The Causes of Peace: What We Know Now

By Asle Toje and Bård Nikolas Vik Steen

Almost a decade after Steven Pinker published his seminal book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and popularised interest in the idea that humanity is becoming more peaceful, the debate is as heated as ever. This book unites in debate and discussion many of the world's greatest thinkers on the sources of human conflict. Topics explored include the influence of hegemony, democracy, ideology, nuclear weapons, and institutions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781544505060

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The Causes of Peace

What We Know Now

Asle Toje and

Bård Nikolas Vik Steen

Copyright © 2019 The Norwegian Nobel Institute

All rights reserved.

The Causes of Peace

What We Know Now

ISBN 978-1-5445-0504-6 Paperback

ISBN 978-1-5445-0505-3 Hardcover

ISBN 978-1-5445-0506-0 ebook

Contents

Contributors

Introduction

Asle Toje and Bård Nikolas Vik Steen

Section I: Is the World Getting More Peaceful?

1. Systemic Trends in War and Peace

Bear F. Braumoeller

2. The Decline of Violent Conflicts: What Do the Data Really Say?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Pasquale Cirillo

Section II: Hegemony and Peace

3. The Quest for Hegemony: A Threat to the Global Order

Richard Ned Lebow and Simon Reich

4. Neoclassical Realism, Non-proliferation, and the Limits of US Hegemony in the Middle East and South Asia

Jeffrey W. Taliaferro

Section III: Ideology and Peace

5. Ideology and Peace: Historical Perspectives

Niall Ferguson

6. The Paradox of American Diplomacy in the Cold War

Fredrik Logevall

Section IV: Democratic Peace

7. A Somewhat Personal History of the Democratic Peace and Its Expansion to the Kantian Peace

Bruce Russett

8. The Democratic-Peace Debate

Joanne Gowa and Tyler Pratt

Section V: Peace through Institutions

9. Can Domestic Institutions Destroy the International Order?

Petr Kratochvíl

10. EU Institutions and Peace

Mai’a K. Davis Cross

Section VI: Peace and Development

11. Fragile States and International Support

Paul Collier

12. Peace through Security-Development: Nebulous Connections, Desirable Confluences?

Maria Stern and Joakim Öjendal

Section VII: Deterrence and Disarmament

13. The Causes of Peace: The Role of Deterrence

Bruno Tertrais

14. Disarmament: Cause, Consequence, or Early Warning Indicator of Peace?

Paul F. Diehl

Section VIII: The Causes of Peace: The Statistical Evidence

15. The Causes of Peace and the Future of Peace

Kristian Skrede Gleditsch

Contributors

Bear F. Braumoeller

Bear F. Braumoeller is professor of political science at The Ohio State University. He previously held faculty positions at Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is, or has been, on the editorial boards of five major journals or series, and he is a past councillor of the Peace Science Society. Professor Braumoeller’s research is in the areas of international relations, especially international security, and statistical methodology. His substantive research includes a book-length systemic theory of international relations, The Great Powers and the International System (2012), and his new book, Only the Dead: The Persistence of War in the Modern Age, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2019.

Pasquale Cirillo

Pasquale Cirillo is an associate professor of applied probability at Delft University of Technology (NL). He specializes in risk and extreme value statistics, with applications to the social sciences. He received his Venia Docendi (Habilitation) in applied statistics from the University of Bern (CH) and his PhD in statistics from Bocconi University (IT). As a consultant, he has collaborated with international institutions such as the World Bank. (www.pasqualecirillo.eu)

Paul Collier

Paul Collier is professor of economics and public policy at the Blavatnik School of Government, and a professorial fellow of St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He was the founding director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies, also at Oxford. From 1998 to 2003 he took public service leave, during which time he was director of the Research Development Department of the World Bank. He also serves on the Economic Advisory Board of the International Finance Corporation and is a director of the International Growth Centre. His research covers the causes and consequences of civil war, the effects of aid, and the problems of democracy in low-income and natural-resources-rich societies. In 2014, Professor Collier received a knighthood for services to promoting research and policy change in Africa.

Mai’a K. Davis Cross

Mai’a K. Davis Cross is the Edward W. Brooke Professor and associate professor of political science and international affairs at Northeastern University. She holds a PhD in politics from Princeton University and a bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard University. She is the author of three books, the most recent of which is The Politics of Crisis in Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2017).

Paul F. Diehl

Paul F. Diehl is the Ashbel Smith Professor of political science at the University of Texas at Dallas. Previously, he was Henning Larsen Professor of Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is co-author most recently of The Puzzle of Peace (Oxford University Press, 2016) and past president of the International Studies Association and the Peace Science Society (International), respectively.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of fifteen books, including Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (2003), The War of the World: History’s Age of Hatred (2006), The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (2008), and High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg (2010). His most recent publications are Kissinger, 1923–1968: The Idealist (2015) and The Square and the Tower (2017).

Kristian Skrede Gleditsch

Kristian Skrede Gleditsch is Regius Professor of political science, University of Essex, and research associate, Peace Research Institute Oslo. His research interests include conflict and cooperation, democratization, and mobilization. He is the author, with Lars-Erik Cederman and Halvard Buhaug, of Inequality, Grievances, and Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and All International Politics Is Local (University of Michigan Press, 2002).

Joanne Gowa

Joanne Gowa is the William P. Boswell Professor of world politics of peace and war at Princeton University. She is the author of Closing the Gold Window: Domestic Politics and the End of Bretton Woods; Allies, Adversaries, and International Trade; Ballots and Bullets: The Elusive Democratic Peace (Princeton University Press, 2011); and articles about political economy and democracy and disputes. She is a trustee of Tufts University.

Petr Kratochvíl

Petr Kratochvíl is professor of international relations and a senior researcher at the Institute of International Relations, Prague. He is the chairman of the Academic Council of the Diplomatic Academy of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic as well as a member of a range of academic and scientific councils. Petr Kratochvíl represents the Institute of International Relations (IIR) in various international associations, such as the Trans European Policy Studies Association and the European Consortium for Political Research. He has published extensively on European integration, EU-Russian relations, institutional reform and EU enlargement, the role of religion in international affairs, and international relations theory.

Richard Ned Lebow

Richard Ned Lebow is professor of international political theory in the War Studies Department of King’s College London, Bye-Fellow of Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, and the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor Emeritus of government at Dartmouth College, Hanover, US. He is a fellow of the British Academy. He has published thirty-four books and more than 300 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. Recent books include The Rise and Fall of Political Orders (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Max Weber and International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and Avoiding War, Making Peace (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2018).

Fredrik Logevall

Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of international affairs and history at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of nine books, most recently Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House, 2012), which won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History and the 2013 Francis Parkman Prize, awarded by the Society of American Historians to the book that ‘exemplifies the union of the historian and the artist’. It also received the 2013 American Library in Paris Book Award and the 2013 Arthur Ross Book Award from the Council on Foreign Relations. Logevall’s commentary has been featured on BBC, CBS, CNN, and National Public Radio, and his reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Politico, and Foreign Affairs, among other publications.

Joakim Öjendal

Joakim Öjendal is a professor in peace and development studies at the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden. For more than two decades, he has been doing research on peacebuilding, democratization, and post-conflict reconstruction. Among his resent books are the Routledge Handbook of Environmental Conflict and Peacebuilding (Routledge, 2018) and Politics and Development in a Transboundary Watershed: The Case of the Lower Mekong Basin (Springer, 2012).

Tyler Pratt

Tyler Pratt is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Yale University. He holds a PhD in politics from Princeton University and a bachelor’s degree in international affairs from the University of Georgia. His work has been published in International Organization. His research interests include international cooperation, global governance, and network analysis. He previously worked in diplomacy and intelligence.

Simon Reich

Simon Reich is a professor in the Division of Global Affairs and Department of Political Science at Rutgers, Newark. He has authored or edited eleven books, most recently The End of Grand Strategy: US Maritime Operations in the Twenty-First Century with Peter Dombrowski (Cornell University Press, 2018). Reich’s twelfth book will be a co-edited volume, Comparative Grand Strategy in the Modern Age with Thierry Balzacq and Peter Dombrowski (Oxford University Press, 2019). Reich previously served as director of research and analysis at the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London.

Bruce Russett

Bruce Russett gained his PhD from Yale University in 1961 and is Dean Acheson Research Professor of international relations and political science at Yale. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has honorary doctorates from Uppsala University, Sweden (2002), and Williams College, Massachusetts, US (2011). A past president of the International Studies Association and of the Peace Science Society (International), of his twenty-seven books, recent ones include Grasping the Democratic Peace (Princeton University Press, 1993); The Once and Future Security Council (Palgrave Macmillan, 1997); and, with John Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), which was awarded the International Studies Association’s prize for Best Book of the Decade 2000–2009; and Hegemony and Democracy (Routledge, 2011).

Bård Nikolas Vik Steen

Bård Nikolas Vik Steen is the Programme Manager of the Norwegian Nobel Institute. Steen received his education from Durham University and the University of Oslo. His current research interests include nuclear disarmament and the relationship between geopolitics, hegemonic change, and war. His latest publications include Nuclear Disarmament: A Critical Assessment (Routledge, 2019), co-edited with Olav Njølstad.

Maria Stern

Maria Stern is professor in peace and development studies at the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden. For more than two decades she has been conducting research on security, development, war, and gender. She has written and co-edited books and special journal issues on the topics of security, methodology, conflict-related sexual violence, militarism, and the security-development nexus. Additionally, she has published widely in leading international academic journals.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb spent twenty-one years as a trader and practitioner of mathematical finance and complex derivatives before becoming a researcher in mathematical and practical problems with probability, particularly extreme events. Taleb is the author of a multivolume essay, the Incerto: The Black Swan (Penguin, 2008), Fooled by Randomness (Penguin, 2007), Antifragile (Penguin, 2013), and Skin in the Game (Penguin, 2018), covering broad facets of uncertainty. It has more than 110 translations into thirty-six languages. Taleb, in his second career, has produced, as a backup of the Incerto, more than seventy scholarly papers in statistical physics, statistics, philosophy, ethics, economics, international affairs, and quantitative finance, all around the notion of risk and probability. He is currently Distinguished Professor of risk engineering at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and principal of the Real World Risk Institute, LLC. His current focus is on the properties of systems that can handle disorder (antifragile) and a program for statistical inference under fat tails.

Jeffrey W. Taliaferro

Jeffrey W. Taliaferro is associate professor of political science at Tufts University, in Medford, Massachusetts. He is the author of Balancing Risks: Great Power Intervention in the Periphery (Cornell University Press, 2004), which won the Robert Jervis-Paul Schroeder Prize in International History and Politics. He is co-author, with Norrin M. Ripsman and Steven E. Lobell, of Neoclassical Realist Theory of International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2016) and co-editor, also with Ripsman and Lobell, of The Challenge of Grand Strategy (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and of Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He is currently writing a book on alliance coercion in US foreign policy.

Bruno Tertrais

Bruno Tertrais has been a senior research fellow at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique since 2001. His areas of expertise include geopolitics and international relations; military and nuclear issues; and security in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. He was previously special assistant to the director of strategic affairs at the French Ministry of Defense (1993–2001); visiting fellow at the RAND Corporation (1995–1996); and director of the Civilian Affairs Committee at the NATO Parliamentary Assembly (1990–1993). He was a member of the two commissions on the NATO White Paper on Defence and National Security (2007 and 2012). He is an associate editor of Survival and a member of the editorial boards of The Washington Quarterly and Strategic & Military Affairs. In 2010, he received the Vauban Prize for his distinguished career. In 2014, he was awarded the Legion of Honour. A graduate of the Institut d’études politiques de Paris (1984), he holds a master’s in public law (1985), a doctorate in political science (1994), as well as a habilitation à diriger des recherches (1994).

Asle Toje

Asle Toje is the former research director at the Norwegian Nobel Institute. He has a PhD in International Studies from the University of Cambridge (2006). Among his lastest works are America, the EU and Strategic Culture (Routledge, 2008); The European Union as a Small Power (Macmillan, 2010); Neoclassical Realism in Europe (Manchester University Press 2012); and Will China’s Rise Be Peaceful?: The Rise of a Great Power in Theory, History, Politics, and the Future (Oxford University Press, 2018). Toje is a serving member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Introduction

Asle Toje and Bård Nikolas Vik Steen

In a letter dated 7 January 1893, Alfred Nobel wrote to his long-time friend Bertha von Suttner, ‘I should like to dispose of a part of my fortune by founding a prize to be granted every five years—say six times, for if in thirty years they have not succeeded in reforming the present system they will infallibly relapse into barbarism.’

‘I am not speaking to you of disarmament, which can be achieved only very slowly; I am not even speaking to you of obligatory arbitration between nations. But this result ought to be reached soon—and it can be attained—to which all states shall with solidarity agree to turn against the first aggressor. Then wars will become impossible. The result would be to force even the most quarrelsome state to have recourse to a tribunal or else remain peaceful. If [such an alliance] enlist all states, the peace of the centuries would be assured.’¹

The idea of collective security was at the heart of the League of Nations system, initiated in 1920. The participants agreed that any breach of the peace was to be declared a concern to all the participating states and would result in a collective response.² However, the attempt at a global security system built on collective security failed comprehensively. In 1895, two years after the letter where Alfred Nobel floated the idea of a Nobel Peace Prize, he wrote his testament in Paris. Here Nobel appeared less certain regarding the causes of peace. He stipulated that the prize should be given to ‘[…] the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses’.³

This roughly coincides with the three causal pathways pursued by contemporary peace scholarship—the societal conditions favourable to peace and the institutions and disarmament that underpin stability and individual efforts to end war. In some ways the trends in peace and conflict studies and the Nobel Peace Prize have progressed abreast over the 118 years that have passed since the prize was first awarded in 1901. The focus on arbitration and the peace congresses of the early 20th century gradually shifted towards greater emphasis on strategic stability and ‘keeping the darkness at bay’ during the Cold War. The years following the end of the Cold War have seen renewed interest in the causes of peace, buoyed by new political possibilities and an expansion in scholarship on the topic.

The causes of war and peace remain among the most contested questions in the study of not only international politics, but of human affairs in general. Research has been carried out by historians, philosophers, and social scientists that has increased our knowledge, with a baffling array of theories that attempt to explain peace in theory and practice. They span from the relative relevance of domestic and international institutions to human psychology, economic incentives and technology, to the logic of democracy and sovereignty. Perhaps surprisingly, however, these various strains have rarely been brought together in order to attempt to establish an overview of the present ‘state of the art’.

While debates rage within research communities, different schools of thought are rarely brought into direct contact with each other. That is a shame; fruitful debates tend to take place between those who agree on the fundamentals. Disagreements over methods, emphasis, empirical material, and even the very concept of peace, have left potentially complimentary research traditions estranged. This book is an attempt to help bridge this gap and establish a shared platform from which the study of peace may progress.

First, however, let us start with the fundamentals: What is peace? The Swedish term used by Alfred Nobel, Frid (peace), has various meanings etymologically, the main one being Friðr, meaning ‘not war’.⁴ This is the most common use of the word, which skirts the many other levels of strife, exploitation, and violence that occur within and among states. Although the concept of peace was at the heart of early enquires into International Relations, during the Cold War it was ousted to the margins of the discipline, which subsequently saw the emergence of the separate sub-discipline of Peace Studies.

The lines of communication between academia and practitioners have often been hampered by a micro-macro divide where case studies are often difficult to translate into more general insights, and vice versa. Research generally gives few straightforward answers to the most acute questions concerning peace and war. The challenge, as AJP Taylor pointed out in reference to the causes of World War I, is that the great armies, the secret diplomacy, and the balance of power were the same as those that had given Europe the long period of peace prior to 1914.⁵ The search for a singular theory of peace, therefore, resembles what Alasdair MacIntyre disparagingly referred to as the quest for a ‘general theory of holes’.⁶

The theorization of peace has largely been a by-product of the theorization of war. The causes-of-war literature is rich in meta-level concepts seeking to grasp the reasons behind organized armed conflicts. These include focus on structure and agency; opportunity and willingness; grievances and mobilization; resources and interests; capabilities and intentions; depravation and governance; greed and resentment; capabilities and resolve.⁷ A main division long persisted between ‘old school’ and ‘new school’ approaches. Old school uses interstate approaches—focusing on high politics and formal power. New school approaches often focus on intrastate conflict and the role of non-government actors, as well as the role of irregular forces, sexual violence, economic grievances, and so on.

A characteristic of Peace Studies as an academic sub-discipline is that peace is not just the absence of war—negative peace—but also the establishment of life-affirming values and structures, what is known as ‘positive peace’. Scholars such as Johan Galtung see negative peace as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for positive peace, defined as ‘the integration of human society’.⁸ In a philosophical sense, this view of peace is what mathematicians call asymptotic—something that may be approached, but never fully achieved. Likewise, a lack of positive peace can make the absence of negative peace more likely, but war can also reduce structural grievances. One could, for instance, think of cases where war can strengthen the societal standing of marginalized groups through military service, thereby fostering positive peace.

In sum, attempts to the contrary have, in practice, not delivered in added insights what is lost in clarity and parsimony in the war-peace dichotomy. For that reason we will, unless otherwise stated, rely on the definition of war employed by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), where it is defined as ‘a contested incompatibility that concerns government and/or territory over which the use of armed force between the military forces of two parties, of which at least one is the government of a state, has resulted in at least 25 battle-related deaths each year’. Battle-related deaths refer to those deaths caused by the warring parties that can directly be related to combat over the contested incompatibility.⁹

The concept of peace has spawned a large body of literature seeking to delineate the ways to create a more peaceful world, yet there has been a great deal of competition between the adherents of the various approaches. This lack of coherence is even more pronounced when casting even a casual glance over the full body of peace scholarship. Communication among the various academic perspectives has either been disrupted or was never established in the first place. As a result, most scholars pursue a single perspective or, more frequently, drift between various research perspectives, unaware of their history and relationship to other traditions.

Key aspects of the book

Surely, one might ask, there have been endeavours to collect a bird’s-eye view of the state of the art? In fact, there are many separate traditions, each with their own overview of what peace and conflict studies looks like. Delving into each goes beyond the scope of any single volume. The goal of our endeavour is therefore not to provide a comprehensive reader of peace and conflict studies. Rather, we take a targeted approach, with eight sections, spanning eight of the most fruitful points of entry into the causes of peace. After a discussion of whether the world is in fact getting more peaceful, we consider the influence of hegemony; ideology; democracy; institutions; development; deterrence; and disarmament, before finally considering the causes of declining political violence from a statistical perspective.

Section I begins with the claim that an ‘upward surge of humanity’ has made wars less frequent and destructive. Popularised by Steven Pinker and his seminal book The Better Angels of our Nature, ‘the decline of war thesis’ has recently become influential in both academia and in popular culture.¹⁰ That does not mean Pinker is without his detractors. In chapter 1, Bear F. Braumoeller takes a sceptical view and argues that the lack of appropriate statistical tests makes it difficult to distinguish the noise from actual proof of progress. He finds little support for the idea that war has declined after the end of the Cold War and argues instead that variations in the international situation account for fluctuations in conflict frequency.

In chapter 2, Pasquale Cirillo and Nassim Nicholas Taleb support and expand on Braumoeller’s conclusions. By setting out a new approach on the basis of ‘extra value theory’, they provide a methodology robust to the often-imprecise measurements of extreme events. Cirillo and Taleb find scant support for what John Lewis Gaddis famously termed ‘the long peace’. Instead, they conclude that the decline of war thesis is the result of methodological inaccuracies, with results fragile to minor errors of measurement.

While confidence in the decline of war thesis has flourished over the past decade, these chapters underscore just how far from settled that argument is. Still, that does nothing to undermine the primary undertaking of this volume: what causes peace? Whether it is simple or nearly impossible, the path to peace will always remain among humanity’s greatest concerns. By focusing on the most influential traditions attempting to illuminate the path, we hope to reveal the contours of the state of the art and provide a new baseline from which research may flourish.

Section II starts the search by training the spotlight on one of the grand debates of security studies: that of hegemonic stability—does hegemony make sense and, if so, does it foster peace? For Richard Ned Lebow and Simon Reich, the answer is a resounding ‘no’ to both questions. Taking issue with the influence of arguments claiming that America’s hegemonic role in world politics fosters peace and stability, they argue instead that American hegemony has contributed significantly to global instability. Viewing this state of affairs as not only detrimental to global interests, but to the interests of the United States (US), Lebow and Reich conclude by sketching an alternative path for the future of American foreign policy.

In chapter 4, Jeffrey W. Taliaferro continues the assessment of hegemony by considering the real magnitude of US influence. Noting that US officials view limiting the spread of nuclear weapons as critical to regional stability, he investigates the United States’ ability to convince allies to restrain or halt their nuclear weapons programmes. Investigating the Nixon administration’s response to the Israeli nuclear programme as well as the Carter and Reagan administration’s efforts toward Pakistan, the evidence is found to match neoclassical realist predictions. Taliaferro reveals that the US’s influence toward an issue that its leaders considers critical to the preservation of peace is considerably less potent than the hegemonic stability thesis might suggest.

Looking elsewhere for a viable path to peace, Niall Ferguson and Fredrik Logevall discuss one of the most disputed questions within International Relations in Section III: what impact does ideology have on maintaining peace? Ferguson starts the discussion by investigating the collision between idealist proclamations of peace and the attempts of statesmen to deliver upon them. Focusing on the career of Henry Kissinger, he traces the development of a sophisticated doctrine of ‘peacemaking’ during Kissinger’s tenure and considers its connection to the subsequent decline of organized violence. Ferguson defends Kissinger’s idealistic pragmatism and illustrates how idealism must combine with realism to yield optimal results. While he does not see solutions in a blind pursuit of peace, nor in realist cynicism without hope or ambition, Ferguson views their combination as ideal for making lasting contributions to global stability.

Fredrik Logevall agrees that strength is best paired with good diplomacy, but takes a somewhat broader approach. Studying the impact of ideas through the lens of American foreign policy during the Cold War, he notes how American deterrence policies are rarely paired with diplomatic action. In his view, an overreliance on tough talk on the American campaign trail has limited the scope for diplomacy, leaving untapped opportunities to further both national security and global peace efforts. Leaders who dare to question a logic where compromise is seen as weakness, have often left office with their presidential legacies improved.

Section IV turns the spotlight to what Jack Levy once characterised as ‘the closest thing to an empirical law in international relations’.¹¹ Bruce Russett, one of the central figures in the development of the democratic peace thesis, opens the discussion in chapter seven, providing an authoritative and personal account of the theory’s path from obscurity to universal wisdom as well as its later expansion into the Kantian peace. Having delivered a definitive account of the logic and evidence that shaped so much of his illustrious career, Russett remains confident that ‘the democratic peace has been heavily criticized, but not overturned’.

Joanne Gowa and Tyler Pratt confirm that the democratic peace thesis has a unique position in both the academe and the halls of power. However, having noted the scepticism of Erik Gartzke and Steven Pinker, as well as troubling variations in the relevant data, they remain unconvinced that Russet’s confidence is warranted. Reanalysing the data while controlling for variations in the international system, they find that the connection between democracy and peace is severely weakened. Showing that dispute rates fluctuate over time, they argue that the changes in conflict propensity are the result of changes in the international system rather than of regime type. The democratic peace having long been recognised as the strongest empirical regularity in international relations—an old debate has been reopened.

Section V shifts focus yet again but stays within the Kantian peace triangle. While the connection between international organisations and peace has been discussed since the days of Immanuel Kant, it has become a constant talking point with the European Union’s perpetual challenges and the political chaos following Britain’s decision to leave. Continuing this path of inquest in chapter 9, Petr Kratochvil gives an introduction to the state of institutionalist literature and notes the neglected influence of domestic institutions and the domestic roots of international norms. Making a first attempt to revive this ‘second image’ perspective, Kratochvil reveals how international organisations are influenced by domestic institutions through four mechanisms: re-socialization, reversed nesting, agenda replacement, and institutional isomorphism, casting the pacifying impact of international institutions in a new light and opening a new academic landscape for discussion.

Sympathetic to the idea that the international system is experiencing a ‘long peace’, Mai’a Davis Cross picks up the institutional mantle in chapter 10 by investigating how and why the institutions of the European Union have contributed to the establishment and maintenance of peace. Drawing a line back to the influence of ideology, she provides an institutionalist argument, claiming that the sharing of ideas has been central to the way in which EU institutions have shaped the peace in Europe. Introducing the major schools of thought as well as recent archival research, Cross attributes significance to the federalist movement, which she views as being both the central driver of European integration and the EU’s contribution to peace.

In section VI, attention shifts to consider the vast sums spent to insulate the less fortunate against the horrors of war. Doyen of developmental economics Paul Collier turns his attention to what he views as the most important remaining development challenge—‘fragile states’—where limited government capacity renders society vulnerable to collapse and conflict. Collier argues that only states with a non-predatory social order are capable of development. In his view, idealistic western overemphasis on the introduction of multi-party democracy has therefore not only hampered development but has been detrimental to both development and peace. If free elections are held too soon, as in Iraq, Collier argues that the non-predatory order necessary to avoid a return to instability and conflict becomes difficult to achieve. Thus, in clear opposition to recent policy, Collier concludes by urging a more pragmatic approach to development, where the focus on democracy is relaxed.

Maria Stern and Joakim Öjendal consider the impact of development on the preservation of peace by exploring the efficiency of peacebuilding in post-conflict societies. Following a conceptual exploration of peace, development, and security, they consider the problems inherent to peacebuilding. Delivering a powerful critique, Stern and Öjendal show how the peace, development and security nexus has failed to deliver on the promise of post-conflict peacebuilding. They conclude that an over-reliance on this approach becomes too de-contextualized to succeed, and even suggest that the chances of ever delivering on the promise of peacekeeping using the security-development nexus are slim.

Section VII considers two, depending on perspective, complimentary or competing scholarly traditions dealing with the force of arms: deterrence and disarmament as paths to peace. In chapter 13, Bruno Tertrais considers the impact of deterrence on the recent absence of great power warfare. Tertrais recognises both the statistical controversies noted at the beginning of this book and the alternative explanation offered by Pinker, but considers them unsatisfactory explanations for the absence of wars against, and between, states in possession of nuclear weapons. Concerned that the 74-year absence of conflict between the great powers might end without the presence of a nuclear deterrent, Tertrais urges significant caution in attempting disarmament.

Paul F. Diehl flips the coin and tries to disentangle the relationship between peace and nuclear disarmament. Noting the large number of Nobel laureates among disarmament activists, he attempts to determine the direction of causality—does disarmament promote peace or does peace promote disarmament? Do fewer weapons reduce the risk of war, or is the number of weapons reduced as a result of a reduced risk of war? Considering the existing literature and the relatively limited empirical data on disarmament, Diehl finds no solid evidence to suggest that disarmament promotes peace. While careful to note that both the evidence and the existing research suffer from serious flaws, he considers such claims to be the result of ‘wishful thinking’ and echoes Tertrais’s warning that disarmament might not deliver on its peaceful promise.

Section VIII concludes this book by considering arguably the most fraught and contentious question of them all: what makes peace last? In chapter 15, Kristian Skrede Gleditsch argues that much of the evidence points toward greater political accommodation. Gleditsch finds that political inclusion significantly decreases the motivation to use violence while political opportunity improves the number of alternatives to it. He concludes his chapter and this book with a discussion of the prospects of future progress. Given the number of promising pathways discussed in this book, it is only fitting that he is optimistic. Positive trends relating to group-accommodation and political democracy, as well as the lack of a reversal in conflict trends after the Cold War, provide ample reason to believe that the current state of relative tranquility will continue, and even improve.

It is our hope that this book will provide a useful summing up of the research on the patterns of peace and conflict and that our collective effort will be of help to students, scholars, policymakers, and the general public. If, by having succeeded in answering some questions, we have created new ones, that is all the more welcome. Our final—and most important—ambition is to put forth a good read. As editors, our goal with this book is to give readers some pleasant moments while giving them new perspectives and insights on one of the most pressing questions of contemporary international politics. In order to encourage a global readership, we have chosen to self-publish the book, thereby keeping costs to the reader low.

Section I

Is the World Getting More Peaceful?

1.

Systemic Trends in War and Peace

Bear F. Braumoeller

¹

Introduction

The decline of war thesis is an argument made by a growing number of social scientists, including Steven Pinker, at Harvard, some of the researchers at Uppsala and the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), and my own colleague at Ohio State University, John Mueller. These scholars argue that, thanks to things such as the gradual expansion of human empathy and the spread of norms of nonviolence, the frequency and intensity of war are in decline and have been in decline for many decades.

Despite the fact that all of the main authors in this debate marshal data in favour of their arguments, the evidentiary basis for the decline of war thesis remains surprisingly thin. This is in part due to persistent mismatches between the quantities of interest—the rate of conflict initiation and the deadliness of war—and the measures used to capture them. It is also due to the near absence of formal and correct statistical tests.

When I started to use revised measures and tests to explore the argument that the institution of warfare is in decline and has been for some time, I soon came to the conclusion that I didn’t believe it. That conclusion prompted me to dig further, to look at different measures, and to learn new statistical methodologies and apply them to the task. Having done so, I still don’t believe it. So my first reaction to the invitation to be a part of this symposium was, ‘I can’t go to a Nobel Symposium and say that peace isn’t breaking out!’

After a fair bit of reflection, I decided to come anyway, for two reasons. First, the decline of war thesis has achieved a nearly taken-for-granted status in the mainstream press. A typical review concludes, ‘Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline.’² To the extent that this assessment is wrong, the record needs to be set straight. The stakes here are non-trivial: if such assessments make politicians and their publics complacent in the face of rising threats, for example, they could have the perverse effect of making the world less safe if they are incorrect.

My second reason for coming is that, as paradoxical as it may sound at first blush, I don’t think that the bad news about war is necessarily bad news about peace. In fact, I think that for much of the last two centuries we have seen both the spread of war and the spread of peace. The decline-of-war scholars may actually be correct when they say that the world is becoming a more peaceful place. However, it has not become less warlike at the same time—in fact, just the opposite.

The Decline of War Thesis

Let me start by discussing the decline of war thesis. I will focus on the three authors whose work is most closely associated with it.

Mueller argues that the institution of war, like the institutions of duelling and slavery before it, is simply going out of style. In Retreat from Doomsday, Mueller argued that this change in attitudes was taking place among developed countries. In his follow-up book, The Remnants of War, he argued that the normative prohibition against war, which was largely the product of the horrors of World War I, has been spreading from developed countries to the rest of the world ever since.³ To the obvious question—Why was there a World War II?—Mueller argues that it was ‘fabricated almost single-handedly by history’s supreme atavism, Adolf Hitler’.

In Winning the War on War, Joshua Goldstein argues that the decrease in warfare is quite recent, and he does not argue that it is irreversible.⁴ He explicitly does not argue that the evolution of civilization has produced increasingly strong norms of nonviolence. Goldstein does argue, however, that the end of the Cold War helps explain the reduction in violence after 1989, but he points to peacekeeping as the key causal variable: he argues that peacekeeping started having an impact on war in 1945 and accelerated after 1989, mostly due to the effect that peacekeeping has on the durability of post-war settlements.

Pinker, in his best-selling book The Better Angels of Our Nature, argues that, in general, there has been a gradual decline in violence over the course of centuries, that both the frequency and intensity of international conflict have decreased since 1945, and that we now live in what is arguably the most peaceful period in history.⁵ He argues that three overlapping and somewhat irregular processes have driven this decline: the pacification process (humanity’s transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agricultural civilizations), the civilizing process (the gradual strengthening of domestic authority and growth of commerce), and the humanitarian revolution (the expansion of empathy that resulted in the abolition of slavery, duelling, and cruel physical punishment and an increase in pacifism).

While these arguments differ in terms of the reasons that they posit for a decline in warfare, the exact aspects of warfare that they think have declined, and the duration of that decline, it is possible to discern two core claims that make up the decline of war thesis, each of which is emphasized to different degrees by different authors:

States use force against one another less often than they did decades or centuries ago.

When wars do occur, fewer people die in them than in decades past.

These are fairly straightforward hypotheses. Unfortunately, very few analyses that have been done to date contain a reasonable test of either one of them.

Main Issues with Existing Analyses

Studies of the decline of war thesis exhibit a surprising number of theoretical and empirical pathologies. For the sake of space, I will focus on two of the most serious in the latter category: the use of measures that do not reflect the quantity of theoretical interest and the failure to use formal statistical tests that would separate real changes in that quantity from random variation.

When I started exploring the evidence presented in favour of these arguments, I discovered that these claims were based on surprisingly little data. This may seem like a bold statement, given that all three books contain data analysis of some sort. Pinker’s book alone is more than 800 pages long and contains, by my count, 116 distinct figures. Most of these figures, however, contain data that relate to his larger claim that all forms of human violence are in decline: they chart changes in rates of homicide, judicial torture, spousal abuse, and so on—even spanking. The charts that relate to interstate warfare are located at the end of chapter 5 and the beginning of chapter 6.

Of these charts, very few actually show worldwide trends in warfare. Most show trends in warfare either within Europe or among the great powers, which are almost without exception European. Granted, both Pinker and Mueller argue that the process of pacification began in the developed world, but they also argue that the process has spread far enough to the rest of the world that it’s had an impact on war in general.

When I looked for data on trends in the rate or frequency of the use of force worldwide, however, I found not a single graph or table in any of the three books, or in the rest of the literature for that matter. The only exception is a 1999 conference paper written by Peter Brecke, who compiled a catalogue of known conflicts with at least twenty-five fatalities, starting from the 1400s to the present day.⁶ Pinker reproduces Brecke’s Figure 2, which shows a general downward trend in the number of conflicts per year that were initiated in Europe since the 1400s, as