Journal of Peace Research

The empirical finding that democracies do not fight each other has long suggested that regime type influences international behavior. In the research reported here, we demonstrate that the democratic peace is only the most visible manifestation of the impact of domestic political structure on international relations. We consider the complete range of cooperative and conflictual interaction of each state in the international system with every dyadic partner in its politically relevant international environment between 1953 and 1978. We demonstrate a strong and consistent relationship between regime type and foreign policy behavior, both at the monadic and the dyadic level. States with more democratic characteristics tend to behave more cooperatively and less conflictually in the international system; these tendencies intensify when democratic states interact with other democracies. Meanwhile, non-democracies tend to treat democracies with more conflictual and less cooperative behavior. The influence of the internal institutional structures of states on their external behavior extends well beyond decisions to go to war. The empirical findings reported herein suggest that future research will benefit from increased attention to the relationships among state structure, leaders' incentives, foreign policy behavior, and international outcomes.

China's military expenditures are of great concern to many. Although numerous articles have been written on this subject, little empirical work has been conducted to identify the determinants of China's military expenditures. This article fills this void by empirically showing that China's GNP, its rivals' military expenditures, its border wars with neighboring countries, and its leadership's preferences are likely determinants of China's military expenditures. Specifically, using the ACDA data, this study indicates that China's military expenditures are positively influenced by China's GNP, its rivals' military expenditures, and China's lagged military expenditures during the period 1965-93. In addition, the change in the Chinese leadership's top priority from preparing for war to economic development after 1979 has a negative impact on China's military expenditures, but the border wars with the Soviet Union and Vietnam do not have a significant impact. Similar results are obtained by using official Chinese data. This suggests that the difference between the official Chinese data and the ACDA data may be systematic so that the relationship between China's military expenditures and their determinants are qualitatively the same regardless of which dataset is used.

The interesting theoretical question about civil war in general is not why it begins (the possible reasons are surely too many to enumerate) or why it stops (all sorts of contingent explanations from simple fatigue to outside force may apply) but why it so often does not resume when it might. We need to comprehend this process of conflict transformation, whereby the conflict either becomes less important or is pursued without using mass violence. Understandably, most analyses and prescriptions for peacemakers focus on relationships between former enemies and attempts to reduce incentives for them to take up arms again. However, a recent analysis of four negotiated settlements of civil wars (Sudan in 1972, Zimbabwe in 1980, Chad in 1987, and Lebanon in 1989) reveals that in all four cases the critical conflict was actually between former allies. The compromises required in negotiated settlements, combined with the other problems of post-civil war societies, make such conflicts likely. In some cases they led to violence; in Zimbabwe and Lebanon conflict again reached the level of civil war. However, the ironic results was that the countries that had experienced the most violence subsequently produced new settlements which essentially confirmed the original ones and appear to be holding. In Sudan, interallied violence was quite low, but the result was that the government changed its policy, the first settlement was undermined, and the original civil war began again. Outsiders should not assume either that wartime cooperation will continue in peace or that `normal' peacetime behavior will naturally appear of its own accord. Indeed, they should probably anticipate that ad hoc wartime alliances are likely to dissolve with the risk of renewed civil violence.

Ethnic conflict seems to be common in all countries of the world where people are divided into separate ethnic groups, that may have a racial, national, linguistic, tribal, religious or caste basis. In this article it is proposed that a significant part of the universality of ethnic conflict can be explained by our evolved predisposition to ethnic nepotism, which can be regarded as an extended form of nepotism. Evolutionary theories of inclusive fitness and kin selection explain the origin and universality of nepotism. The members of an ethnic group tend to favour their group members over non-members because they are more related to their group members than to outsiders. This disposition to favour kin over non-kin becomes important in social life and politics when people and groups of people have to compete for scarce resources. Two hypotheses on political consequences of ethnic nepotism are presented: (1) significant ethnic division tends to lead to ethnic interest conflict in all societies and (2) the more a society is ethnically divided, the more political and other interest conflict tend to become channelled into ethnic lines. These two hypotheses are tested by empirical evidence for 183 contemporary states. The hypothetical concepts `ethnic division' and `ethnic conflict' are operationalized into empirical variables. The results support the two hypotheses. Deviating cases underline the importance of other relevant factors behind ethnic conflict and violence.

Few puzzles in international relations research have received as much attention as the relationship between political regimes and interstate conflict. Here we examine a particular aspect of this puzzle: the systemic relationships between democracy, democratization, and interstate conflict. We test hypotheses aimed at exploring three dimensions of this general inquiry. First, that democracy, democratization, and war are endogenous phenomena. Second, that the relationships between these three processes vary across time with respect to their strength and direction. Lastly, that these relationships also vary spatially, paying particular attention to geographic regions. Using time-series techniques with data for the period 1816-1992, we employ Granger causality and vector auto-regression (VAR) techniques to test our hypotheses. Briefly, we find evidence confirming the endogeneity of these processes, though this endogeneity is not as extensive as we anticipated and is conditional on the spatial and temporal sample selected. Perhaps more importantly, we find evidence suggesting that the statistical strength and sign of the relationships of interest exhibit considerable spatial and temporal heterogeneity. We conclude that the regional level, rather than the global level, holds more promise for understanding the interrelationships between systemic democracy, democratization, and interstate conflict.

Formal acceptance of international agreements on human rights has progressed to the point where currently over three-quarters of the UN member states are parties to the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights. In fact, becoming a party to this covenant seems to be concomitant with joining the UN. Of the newly independent states in Eastern Europe and in the region of the former Soviet Union, only Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Moldova, and Macedonia have not joined the treaty. This article tests empirically whether becoming a party to this international treaty (and its optional protocol) has an observable impact on the state party's actual behavior. The hypothesis is tested across 178 countries over an eighteen-year period (1976-93) and across four different measures of state human rights behavior. Initial bivariate analyses demonstrate some statistically significant differences between the behavior of states parties and the behavior of non-party states. However, this difference does not appear in the bivariate analysis that compares the states parties' behavior before becoming a party to the treaty with their behavior after becoming a party state. When the analysis progresses to more sophisticated multivariate analysis, in which factors known to affect human rights are controlled, the impact of the covenant and its optional protocol disappears altogether. Overall, this study suggests that it may be overly optimistic to expect that being a party to this international covenant will produce an observable direct impact.