ECONOMY

832 international conflict
of conflict into investigations of all other aspects of politics. Where once national
interest was at the forefront of research on international affairs, increasingly the
study of the political ambitions of and institutional constraints faced by leaders is
supplanting concern about the national interest. Indeed, insights from spatial models
and other approaches to domestic politics challenge the fundamental meaning of “the
national interest.” When it is possible to assemble many majority coalitions around
competing interests within the same population of national decision-makers it is
difficult to say that the interests backed by one coalition are closer to the national
interest than the policies backed by another coalition (McKelvey 1976, 1979;Schofield
1978).
In this chapter I touch upon some debates regarding international affairs and the
ways we go about studying conflict and peace. International relations scholarship can
loosely be divided into those who focus on such structural aspects of the international
system as the global distribution of power, or the alignment of nations into two
blocs—the bipolar world of the cold war—or many blocs and those who attend to
the ways in which domestic political dynamics shape international relations. For
much of the post–Second World War years, structural perspectives including neorealism
(Waltz 1979; Glaser 1992; Schweller1994, 1997), liberalism (Keohane and
Nye 1977; Keohane1984), and power transition theory (Organski 1958; Organski and
Kugler 1980; Tammen et al. 2000; Lemke2002) have contended for domination as
explanations of variance in cooperative and conflict-prone behavior. By structural
perspectives I mean theories, such as those just listed, for which the central concern
is how aggregate characteristics of the international system such as the distribution of
power or distribution of wealth among states (as rational unitary actors) determines
interactions leading to international conflict or cooperation.
Neorealism treats international affairs as anarchic; that is, a self-help system lacking
a dominant power that can enforce agreements. It hypothesizes that political stability
in the form of the survival of states is ensured by national efforts to maximize
security through alignments. Its focus is on explaining conflict and constancy in
relations among states under the supposition that war is the natural state of affairs.
Liberalism countered by assuming that international relations are hierarchic rather
than anarchic and that a hegemonic power, such as the United States, stands atop the
international system. Its focus is on the prevalence of cooperation rather than conflict
and so naturally draws researchers into investigations of such international political
economy arenas as trade policy, the use of economic sanctions, and international
banking policy. The power transition shares with liberalism a focus on hierarchical
power relations but centers its attention on how domestic economic growth might
influence the risk of system-transforming wars; that is, wars that fundamentally alter
who is on top and, therefore, what policies or norms of action are imposed on the
community of nations.
During the past decade there has been a shift away from structural perspectives
toward ones that look at how domestic political institutions constrain and create
incentives that shape cooperation and conflict (Putnam 1988; Bueno de Mesquita
and Lalman 1992; Fearon1994; DownsandRocke1995; Schultz1998, 2001a; Bueno