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International Institutions and the Mechanisms of War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2017

Ryan Goodman
Ryan Goodman*
Affiliation:
Harvard Law School
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Type
Recent Books on International Law
Information
American Journal of International Law , Volume 99 , Issue 2 , April 2005 , pp. 507 - 515
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of International Law 2005

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References

1 Levy, Jack S., The Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace, 1 Ann. Rev. Pol. Sci. 139, 160 (1998)Google Scholar (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). But cf. Debating The Democratic Peace (Michael E. Brown, Sean M. Lynn–Jones, & Steven E. Miller eds., 1996) (reproducing essays disputing the empirical foundations of the democratic peace).

2 In an important passage, Moore unites the two strands:

[A]nother way to conceptualize the importance of democracy and deterrence in war avoidance is to note that each in its own way internalizes the costs to decision elites of engaging in high risk aggressive behavior. Democracy internalizes these costs in a variety of ways including displeasure of the electorate at having war imposed upon it by its own government. And deterrence either prevents achievement of the objective altogether or imposes punishing costs making the gamble not worth the risk. (P. 43)

3 See, e.g., Maoz, Zeev & Russett, Bruce, Normative and Structural Causes of Democratic Peace, 1946–1986, 87 Am. Pol. Sci. Rev. 624, 625 (1993)Google Scholar.

4 The fact that Moore deviates from standard accounts of international law is an important caveat for readers, especially those from other disciplines, who are interested in the book for its legal perspective.

5 Notably, Moore does not address other conditions that the United States failed, in that situation, to satisfy for the purpose of exercising the right of collective selfdefense (for example, whether the relevant military activities amounted to an armed attack; whether the victim state considered the actions an armed attack; and whether the victim state requested assistance at the time). Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua (Nicar. v. U.S.), 1986 ICJ Rep. 14, paras. 229–38 (June 27).

6 Moore also makes a related claim that wars initiated by democracies are largely motivated by “value conservation,” not “value extension.” This distinction sometimes appears to mirror the legal categories of aggression and nonaggression (p. 117 n.17). Yet the current use–of–force regime attaches no legal—and little, if any, normative—weight to such a distinction. Additionally, as an empirical matter, one should not be sanguine even if democracies initiate war primarily due to “value conservation”; empirical studies of prospect theory suggest that states engage in more extreme, warprone behavior in order to avoid losses than to achieve gains. See, e.g., Nincic, Miroslav, Loss Aversion and Domestic Context of Military Intervention, 50 Pol. Res. Q. 97 (1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Studies also suggest that major wars frequently result from shifts in power, such as conditions in which a major state’s strength declines relative to its potential adversaries. Geller, Daniel S. & David Singer, J., Nations at war: a Scientific Study of International Conflict 68–76 (1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Levy, Jack S., Declining Power and the Preventive Motivation for War, 40 World Pol. 82 (1987)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 See, e.g., Russett, Bruce, Grasping The Democratic Peace: Principles For A Post–Cold War World 30–31 (1993)Google Scholar.

8 See discussion infra Part II.

9 See Russett, Bruce M. & Oneal, John R., Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations 78–79 (2001)Google Scholar.

10 Moore contends that his book makes another contribution by synthesizing “core elements” of realist and idealist theories of international relations—in particular, by “incorporating].. . the importance of form of government from the idealist model and the importance of deterrence from the realist model” (p. xix). It is not necessarily idealist, however, to consider form of government an important determinant of state behavior. Indeed, Moore’s assessment of the democratic peace is grounded in a structural—not a norm–based, or idealist—explanation of the reasons that governmental form matters.

11 Maoz & Russett, supra note 3, at 625.

12 Id.

13 Id.

14 Id. at 624

15 Id. at 634–35.

16 Cf. Alexander Wendt, Social. Theory of International Politics 325–36 (1999).

17 Hermann, Margaret G. & Kegley, Charles W. Jr., Rethinking Democracy and International Peace: Perspectives from Political Psychology, 39 Int’l Stud. Q. 511, 515–17 (1995)Google Scholar.

18 In one study, participants were significantly less likely to approve the use of force against a democratic state; they were also significantly more likely to consider the eventual use of force against a democratic state a “foreign policy failure.” Mintz, Alex & Geva, Nehemia, Why Don’t Democracies Fight Each Other? An Experimental Study, 37 J. Conflict Resol. 484 (1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 The most intriguing studies analyze the few arguable cases of war between two democracies. The studies show that in these possible exceptions to the democratic peace, one side’s leadership did not consider the other democratic. These studies most directly undercut a structural explanation of the democratic peace. Both states satisfied scholars’ formal criteria for democracy. It was the perception of the other state that mattered, not its structural composition.

20 Hermann & Kegley, supra note 17, at 517–21.

21 See, e.g., Maoz, Zeev & Abdolali, Nasrin, Regime Types and International Conflict, 1816–1976, 33 J. Conflict Resol. 3, 32 (1989)Google Scholar (“What is surprising is that autocratic regimes exhibit very similar patterns: They are disproportionately unlikely to engage in disputes with other autocracies . . . .”); Hermann & Kegley, supra note 17, at 518–19 (collecting studies). At the same time, pairs of nondemocratic states should not be expected to attain the exceptionally high level of peace experienced by democratic states. That is, the particular form of political governance should not be expected to shape the self–identity of nondemocratic leaders to the same extent as the form of governance shapes the identity of democratic leaders.

22 See, e.g., Henderson, Errol A., Culture or Contiguity: Ethnic Conflict, the Similarity of States, and the Onset of War, 1820–1989, 41 J. Conflict Resol. 649 (1997)CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed. These correlations are complex. Similarities along some dimensions (religion) may be directly associated with peace. Similarities along other dimensions (ethnicity) may be directly associated with war. Id. at 662–67.

23 Geller & Singer, supra note 6, at 23–24.

24 See, e.g., Thies, Cameron G., A Social Psychological Approach to Enduring Rivalries, 22 Pol. Psychol. 693 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hensel, Paul R., An Evolutionary Approach to the Study of Interstate Rivalry, 17 Conflict Mgmt. & Peace Sci. 175 (1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 Vasquez, John & Leskiw, Christopher S., The Origins and War Proneness of Interstate Rivalries, 4 Ann. Rev. Pol. Sci. 295, 296 (2001)Google Scholar (discussing Mansbach, Richard W. & Vasquez, John A., in Search of Theory: Toward A New Paradigm For Global Politics (1981)Google Scholar). As Vasquez and Leskiw explain, “When a state resorts to a negative–affect calculus, it is more concerned about who gets what than about the value of the stakes. In that situation, hostility toward a specific state, rather than the intrinsic value of the stakes, determines one’s issue position[, a process] which results in psychological hostility” between states. Id.

26 Vasquez, John A., the War Puzzle 161 (1993)Google Scholar; id. (agreeing with the “speculation] that as the newcomers actually become acculturated they will follow a traditional... model”) (citation omitted); see also Vasquez, John A., The Probability of War, 1816–1992, 48 Int’l Stud. Q. 1 (2004)Google Scholar.

27 Goodman, Ryan & Jinks, Derek, Toward an Institutional Theory of Sovereignty, 55 Stan. L. Rev. 1749, 1765–80 (2003)Google Scholar.

28 Finnemore, Martha, The Purpose of Intervention: Changing Beliefs About the Use of Force (2003)Google Scholar; see also id. at 22 (discussing consistency with institutional theories in “global polity” scholarship). For an earlier study of the potential influence of international models concerning the use of military force, see Tillema, H. K. & Van Wingen, J., Law and Power in Military Intervention: Major States After World War II, 26 Int’l Stud. Q. 220 (1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Goertz, Gary & Diehl, Paul F., Territorial Changes and International Conflict 70, 74–76 (1992)Google Scholar; Strang, David, Global Patterns of Decolonization 1500–1987, 35 Int’l Stud. Q. 429 (1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Strang, David, From Dependency to Sovereignty: An Event History Analysis of Decolonization 1870–1987, 55 Am. Soc. Rev. 846 (1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 See, e.g., Houweling, Henk W. & Siccama, Jan G., The Epidemiology of War, 1816–1980, 29 J. Conflict Resol. 641 (1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Faber, Jan, Houweling, Henk W., & Siccama, Jan G., Diffusion of War: Some Theoretical Considerations and Empirical Evidence, 21 J. Peace Res. 277 (1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 See Faber et al., supra note 30, at 287 (“the space time perspective on processes of war outbreaks stresses the need for a theory of action of state–actors”) (citing Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradictions in Social Analysis 49 (1979)).

32 Such studies would need to test normative theories against rational–actor accounts of the data. For example, warring states may be less capable of preventing other states from engaging in separate military conflicts. War in the same region or in the same time period may provide a predatory state with the opportunity to engage in acts of aggression.

33 For an elaboration of these types of interactions and other contextual considerations, see Goodman, Ryan & Jinks, Derek, How to Influence States: Socialization and International Human Rights Law, 54 Duke L.J. (forth coming 2004)Google Scholar.

34 Cf. Hermann & Kegley, supra note 17, at 516 (discussing potential for war under conditions in which “[p]olitical systems that are not democratic are viewed suspiciously and often are pejoratively classified as an outgroup with a set of derogatory attributes that differentiate them from the community of democratic states”).

35 The National Security Strategy of The United States of America 25 (2002), at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf> (“The attacks of September 11 were also an attack on NATO . . . . NATO’s core mission—collective defense of the transatlantic alliance of democracies—remains, but NATO must develop new structures and capabilities to carry out that mission under new circumstances.”).

36 Sagan, Scott D., Why Do States Build Nuclear Weapons ?: Three Models in Search of a Bomb, 21 Int’l Security 54, 83–84 (1996/97)Google Scholar; cf. Kinsella, David & Chima, Jugdep S., Symbols of Statehood: Military Industrialization and Public Discourse in India, 27 Rev. Int’l Stud. 353, 355–56 (2001)Google Scholar; Eyre, Dana P. & Suchman, Mark C., Status, Norms, and the Proliferation of Conventional Weapons: An Institutional Theory Approach, in The Culture of National Security: Norms and Identity in World Politics 79 (Katzenstein, Peter J. ed., 1996)Google Scholar.

37 Fehr, Ernst & Falk, Armin, Psychological Foundations of Incentives, 46 Eur. Econ. Rev. 687, 694 (2002)Google Scholar (surveying empirical studies of the differential effect of positive versus negative incentives on voluntary cooperation and norms of reciprocity).

38 Id. at 694–96.

39 Frey, Bruno S. & Jegen, Reto, Motivation Crowding Theory, 15 J. Econ. Surv. 589 (2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 See generally id. (surveying empirical studies of interactions between extrinsic incentives and intrinsic motivation); cf. Deci, Edward L., Koestner, Richard, & Ryan, Richard M., A Meta–analytic Review of Experiments Examining the Effects of Extrinsic Rewards on Intrinsic Motivation, 125 Psychol. Bull. 627 (1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

41 Frey & Jegen, supra note 39, at 594, 602–05.

42 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, supra note 35, at 15–16 (discussing quest for better information, allied support, and military efficiency to maximize the benefits of preventive self–defense doctrine).

43 Frey & Jegen, supra note 39, at 594.

44 Fehr & Falk, supra note 37, at 689–704.

45 Dep’t of Defense, Nuclear Posture Review Report 16 (Jan. 8, 2002). The foreword and excerpts from the report itself are available online at <http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/policy/dod/npr.htm>. Although the report itself is classified, it was leaked to the Los Angeles Times in March 2002.

46 President Bush, George W., State of the Union Address (Feb. 2, 2005), at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/02/>>Google Scholar ;see also Reiss, Mitchell B., Revisiting Waltz’s Man, the State and War: New Images for a New Century, Remarks at the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, Tufts University (Oct. 6, 2004), at <http://www.state.gov/s/p/rem/36915.htm>Google Scholar.