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"Arms Races: An Assessment of Conceptual and Theoretical Challenges" published on by Oxford University Press.

Abstract
International agreements save the costs of war, but complying with their terms can be costly. We analyse a model of interstate crisis bargaining in which one state may be unwilling or unable to make a costly investment that guarantees its subjects' compliance. In equilibrium, peace is assured when the domestic government is militarily strong enough to demand terms that its subjects tolerate. When the domestic government is militarily weaker, peace requires that the foreign state compensate it for either the costs of enforcement or its subjects' violations, and these prospective costs of peace may also lead the foreign state to solve the enforcement problem with war because peace is relatively costly. We also show that war due to enforcement problems is more common in militarily weak states and that equilibria at which the foreign state subsidizes enforcement are more common when the costs of violation fall disproportionately on the domestic state. The American invasion of Mexico in 1916 and the Red Army's peaceful withdrawal from East Germany in 1989 demonstrate the model's usefulness.

A president's most precious commodity is time, and nowhere is this scarcity more apparent than with respect to international travel. Personal presidential involvement in diplomatic relations has proven to yield significant benefits, and yet traveling to engage in face-to-face diplomacy is often prohibitively expensive for American executives in time and attention. Given such restrictions, when and where do presidents choose to travel? We use a data set of more than 750 presidential trips spanning more than one hundred countries and a century of history to investigate the domestic and international factors influencing when, where, and for what reason presidents are likely to travel abroad. We provide a detailed examination of presidential travel over time and find that domestic political contexts influence presidential propensities to travel consistent with expectations based on allocating time and attention as limited resources.

Does trade reduce conflict even when states compete over high-salience issues (e.g., territory)? Despite recent challenges to liberal peace theory, few studies have examined whether the trade-reduces-conflict argument is robust to particularly conflict prone issues like territory. We evaluate whether trade reduces not only violent conflict over territory, but also the incentives to use specific power politics behaviors (e.g., arms races) associated both with territorial competition and a higher probability of war. As key causal mechanisms, we rely on opportunity costs and the ability to credibly signal information that increased trade generates, reducing states' incentives to engage in violent conflict and arms races. Empirical analyses, using multiple sample populations and different measures of key indicators and outcomes, are consistent with our expectations. The results suggest that trade may reduce conflict both directly, by decreasing the likelihood of militarized disputes, and indirectly, by reducing the likelihood of power politics strategies like arms races, thought to increase the likelihood of war.

As a rule, countries consider clearly defined international borders to be paramount for their survival and prosperity. Most borders gain definition peacefully and, once they do, these definitions stick (i.e., the border remains settled). The failure to define borders, however, produces protracted, geopolitical, militarized competitions (or rivalries) between neighboring countries. Rider and Owsiak model this failure as a particular type of bargaining problem - namely, bargaining over territory that affects the distribution of power between neighbouring states significantly - that undermines efforts to resolve border disagreements peacefully. Countries must then overcome this bargaining problem or risk falling into a protracted rivalry, which then needs to be addressed with more resources. The authors develop a theory of how borders settle. They then explore the consequences of the failure to settle, theoretically connecting it to the onset of rivalries. This leads to the process that helps rivals overcome the bargaining problem, resolve their border disagreement, and terminate their rivalry.

As a rule, countries consider clearly defined international borders to be paramount for their survival and prosperity. Most borders gain definition peacefully and, once they do, these definitions stick (i.e., the border remains settled). The failure to define borders, however, produces protracted, geopolitical, militarized competitions (or rivalries) between neighboring countries. Rider and Owsiak model this failure as a particular type of bargaining problem - namely, bargaining over territory that affects the distribution of power between neighbouring states significantly - that undermines efforts to resolve border disagreements peacefully. Countries must then overcome this bargaining problem or risk falling into a protracted rivalry, which then needs to be addressed with more resources. The authors develop a theory of how borders settle. They then explore the consequences of the failure to settle, theoretically connecting it to the onset of rivalries. This leads to the process that helps rivals overcome the bargaining problem, resolve their border disagreement, and terminate their rivalry.

Many studies have examined the formation of interstate rivalries, but few provide a theoretical mechanism capable of explaining why some neighboring states experience protracted conflict while others do not. To address this question, we theoretically link bargaining theories of conflict with issue-based explanations of conflict to offer a novel application of the commitment problem mechanism. We argue that when neighboring states disagree over border territory endowed with a potential source of power (i.e. strategic or economic value), it is difficult for either side to commit credibly in the future to comply with agreements made today. Consequently, neighboring states may be reluctant to make concessions that could enhance their adversary's future bargaining power. This reluctance, in turn, increases the likelihood of bargaining failure, thereby also increasing the likelihood that the dispute festers and the relationship evolves into a rivalry. Using recently reported data on border settlement and three measures of rivalry, we find systematic evidence for our theoretical expectations. Unsettled borders increase the likelihood of rivalry onset. This relationship, however, seems driven by border territory containing strategic and economic endowments – the exact type of territory that theoretically drives commitment problems. We therefore conclude that not all territory matters for the onset of contiguous rivalries.