1. THE SECOND IMAGE: WHY DO SOME SOCIETIES/ STATES/CULTURES/LEADERS FIGHT MORE THAN OTHERS? DO STATES WITH SIMILAR CHARACTERISTICS BEHAVE IN SIMILAR WAYS?

2. WHICH STATES FIGHT THE LEAST? B/w 1816-1992, 10% of states accounted for 57% of all wars. B/w 1815 and 1865, 11 countries = 90% battle deaths. The “abstainers” were mostly: Militarily and economically weak Ranked low on power-related status Achieved independence slowly and through an evolutionary process Were politically democratic at independence

3. A STATS MINI-LESSON! WEEKS’ ARTICLE Key question: Why are some dictatorships more belligerent? Key variables in her “2x2 typology” of dictatorship: How many leaders? Personalist or closed oligarchy (“elite constrained”) What kind of dictator? Military/civilian Gives us 4 categories: Machines, Juntas, Bosses & Strongmen Hypotheses: H1: Machines no more likely to initiate war than democs H2: Machines much less war than juntas; H2: Strongmen the most dangerous; H3: Personalism and militarism partially redundant effects Measurement/classification of leaders Depend variable= prob. Of each country starting conflict in a given year) Control variables: (1) Capabilities of dyad A&B; (2) Alliances of A&B; (3) geographic contiguity (4) trade dependence; (5) Regime stability; (6) Side B regime type Regression method: Fancy logistic regression… Texas football and predicting what % of times they will in the next 100 years as a function of key injuries… And then, let’s look at the charts

6. WHAT SOCIAL CONDITIONS & SUBSTATE FACTORS HAVE BEEN LINKED TO GOING TO WAR? Thinking about cause and effect: Do weak & divided states attract or create civil and/or international conflict?: The “endogeneity” problem: Weak states = war? Or is it the reverse? Or is there a causal loop? “Missing variable bias”: Does something else cause both weak states and war? What evidence is there to support scapegoat/diversionary theory? Not as much as you would think Military structure arguments: Graham Allison’s discussion of SOPs and bureaucratic politics as an explanation of the Cuban Missile Crisis The interaction between nationalism, state structure, and geography: The US and Britain versus Germany and Russia (does vulnerability make for different “in-group/out-group” pressures?) Why are multinational states more prone to war? Irridentialism, separatism Nationalist/aggressive cultures and especially “national narratives” dramatically vary and they seem to be linked to aggression: Japan, China, US, Russia; generally linked to societies over-estimating themselves, under estimating opponents. Relative deprivation and the willingness to fight wars

7. ARE SOME REGIME TYPES MORE SUSCEPTIBLE TO CONFLICT? THE DEMOCRATIC PEACE Kant: Why should democracies fight (or at least initiate wars) less? Do they? Updates to the democratic peace theory: How can checks & balances and the role of oppositional politics impact the propensity to war? Do civil liberties (esp. freedom of the press) mean fewer conflicts? Are some types of democracies less susceptible to group think? Are some types of authoritarian regimes, too? (Weeks article: Machines/Juntas, Boss/Strongman -- Schultz article on transparency and democratic structure) Public opinion & electoral cycles: Are there incentives to engage in scapegoating in presidential democracies because of the forced timing of elections? If democracies are less inclined to start wars with other democracies, are they less prone to joining? Are democracies going to be increasingly likely to fight in a world that takes human rights seriously? New democracies: What happens when your voters are stupid or divided along ethnic lines? What happens when democracies choose to fight? Why do the seem to fight better? Do they fight more nicely? Do they end wars more nicely?

8. ARE CERTAIN ECONOMIES LESS PRONE TO CONFLICT? What was Karl Marx’s theory of inter-state war? (He didn’t have much of one) What was Vladimir Lenin’s theory of imperialism and war? Why would rich states fight in and over developing countries? Why did pacifying the local working classes depend on exporting brutality? What was the fighting all about? Finding markets for surplus goods and capital that could have a high return on investment Other reasons to fight in and over countries in the economic periphery: The need for raw materials and the internal politics of rich states’ military industrial complex What does the evidence suggest? Causality issues make this hard… Do poor countries fight because they are poor or stay poor because they fight? No evidence rich states fight each other. What is interdependency theory, and why do liberals assume advanced capitalist countries will fight a lot less (at least each other)?: What are the economic stakes and vulnerability of states that are highly interconnected economically? (Why would we be fools to fight China?) Subnational actor stakes: Even if politicians want to fight, why don’t businessmen? How does globalization give us all a shared vision of reality and the future?