Katherine Barbieri

Economic Interdependence: A Path to Peace or a Source of Interstate Conflict?:

This article investigates the long-standing liberal hypothesis that trade ties facilitate interstate peace. Rather than assuming that trade will always promote peace, the author highlights the need to consider both the nature and context of economic linkages in assessing whether such ties are more likely to dampen or amplify interstate conflict. The study encompasses a diverse group of dyadic relationships for the period 1870-1938, 14,341 dyad years, and includes 270 militarized interstate disputes and 14 wars. After controlling for the potentially confounding influences of contiguity, regime type (joint democracy), relative capabilities, and alliance commitments, the author finds evidence that economic linkages have a dramatic influence on whether or not dyads engage in militarized disputes, but no influence on the occurrence of wars. Rather than inhibiting conflict, extensive economic interdependence increases the likelihood that dyads will engage in militarized interstate disputes. Peace through trade is most likely to arise among dyads composed of mutually dependent trading partners. Even then, the relationship between interdependence and conflict appears to be curvilinear, where low to moderate degrees of interdependence reduce the likelihood of dyadic disputes, and extensive economic linkages increase the probability of militarized disputes. Extreme interdependence, whether symmetrical or asymmetrical, has the greatest potential for increasing the likelihood of conflict.

Trading Data: Evaluating our Assumptions and Coding Rules

Some scholars have rushed to judgment about the nature of the relationship between trade and conflict, making strong assumptions about the data upon which their conclusions rest. In this paper, we test these assumptions, showing that they are often not warranted and, thus, pose threats to many of our conclusions about trade’s impact on conflict. We discuss official trade statistics; the treatment of missing trade data; and problems with some decision rules being adopted within our research community. We introduce the new Correlates of War (COW) Trade Data Set; discuss the rationale behind our coding decisions; and compare this data set with other sets. The end result is a series of findings that should help our field advance its understanding of the often difficult issue of trade’s relationship with international conflict.

Economic Globalization and Civil War

In recent decades, the number of countries with ongoing civil wars and the share of these countries in the international system have increased dramatically. At the same time, the scope of economic globalization has also increased. Are these trends related? The theoretical literature on the determinants of civil wars presents conflicting views about the effects of globalization on such wars. One view expects economic globalization to reduce the likelihood of civil wars, ceteris paribus. A second view expects the opposite. A third view implies that globalization does not necessarily affect the likelihood of civil war. Progress in assessing the validity of these arguments requires confronting them with data. However, so far economic globalization has been included as a control variable in a very small number of studies, and only trade was inspected. This paper statistically investigates the effect of several aspects of globalization on civil war from a large-N, time-series, cross-sectional sample. The occurrence of civil war is measured in two ways: the presence of civil war (or civil war prevalence) and the breakdown of civil war (or civil war onset). Economic globalization is measured by the flows of trade, foreign direct investment, portfolio investment, and Internet use. We find that economic forms of globalization reduce the likelihood of civil war, but that Internet use does not affect its likelihood. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the implications of these findings for public policy and for future research.

Measure for Mis-measure: A Response to Gartzke & Li*

Barbieri & Peters (B&P) question Gartzke & Li’s (G&L’s) conclusion that the contradictory findings between Barbieri andOneal & Russett on the trade–conflict question can be explained by their use of alternative measures. There are problems with G&L’s analysis. First, G&L’s findings are based on analyses with measures incompatible with Barbieri’s. Second, G&L adopt measures that are not truly dyadic. Third, G&L draw erroneous conclusions from their mathematics. B&P explain these problems and present empirical analyses that show that even when controlling for economic openness, as G&L propose, dyadic interdependence is still positively associated with conflict.B&P find support for G&L’s conclusion that openness promotes peace.

Trading with the Enemy During Wartime

IN THEIR DEFENSE of the town of Grave against a siege by the Dutch and their allies in 1674, the French, concerned that the town was dangerously overstuffed with ammunition from other fortresses that were being evacuated, sold half of their gunpowder to the Dutch, who then used it to bombard the French. Nearly a century later, a member of the British Parliament declared that the Dutch were “so careful to preserve the inlets of gain from obstruction, that they make no scruple of supplying their enemies . . . , and have been known to sell at night those bullets which were next day to be discharged against them.” Americans are no strangers to this age-old tradition of trading with the enemy. In the first two years of the War of 1812, Americans provided approximately two-thirds of the beef rations for the British army in Canada. They also supplied the British fleet that blockaded the American coast and destroyed Washington, D.C. During the Second World War, American firms supplied oil and trucks to Nazi Germany through Switzerland, while Allied forces suffered shortages of both. The long-standing and seemingly paradoxical practice of trading with the enemy during wartime continues to the present day. As Peter Andreas concluded in his study of the clandestine political economy of the Bosnian war, “the besiegers were supplying the

On the effect of natural resources on interstate war

Many analysts expect that a decline in natural resources and a rise in resource demand will increase the risk of interstate war in the coming decades. Other researchers reject this expectation. Empirical examinations are mostly qualitative case studies, and the few statistical models center primarily on waters. We argue changing resource levels can provide either an incentive or a disincentive for countries to go to war. The net effects by resource are empirical issues. We offer statistical models for a large sample, including several types of renewable and non-renewable resources, and other variables. We find that resource changes impact interstate war, and the magnitude of their impacts is on par with that of non-resource forces, and the effects of one time resource changes linger. The paper examines implications for the coming decades in light of the United States’ National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends 2030 outlook.

Too Many Assumptions, Not Enough Data

We want to thank Kristian Gleditsch (2010) for his comments on “Trading data” (Barbieri, Keshk, and Pollins, 2009). We agree that missing data pose serious problems, that it is important to make data available to other scholars, and that data generation processes should be transparent. Despite these many areas of agreement, we want to respond to several points Gleditsch makes. In some cases, the problem is simply a misunderstanding and in other cases there is a genuine disagreement. By clarifying and fleshing out points of disagreement, we hope to advance further this important debate. First, Gleditsch makes some incorrect statements about the availability of different sets of trade data. It is true that the Correlates of War (COW) Trade Data were only recently made available under that name, but its creators—Katherine Barbieri, Omar Keshk, and Brian Pollins—have made earlier trade data sets available, individually and jointly. In fact, we have commented on Gleditsch (2002) and other trade data in a number of venues. Gleditsch (2002, 2004) does not mention our related work, but he (2010) now acknowledges his discussion with Pollins at one conference where we presented a paper evaluating his data and solutions (Barbieri, Keshk, and Pollins, 2003). Gleditsch’s (2004) first data update, in fact, corrects some of the problems we identified in that 2003 paper. Admittedly, we should have provided more complete descriptions of the origins and evolution of the COW Trade Data Set. Simply stating that “The COW Trade Data Set, Version 2.0, builds upon several of the authors’ earlier projects, including BKP Version 1.0 (see Barbieri et al., 2003) and Barbieri’s International Trade Data Base, Version 1.0 (Barbieri, 2002, Appendix A)” was insufficient. So, we accept some responsibility for Gleditsch’s misunderstanding.