Civil-Military Dynamics, Democracy, and International Conflict A New Quest for International Peace

by James, Patrick; Choi, Seung-Whan

• ISBN13: 9781403964854
• ISBN10: 1403964858
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-04-16
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Addressing decision-making over interstate disputes and the democratic peace thesis, Choi and James build an interactive foreign policy decision-making model with a special emphasis on civil-military relations, conscription, diplomatic channels and media openness. Each is significant in explaining decisions over dispute involvement. The temporal scope is broad while the geographic scope is global. The result is sophisticated analysis of the causes of conflict and factors that can ameliorate it, and a generalizable approach to the study of foreign relations. The findings that media openness contributes to peaceful resolution of disputes, that the greater the influence of the military the more likely for there to be interstate disputes, that conscription is likely to have the same effect, and that increases in diplomatic interaction correlate with increased conflict are sure to generate debate.

Author Biography

Seung-Whan Choi is Visiting Assistant Professor of Department of Political Science at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Patrick James is Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Table of Contents

List of Tables	ix
List of Figures	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
1 Introduction	1	(6)
2 A Review of Democracy, Peace, and Other Things	7	(16)
The Democratic Peace and Its Critics	7	(7)
The Recent Evolution and Prospects of the Democratic Peace	14	(9)
3 A New Look at International Conflict and Peace: Four Factors to Consider	23	(16)
Intuition, or, How does It Work?	23	(6)
A Flow Chart of the Foreign Policy Decision-Making Process Model	29	(4)
Two Historical Exemplars	33	(3)
Where To?	36	(3)
4 Research Design	39	(16)
Hypotheses	39	(4)
Measurement and Data	43	(4)
Building Logit and Neural Network Models	47	(8)
5 Accounting for Militarized Interstate Disputes	55	(36)
Logistic Regression Analysis	55	(15)
Neural Network Analysis	70	(9)
A Case Study: Bush Administration Diplomacy and the North Korean Nuclear Program	79	(12)
6 Accounting for Fatal Militarized Interstate Disputes	91	(18)
Logistic Regression Analysis	92	(7)
Neural Network Analysis	99	(10)
7 A Key Issue of Measurement: Military Expenditure and Civil-Military Relations	109	(20)
Measuring Civil-Military Relations in Two Steps	110	(11)
Empirical Implications: Do Civil-Military Relations Still Matter?	121	(8)
8 A Closer Look at Media Openness: From Institutional Democracy to Media Openness?	129	(18)
Media Openness, Democracy, and Interstate Disputes	130	(7)
Testing the Role of Media Openness	137	(3)
Empirical Implications: The Power of Media Openness	140	(7)
9 The Quest for Peace	147	(8)
Findings	147	(3)
Policy Implications	150	(4)
Some Final Thoughts	154	(1)
Appendix	155	(2)
Notes	157	(18)
References	175	(18)
Index	193