Journal of Peace Research

The focus is on utopianism in peace research, defined as the trend which embraces the core value of peace to the extent where tensions and contradictions in the concept of peace are glossed over. The starting-point is Johan Galtung's definition of peace as the absence of both direct and structural violence. The definition is considered useful, but it is shown that it makes the achievement of peace extremely difficult. After a more concrete identification of the tensions and contradictions in the concept, the focus is on peace as the absence of violence. The entity of developmental violence is introduced and defined as violence which contributes to reduce the total sum of violence inflicted upon individuals, groups and nations. It is argued that the utopian trend in peace research, based on the Gandhian heritage, fails to recognize the existence of developmental violence and thus paints itself into a corner from which there is no satisfactory exit. The plea is for a more open, constructivist position which can make it possible to ask questions about blends of violence and non-violence and about situations where non-violence is infeasible.

The theme of the article is the multilateral reduction of offensive capabilities, aimed at the enhancement of conventional defensive superiority as a means of war prevention. This approach surfaced at the 1932 World Disarmament Conference in Geneva. It was promoted in order to enhance confidence, prevent a disastrous arms race, and allow for a `cooling-off' period in times of tension. Uppermost in most minds, however, was the aim of precluding the possibility of a `lightning attack' by prohibiting the necessary hardware - bombers and tanks. The origin of the approach cannot be traced back much further than 1930, to the influential leader of the peace movement, Lord Cecil, and the strategic thinker Liddell Hart. After initial widespread support by political delegates, fruitless debates in special technical commissions led to stagnation, while Hitler rose to power. Advocates of the revival of the powers of the offensive, such as Fuller and Winston Churchill, had had no doubts about what kind of hardware to promote, in order to prevent a repetition of the stalemate of World War I. When it came to abolishing rather than promoting weapons, however, they refused to fully accept the distinction between offensive and defensive weapons. In order to save a handful of experimental tanks, and the dream they promised of a revival of decisive offensive warfare, the military experts of the major powers let pass the chance of preventing war through the reduction of offensive capabilities. The Conference failed, and Hitler set out to acquire exactly those bits of hardware that promised success through what was later to become known as the `Blitzkrieg'. Thus, in 1932 the window of opportunity, still slightly ajar, finally closed, preparing the way for World War II. Today the approach has another chance, but once again the window of opportunity is closing.

Statistical studies of the determinants of defense expenditures have been criticized on two counts: (a) most of them do not test the hypotheses of causality that they include, but simply use them as a point of departure, and (b) those that do test causality are restricted to conceptual models with very few explanatory variables. The objective of this paper is to study the defense expenditures of the USA and the USSR, explicitly avoiding these two limitations. This is done using elementary statistical methods in somewhat unorthodox ways. The conclusions of the analyses are carefully compared with those obtained by other authors and the differences encountered are explained as far as possible. The analyses and comparisons show that the defense expenditures of the USA are determined by their own inertia and by political factors within the country, while those of the USSR are determined by their own inertia and the conditions of relations with the USA. The interest of these results is not in their novelty, but in the fact that they are obtained with procedures designed to provide a more solid foundation.

This article examines central administration functional expenditures for four Latin American countries over the last twenty years. A detailed review of fiscal accounts was conducted in each country, with greater concern for inter-country consistency in public sector accounting techniques and functional area definitions. The study reveals large errors in military expenditure data published by international sources. Our improved and disaggregated database shows, first, that Defense expenditures are the single largest (and most volatile) functional outlay, often greater than all public sector social functions combined. Second, from 1969 through 1987 (except in Peru) the Defense function grew faster than Health or Education, with Defense generally crowding out these social expenditures. This conclusion directly contradicts the dominant position in the literature regarding Less Developed Country social expenditure crowd-out by Defense. Third, military regimes tend to spend more on Defense (and a higher average share of the nomina) than do civilian regimes. Here a growing number of counterassertions in the literature are based on faulty military expenditure reporting. Moreover, military regimes spend less on social areas than do civilian regimes. And lastly, Police shares of the nomina are inversely related to the country's level of development.

This article uses a methodology developed by Hicks & Kubisch and data from a sample of forty countries to investigate the dynamics of defense budgeting in Subsaharan Africa during the 1967-87 period. We find that African countries discriminate against defense in budgeting when budget resources are increasing. On the other hand, they favor defense in budgeting during periods of austerity. This pattern of budgeting increases the defense burden and budget shares in African countries at times when the general population is least able to shoulder such a burden, and hence the need to reallocate defense spending is greatest. We also find that African governments consistently favor defense in the allocation of foreign exchange. The pattern of defense budget allocation in Subsaharan Africa neither varies among the four geographical regions of Subsaharan Africa - West, East, Central and Southern - nor among the oil exporters and the foreign exchange constrained oil importers. This inability to decrease defense spending during periods of austerity implies that those interested in changing budgetary priorities should have to rethink the concept of defense and hence redefine defense in African societies. African defense forces may have to be redirected to be used for development purposes rather than as a fighting organization. This will decrease the conflict between the fiscal needs to decrease defense spending and the reality of inability to do so. Such a reorientation of the military will also reduce the conflict between high defense spending and long-term development in Subsaharan Africa.

The growing literature on the relationship between democracy and war has focused on two questions-Whether democracies are more pacific than other types of government, and why democracies do not seem to go to war against each other. In the spirit of Lakatosian cumulativeness - looking for explanations with excess empirical content - this commentary supports one explanation of the `why democracies do not fight democracies' question. The model supported is an expected utility formulation by Bueno de Mesquita & Lalman based on the logical relationships between states which are `doves' and `non-doves'. The same explanation for democracy-to-democracy peace provided by the Bueno de Mesquita-Lalman analytics, based on the ability to `separate' states into doves and non-doves, can be used to explain the linkages between integration and the Deutschian concept of `security community'.

It is often stated in academic analysis as well as in public discussions that there is a nuclear proliferation regime. The rather limited proliferation of nuclear weapons since the 1960s is then said to be the result of the erection and fairly successful working of this international regime. This view is criticized using a recent article in this journal as an example. One problem with the international regime approach is that proponents are often not very clear on who is in and who is out of regimes. In the area of non-proliferation, with its multitude of treaties, arrangements and policies, the distinction is especially difficult. It probably makes more sense to speak of several rather than just one international nonproliferation regime. While these regimes have important places in non-proliferation, analysis only looking at them misses important aspects. One is that national decision-making is influenced by norms around non-proliferation that are not international regimes. The neglect of norm-building reflects a major shortcoming of the international regime approach, namely its state-centeredness. This defect has consequences for the analysis of the importance of elements within the international non-proliferation area. Policy recommendations based solely on international regime analysis are misleading. Diplomats, policy-makers and the public concerned about nuclear non-proliferation are better advised if the problem is put into a larger perspective including both institutional and normative aspects.

Studies of identity formation are back as a clue to questions of peace and war. Human collectives such as nation-states forge their identities by offsetting the collective against other entities. The books under review discuss how this process takes place. They make up a possible link between the literature on nationalism and state legitimacy on the one hand, and studies of interstate security on the other. This makes them a possible starting-point for empirical research.