TY - JOUR
T1 - Peaceful dyads
T2 - A territorial perspective
AU - Owsiak, Andrew P.
AU - Vasquez, John A.
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Marie T. Henehan for suggestions. Andrew Owsiak thanks the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame for its support. John Vasquez thanks the European University Institute in Florence for a visiting fellowship, where he worked on this study while on sabbatical from the University of Illinois. Replication files for the empirical analysis appear online at: https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/internationalinteractions . For questions about replication, please contact the authors.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - Many dyads develop peaceful relationships, avoiding war for long, historical periods. Are such dyads common? How many exist, and why have they never fought? This study provides a territorial perspective on peaceful dyads, defined as those that never fight a war over a given historical period. It compares two explanations for why peaceful dyads exist: the territorial peace and the democratic peace. A series of hypotheses test the relative ability of these two theories to account for peaceful dyads. The tests employ three samples–all dyads, politically relevant dyads, and grievance dyads–from 1816–2001, with an emphasis on the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. Through our analyses, we produce three major findings. First, the absence of territorial conflict–but not democracy–predicts peaceful dyads. Second, the absence of territorial disagreements appears in the vast majority (i.e., 85–96%) of peaceful dyads. Finally, approximately, 93–98% of democratic dyads lack any territorial disagreements. This implies that democratic dyads are peaceful because they face different issues than non-democratic dyads–ones less likely to undermine the development of peaceful, dyadic relationships.
AB - Many dyads develop peaceful relationships, avoiding war for long, historical periods. Are such dyads common? How many exist, and why have they never fought? This study provides a territorial perspective on peaceful dyads, defined as those that never fight a war over a given historical period. It compares two explanations for why peaceful dyads exist: the territorial peace and the democratic peace. A series of hypotheses test the relative ability of these two theories to account for peaceful dyads. The tests employ three samples–all dyads, politically relevant dyads, and grievance dyads–from 1816–2001, with an emphasis on the Cold War and post-Cold War periods. Through our analyses, we produce three major findings. First, the absence of territorial conflict–but not democracy–predicts peaceful dyads. Second, the absence of territorial disagreements appears in the vast majority (i.e., 85–96%) of peaceful dyads. Finally, approximately, 93–98% of democratic dyads lack any territorial disagreements. This implies that democratic dyads are peaceful because they face different issues than non-democratic dyads–ones less likely to undermine the development of peaceful, dyadic relationships.
KW - conflict
KW - democratic peace
KW - interstate peace
KW - philosophy of science
KW - Territorial peace
KW - war
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U2 - 10.1080/03050629.2021.1962859
DO - 10.1080/03050629.2021.1962859
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85114220516
SN - 0305-0629
VL - 47
SP - 1040
EP - 1068
JO - International Interactions
JF - International Interactions
IS - 6
ER -