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This paper outlines a program of needed research on principled nonviolence as a conflict and conflict resolution strategy in international relations. A multi‐pronged program of research is proposed, including, conceptual analyses and model generation, hypothesis and variable development: psychological analyses, laboratory simulation, and analyses of current ongoing, international conflict situations.

The research reported here extends investigation of the democracy-war hypothesis by focusing on the norms of dispute resolution integral to the democratic process. If we extend these norms to the international arena, then it becomes reasonable to expect democratic states to adopt compromise solutions to international problems. One implication of this logic is that democracies are likely to be more amenable than others to efforts of third parties to resolve or ameliorate interstate disputes. This hypothesis is examined in the present study. A sample of strictly interstate disputes acquired from the Alker-Sherman disaggregated conflict set provide the basis for this inquiry. Democracy is assessed for each disputant party with the composite index from the Polity II data collection. In order to control for extraneous effects on the probability of management, the author develops a baseline model consisting of prior management activity, the costs of conflict, and the power of the disputants. Because the dependent variable in this analysis is a binary indicator, the author employs probit regression to estimate the effects of democracy while partialling out the controls. The empirical results show that democracy does carry the systematic positive influence on the probability of conflict management expected of it.

This article analyzes the two-stage problem a country faces in first choosing the optimal amount of arms to acquire and then deciding whether it can improve upon the allocation that emerges after the first stage by engaging in a military conflict. A model is introduced based on the concept of economic externality to generate conflict situations in the first stage. Then comparative static results are derived by varying the parameters of this model, for example, the rate of technological progress in the military sector and the rate of economic growth, and examining whether the conflict situation improves or worsens as the social welfare of the nations change accordingly. Uncertainty is then introduced and the results are analyzed. Finally, the last part explores the conditions under which the conflict situations presented in the first stage actually lead to the outbreak of war.

This study replicates and extends previous inquiries on the relations between regime type and conflict involvement of states. It examines the robustness of previous findings with respect to various regime attributes, various conflict involvement measures, and units of analysis. Using two comprehensive datasets on polity characteristics and militarized interstate disputes, the empirical analyses reveal: (1) There are no relations between regime type and conflict involvement measures when the unit of analysis is the individual polity (i.e., a state characterized by a certain regime type over a given time span); this finding is robust in that it holds over most regime characteristics and conflict involvement measures. (2) There is a significant relationship between the regime characteristics of a dyad and the probability of conflict involvement of that dyad: Democracies rarely clash with one another, and never fight one another in war. (3) Both the proportion of democratic dyads and the proportion of autocratic dyads in the international system significantly affect the number of disputes begun and underway. But the proportion of democratic dyads in the system has a negative effect on the number of wars begun and on the proportion of disputes that escalate to war.

Ironically, as telecommunications technology--the embodiment of modernity--advances, bringing people in different nations into more direct contact during conflict situations, traditional cultural factors become increasingly important as differing ways of thinking and acting collide. The mass media can be seen as a factor in the creation of international conflict; they also, claim many scholars, are the key to control and resolution of those problems. Whichever side of the coin one chooses to look at--mass communication as cause or cure of conflict--there is no doubt that the news media are no longer peripheral players on the global scene; they are important participants whose organizational patterns of behavior, values, and motivations must be taken into account in understanding national and international conflict. In this volume, a distinguished group of authors explores the variety of ways the news media--newspapers, radio, and television--are involved in conflict situations. Conflicts between the United States and Iran, India and Pakistan, and the United States and China are examined, and national-level studies in Sri Lanka, Iran, Hong Kong, and the United States provide varied contexts in which the authors look at the complex interrelationships among government, news media, and the public in conflict situations.

Finding an alternative to supplement military ways of resolving international conflicts has been taken up by many people skilled in various areas such as political science, economics, social studies, modelling and simulation, artificial intelligence and expert systems, military strategy and weaponry as well as private business and industry. The Workshop will therefore be of use as it looks at various control methods which would create a conciliatory social and political environment or climate for seeking and obtaining non-military solutions to international conflicts and to solutions to nation

Does the United States have the right to defend itself by striking first, or must it wait until an attack is in progress? Is the Bush Doctrine of aggressive preventive action a justified and legal recourse against threats posed by terrorists and rogue states? Tackling one of the most controversial policy issues of the post-September 11 world, Michael Doyle argues that neither the Bush Doctrine nor customary international law is capable of adequately responding to the pressing security threats of our times. In Striking First, Doyle shows how the Bush Doctrine has consistently disregarded a vita.

Many international conflicts are recurrent, and many of these are characterized by periods of violence, including wars, that are hard to describe as planned products of rational decision-making. Analysis of these conflicts according to rational-choice international-relations theory or constructivist approaches has been less revealing than might have been hoped. We consider the possibility that emotive causes could better explain, or at least improve the explanation of, observed patterns. We offer three emotive models of recurrent conflict and we outline a method by which the reliability of emotive explanations derived from these models could be tested prospectively.