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This paper aims to seek to and understand how civil conflict and international claims inform one another. Does the existence of ongoing civil and international conflicts affect how a government addresses an international claim? The paper builds on existing literature that link international and domestic conflict. However, it suggests that the logic behind civil conflicts may be different from that for international ones as states decide how to deal with any one claim.

The paper posits that states faced with domestic conflicts and additional international claims are more likely to seek to resolve an international claim than those without similar conflicts. It develops a series of hypotheses about the likelihood of claim escalation and peaceful settlement attempts and proceed to test them quantitatively using the Issue Correlates of War data combined with the uppsala conflict data program/peace research institute oslo Armed Conflict Data.

On the one hand, the paper finds support for the argument regarding the difficulty states are faced with when seeking to resolve multiple international claims. On the other hand, it finds that the presence of civil conflicts incentivizes states to resolve international claims either by force or peacefully, suggesting internal violence can both lead to diversionary behavior and attempts at conflict resolution.

The findings have important implications for work considering the complexity of domestic and international conflict linkages.

While many studies of claim militarization and peaceful attempts focus on dyadic and international characteristics, this paper creates a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of this foreign policy decision process.

Purpose – This chapter aims to position regional integration in the Kantian peace tripod and to test whether regional economic integration has a significant effect in reducing militarised interstate disputes.

Methodology – It uses logistic regression on cross-sectional–time-series data and a generalised estimating equation.

Findings – The analysis shows that regional integration had a significant impact in reducing militarised interstate disputes between 1950 and 2000.

Practical implications – This chapter may provide a new dimension to the academic discussion on the Kantian peace proposition, and encourage policy makers in less integrated regions to integrate with their neighbouring states in a bid to minimise political tensions.

Originality – The chapter is based on original data on regional integration collected by the author.

Building on the steps to war model, this paper seeks to examine the impact that territorial Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID) have on the time it takes a dyad to go to war after it experiences its first MID.

A model common to epidemiological research, the hazard model, is employed to examine the dyadic relationship from the time of the first MID forward. This is an improvement to dyadic analysis, as most research examines the characteristics of individual MIDs in isolation.

Dyads with a history of territorial MIDs go to war much more quickly than dyads without a history of territorial MIDs. Future research should explore the relationship between territory, war, and power status to test the assertion that minor power states engage in power politics behavior less frequently.

Conflict resolution measures need to be employed more quickly when states have unresolved territorial issues. Mediation generally does not occur quickly, which may explain why territorial issues are less likely to be referred to mediators and less successfully mediated. The results presented herein highlight the need for flexible, quick responses to certain crises and the need to settle borders and other territorial disputes permanently to avoid war.

The paper tests a critical component of the steps to war model and examines the assertion that the historical relationship between states affects conflict decisions.

The purpuse of this study is to answer the following two questions. Do conflict management efforts mitigate the recurrence and severity of civil conflict? If so, how? Do some conflict management strategies fare better than others in these tasks? This study theorizes about the connection between the costliness of a conflict management strategy – with respect to both the disputants and third parties – and civil conflict outcomes. This theory produces two contradictory predictions: that more costly strategies either increase or decrease violence. This study not only adjudicates between these two possibilities but also incorporates the role of timing. The early use of more costly strategies, for example, may encourage disputants to reduce violence in civil conflicts.

To evaluate the predications that the authors derive from their theoretical argument, the authors quantitatively analyze the effect of conflict management strategies’ relative cost on various measures of civil conflict recurrence and severity. The authors first identify the set of international–civil militarized conflicts (I-CMCs) during the period 1946–2010. I-CMCs contain two dimensions – interstate and intrastate – making them the most complex and dangerous form of militarized conflict. To each I-CMC, the authors then link all third-party attempts to manage the I-CMC’s civil conflict dimension. Finally, after developing quantitative indicators, a series of regression equations explore the relationships of primary interest.

Two main findings emerge. First, when third parties use a relatively more costly conflict management strategy to manage a civil conflict (e.g. a peace operation or military intervention, as opposed to mediation), the severity of the conflict increases, while conflict recurrence rates remain unchanged. Second, this study uncovers a trade-off. The early use of a relatively more costly management strategy lowers a civil conflict’s severity in the short-term. It also, however, increases the likelihood – and speed with which – civil conflict recurs. The timing of certain conflict management strategies matters.

Scholars typically isolate conflict management strategies in number (i.e. consider efforts as independent of one another, even those within the same conflict) and kind (i.e. examine mediation but not peace operations). This study, in contrast, includes the following: the full menu of conflict management strategies available to third parties – negotiation, mediation, adjudication/arbitration, peace operations, sanctions and military intervention – over a lengthy time period (1946–2010); theorizes about the relative merits of these strategies; and considers the timing of certain conflict management efforts. In so doing, it highlights a policy trade-off and proposes promising areas for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to explore to what extent the economic interdependence can affect the likelihood of conflict between States. Specially, over the past few decades, there has been a huge interest in the relationship between economic interdependence and political conflict. Liberals argue that economic interdependence lowers the possibility of war by increasing the weight of trading over the alternative of aggression; interdependent states would rather trade than invade; realists dismiss the liberal argument, arguing that high interdependence increases rather than decreases the probability of war. In anarchy, states must constantly worry about their security.

This paper highlights the content and level of economic interdependence between China and the USA since the beginning of China’s economic reform in 1979 and examines the impact of economic interdependence between them on their relationship toward Taiwan since 1995 and the probability of conflict.

Economic interdependence is proved to significantly decrease the onset of conflict between the two parties. This can be shown by comparing the number of armed conflicts during the pre-interdependence period to the number of armed conflicts after the economic interdependence there was an overage of 0.79 militarized interstate disputes (MIDs)/year, compared to 0.26 MIDs/year following China’s economic reforms; also, the length of the hostilities was longer during the pre-interdependence period (with an average of 11.13 months versus 5.33 months).

This means that economic interdependence does not completely prevent the outbreak of international conflicts, but it also plays a major role in influencing the conflict in terms of the conflict’s intensity, the use of armed force and the number of conflicts that occur between the economic interdependence states.

This study will look at the relationship between norms on gender equality on the one hand and the level of gender equality in the political and socioeconomic sphere, the presence or absence of armed conflict, and general peacefulness on the other.

Data on gender equality norms from the World Values Surveys, political and socioeconomic gender equality from the Global Gender Gap Index, armed conflict from the Uppsala Conflict Data Base, and general peacefulness from the Global Peace Index are analyzed in a bivariate correlation.

The results show a significant association between norms on and attitudes toward gender equality and levels of political and socioeconomic gender equality, absence or presence of armed conflict, and level of general peacefulness.

There is no data base on norms on and attitudes toward the use of violence which is why only levels of violence are included in the study.

The study shows that governments, aid agencies, NGOs and others working on conflict prevention and peace building need to focus on improving gender equality in order to achieve a sustainable decrease in conflict levels and an improvement in general levels of peacefulness.

This study is original in that it looks at norms on gender equality on the individual level on the one hand and actual levels of both gender equality and violence in the society, including armed conflict on the other.

Using data over the period from 1950 to 2000, we estimate a model of bilateral international trade to explore the linkages between (a) alliances, (b) joint memberships in international institutions, (c) mutual cooperation and (d) conflict, (e) mutual economic freedom, and (f) democracy and bilateral trade. We incorporate exporter and importer effects as well as reciprocity into a gravity model and cross-validate it against annual out-of-sample data. The resulting, empirical findings show the importance of second and third-order dependencies in bilateral trade data. Military alliances, membership in IGOs, international cooperation, and mutual economic freedom are shown to be strongly associated with bilateral trade. Conversely, conflict and the level of democracy do not demonstrate strong, discernable linkages to bilateral trade.

State leaders’ decision-making calculus is often attributed to external factors. The political arena, international community pressure and a country’s military stance all take centre stage in the analysis of national security decisions. Little weight is given to personal aspects of a leader’s psyche in explaining these decisions; this is true to the bulk of the research regarding this topic. This study theorizes and tests a positive link between Israeli leaders’ combat military experience and their propensity to enter into ‘peacemaking’ decisions namely, peace talks, cease fires and unilateral withdrawals. This research uses a new database comprising all peacemaking decision points in Israel’s history, looking at the pressure put on a leader from outside factors and his military experience to explain the decision taken. It finds a strong significant link between combat experience and the tendency to enter in a peacemaking decision with little regard to ideological affiliation, shedding a new light on Israeli politicians from both sides of the aisle.

Capitalist peace theory asserts that economic freedom or capitalism, contract-intensity, trade, foreign investment, financial openness, or the avoidance of state property ownership promote peace. But the capitalist peace also includes the democratic peace. If democracy itself is an effect of economic freedom or the prosperity generated by it, then the democratic peace is no more than a mere component of the capitalist peace. Then capitalism and economic interdependence promote peace by two or even three routes, directly and indirectly, through democracy and, possibly, by common memberships in intergovernmental organizations, too. Admittedly, this argument relies on compiling lots of diverse pieces of evidence, some of which are still debated in the scientific community. The idea that capitalism might be more important as well as more beneficial for peace than democracy rests on two reasons. First, without capitalism or the prosperity it promotes, democracy might no longer be viable. Under capitalism, nations may enjoy prosperity and peace together. Better still, poor nations benefit from the existence of more advanced ones that are sources of technology, models for emulation, and markets for labor-intensive products. Second, democratic peace theory has invited the dangerous idea that one might or even should promote democracy by war. The consequences of the financial crisis of 2008 and the political responses to it, however, threaten to undermine globalization. That is why the capitalist peace faces an uncertain future at a time when we need it. The rapid economic rise of Asia, in particular of China and somewhat later probably of India to great power status, is likely to undermine the global pecking order and to imply some power transitions. In the past, power transitions have been related to increased risks of war. That is why we need a capitalist peace between China and the West.