting to take sides as to whether one or the other is a more valid measure of the phenomenon of mass political killing, the authors aim in this investigation to see what independent variables best account for the onset of mass political killing, with the state-year as the unit of analysis. The predictor variables are level of economic development; types of war and violent unrest short of war; and regime type. By using a Cox proportional hazard model, the authors find that important regime effects either appear or disappear depending on the dataset used, with regime generally having a significant effect on onset of democide, but not having a significant effect on onset of geno-politicide. It is important for the scholarly community to be aware of these dataset effects, which may be the source of some of the most important existing controversies in the literature on explaining mass political killing.

Preface and introduction: overview of why this book matters

In public policy, as in personal life, we protect ourselves as best we can by making informed choices – let us call the best ones rational choices – between (indeed, among) the options that seem to be available to us. It is one’s hope that the choice we make will be for the best, but . . . . If our choice does have some effect, as we hope, then it alters the world, and hence moves us from the present into the future. And we do not know the future; it is the undiscovered country in whose shadow we live. This critical switch to a future frame of reference is especially so about many of our most important choices, such as choices about what to do about the big global problems with long turnaround times, like environmental degradation and nuclear proliferation. Our best choice requires us to make, then, either explicitly or intuitively, a pair of contingent forecasts, namely: one about how things will be better, in our future, if we take our preferred choice; and the other about how things will turn out worse if we take the alternative, inferior choice before us. It is in this sense that “All public policy presupposes a forecast” – a remark that Alan Greenspan made even before he was Chairman of the Federal Reserve. However, all we have to go on in making such contingent forecasts is any data (or evidence or pattern) that we have detected from how things have been in the past. In that sense, Kierkegaard is right in saying that life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards. This book, Predicting the Future in Science, Economics, and Politics, is about that reasoning process by which we attempt to understand future contingent forecasts, and how we attempt to guide our decisions by evidence necessarily based on – but hopefully elevated by our reasoning above – past experience. As Richard Alexander said during his preparation

Scientific prediction and the human condition

It is a puzzle that while academic research has increased in specialization, the important and complex problems facing humans urgently require a synthesis of understanding. This unique collaboration attempts to address such a problem by bringing together a host of prominent scholars from across the sciences to offer new insights into predicting the future. They demonstrate that long-term trends and short-term incentives need to be understood in order to adopt effective policies, or even to comprehend where we currently stand and the sort of future that awaits us.