Abstract
Yonatan Lupu and Vincent A. Traag has been awarded the annual Bruce Russett Award for the Article of the Year published in Journal of Conflict Resolution during 2013. The winning article, “Trading Communities, the Networked Structure of International Relations, and the Kantian Peace” was published in the December 2013 issue (JCR 57:6).
Members of the editorial board of JCR participated in a two-stage process in order to determine the winner of the award. The first step was for a nominating committee to recommend their top three articles for consideration. In the second step the three articles that received the most nominations were given to a voting committee who were asked to rank-order each of the articles. The winner received the highest overall rankings among all the votes cast. In casting their votes for the article of the year, the committee was asked to judge the strength of each article in terms of new and important contributions to basic research based on considerations of theoretical quality, methodological rigor, and substantive relevance to the field of conflict studies.
In the award-winning article Lupu and Traag argue that existing theoretical and empirical work on the relationship between international trade and conflict would be strengthened by considering the networked structure of international trade. They propose that an analysis of trade from a network perspective highlights the importance of indirect trade ties in reducing the risk of conflict between states. Using a sophisticated network analytic tool of modularity maximization they develop multiple measures of indirect trade relations and find in a series of empirical tests that indirect trade ties are robustly related to lower levels of militarized interstate disputes for the period 1960-2000. The editor of JCR would like to extend a special thanks to all of those board members who served on the nominating and voting committees: Todd Sandler, Gerald Schneider, Ron Smith, Erik Voeten, Bill Donahue, and Dan Druckman.
The award is USD 500.