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Explores E.N. Chernykh's Great Migration (C-wave) model for explaining long-term changes in world-system behavior across seven periods of crisis/transformation that occurred between 3500 B.C. & 1300 A.D. to argue that he was wrong to claim there was only one pan-Eurasian crisis in the first millennium B.C. Two such crises are described. It is maintained that it is possible to connect actors widely separated in Eurasian space. However, evidence of indirect linkages between Mediterranean & Chinese security problems does not imply that all actors were involved in exactly the same processes at the same time. Attention is given to both the element of continuity that is found when first millennium crises are compared to last second millennium crises & the impact of the two crises of the first millennium B.C. on the later reorientation of trade patterns in the Near East. Although Chernykh's model is useful for analyzing the onset of Eurasian interdependence, his interpretation & crisis dating need to be revised. Tables, Figures, References. J. Lindroth

Explores E.N. Chernykh's Great Migration (C-wave) model for explaining long-term changes in world-system behavior across seven periods of crisis/transformation that occurred between 3500 B.C. & 1300 A.D. to argue that he was wrong to claim there was only one pan-Eurasian crisis in the first millennium B.C. Two such crises are described. It is maintained that it is possible to connect actors widely separated in Eurasian space. However, evidence of indirect linkages between Mediterranean & Chinese security problems does not imply that all actors were involved in exactly the same processes at the same time. Attention is given to both the element of continuity that is found when first millennium crises are compared to last second millennium crises & the impact of the two crises of the first millennium B.C. on the later reorientation of trade patterns in the Near East. Although Chernykh's model is useful for analyzing the onset of Eurasian interdependence, his interpretation & crisis dating need to be revised. Tables, Figures, References. J. Lindroth

Following up on an earlier paper demonstrating statistically significant relationships between measures of recurring political-economic crises (hinterland incursions, trade collapses, economic contractions, and regime transitions) and a measure of climate deterioration (the interaction of falling Tigris-Euphrates river levels and years of warming/ drying), the inter-relationships among these variables are examined more closely for the 3400–1000 bce period. Theoretically focused on a test of Tainter's diminishing marginal return theory of societal collapse, additional indicators are introduced encompassing population (urban population size, urban popula-tion growth rate) as a proxy for diminishing marginal returns, two measures of centralization/ fragmentation (including imperial size), and the indicators used for the climate interaction term in the earlier paper. The multivariate logit outcome for interactions among and between the 11 variables reinforces the earlier findings linking climate deterioration to political-economic crises, extends the climate deterioration linkage to fragmentation and population decline, and finds relatively strong support for the Tainter derived expectation that diminishing marginal returns and fragmentation are closely linked but that both are less closely linked to recurring political-economic crises than might otherwise have been anticipated.

Ever since the revival of Kant's Perpetual Peace thesis, the linkages between democracy and peace has been a central topic in international relations research, with sustained debate over whether it exists and if it does, why it does. In this stimulating volume, two leading IR scholars place the democratic peace debate within a broader context, including the extent of threats in international relations, degree of satisfaction with the status quo, the diffusion of democracy, and the rise of the trading state. Step by step, Thompson and Rasler examine the democratic peace through a series of puzzles concerning arguments at the dyadic, systemic, and individual state levels. Synthesizing a broad range of knowledge and linking islands of theory, Puzzles of the Democratic Peace provides a distinctive look at the state of the field and paths forward.

Processes of war, trade, and systemic leadership are often examined in isolation from one another. Sometimes, two of the three are studied together. Does war interrupt trade? Does systemic leadership reduce the level of warfare? Does systemic leadership lead to freer trade? While these are familiar questions, our contention is that all three processes are interrelated at the systemic level. War and trade are dependent upon systemic leadership. Trade expands in the presence of systemic leadership, and war expands as systemic leadership declines. Yet the expansion of war is also critical to the emergence of systemic leadership. At the same time, these relationships have not remained constant over time but have evolved. The scope of systemic leadership and the intensity of war have increased while the frequency of war among the most powerful actors has contracted. Trade, on the other hand, has expanded dramatically. A vector autoregression analysis of the three processes provides substantial empirical support for the argument that leadership leads to more trade and less war, while also promoting increasingly more pacific relations among elite states in the world system.

One of the democratic peace puzzles is the question of whether and to what extent the democracy → peace relationship underestimates the possibility that peace precedes democracy: the reversed causal arrow hypothesis. From a war making–state making perspective, democratization needs to be viewed as a partial function of external threat and domestic power concentration. All three variables are found to be interrelated as predicted and related in turn to the external conflict behavior of major powers from 1816 to 1992. These monadic findings, however, do not appear to negate the dyadic relationship between democratization and selectively reduced conflict behavior. In sum, there is substantial support for the reversed causal arrow hypothesis, but it does not render the regime type → conflict behavior relationships spurious. Rather, it enriches the understanding of the context in which democratization has emerged to have some effect on international politics.

Conventionally, Southern debt crises are thought to be isolated policy problems that take place from time to time. This article extends the leadership-long cycle approach to international political economy to explain the recurrence of Southern debt crises. The focus is on global debt crises that affect many Southern countries at the same time, as opposed to localized crises that affect a single country or few countries. The unit of analysis is subsystemic, where countries are classified as belonging to the South (less developed) or the North (developed). Within this context, Southern debt problems are part of a structural process associated with long waves of global economic growth and technological innovation. Radical innovation in the North discontinuously stimulates growth in the North. Northern prosperity increases the demand for Southern exports. To meet the increased demand, the South borrows from the North but is then unable to meet interest payments when Northern economic growth and Northern demand for Southern commodities decay. Three other forces of significance are the levels of systemic leadership, Northern conflict, and the inherent inertia of Southern debt problems. Testing this argument with annual data from 1870 to 1989 on the proportion of Southern countries in the international system that experience debt crises, it is found that Southern debt crises, systematically and significantly, are less likely in the presence of strong systemic political-economic leadership and world economic growth, and are more likely in the presence of Northern conflict and past Southern debt crises.

By developing systematic, albeit crude, information on the timing of economic fluctuations in Afro-Eurasia between 4000 and 1000 B.C.E., we seek further evidence about the scope and degree of interdependence in the world system's economic interactions. The empirical outcome suggests a variety of weak to moderate connections and waves of economic fluctuation that were especially and increasingly discernible in troughs of the contraction periods. By no means does this analysis resolve any or all questions about the antiquity or integration of the contemporary world system, but it supports the idea that world history is very much rooted in the continuity of ancient processes.