All International Politics Is Local: The Diffusion of Conflict, Integration, and Democratization

by Kristian Skrede Gleditsch

Overview

How does regional interdependence influence the prospects for conflict, integration, and democratization? Some researchers look at the international system at large and disregard the enormous regional variations. Others take the concept of sovereignty literally and treat each nation-state as fully independent. Kristian Skrede Gleditsch looks at disparate zones in the international system to see how conflict, integration, and democracy have clustered over time and space. He argues that the most interesting aspects of international politics are regional rather than fully global or exclusively national. Differences in the local context of interaction influence states' international behavior as well as their domestic attributes.

In All International Politics Is Local, Gleditsch clarifies that isolating the domestic processes within countries cannot account for the observed variation in distribution of political democracy over time and space, and that the likelihood of transitions is strongly related to changes in neighboring countries and the prior history of the regional context. Finally, he demonstrates how spatial and statistical techniques can be used to address regional interdependence among actors and its implications.

Kristian Skrede Gleditsch is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472112678
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	08/07/2002
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	280
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Kristian Skrede Gleditsch is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.

Editorial Reviews

Conflict is not distributed equally around the world. Rather, as this book explains, the globe is broken up into zones of peace and hostility. States tend to cluster regionally according to type — mature democracies, transforming democracies, and autocracies — and those types interact differently when it comes to conflict. In turn, Gleditsch argues, two factors shape regional variations. First is the extent of integration, which reshapes identities, relationships, and expectations, thereby taming conflict within a dense network of regional ties. The other is the presence of stable democratic institutions, which constrains the use of force; western Europe and the Atlantic community are the obvious pioneers in both trends. Gleditsch shows how the interactions between these factors push regions closer or further away from stable peace. One implication is that democracy is a critical component of regional peace — but international efforts at democratization in one country (say, Iraq) will not likely be successful unless the wider region is also moving in this direction. The book's one shortcoming is that its statistical bent ignores specific historical or contemporary regional cases; Europe is not even listed in the index.

Foreign Affairs