Democracy, Conflict Management, and Militarized Interstate Disputes

该项目旨在提高我们对民主和第三方中间人在塑造国际冲突的轮廓和结果方面的相互作用的认识。从民主规范的发展理论中得出了四个可经经验检验的假设，即民主领导人在一定的规范约束下运作，以规范和解决国内外的政治冲突。这些假设认为，民主通过灌输给政治领导人的规范发挥作用，既会影响国家对第三方冲突管理者的默许，也会制约他们管理努力的有效性。这项研究的主要目的是对照军事化的国家间争端的历史记录，系统地评估这些假设的关系。由于二战前几乎没有完全民主的国家存在，这项研究的时间范围从1946年开始，一直延伸到1992年，也就是有记录的国家间争端的最后一年。军事化的国家间争端为这些假设提供了一个新颖而重要的试验台，这不仅是因为关于国际冲突的许多已知知识都源自对军事化争端的研究，而且因为它们构成了目前可用的最广泛使用和最彻底调查的国家间冲突事件汇编。对这些假设提出的问题的经验性回答，预计将对我们如何理解和处理国际冲突产生理论和实际影响。但是，如果没有第三方对冲突管理的系统确定和记录，这种经验性评价就无法进行，而这些信息目前在军事化争端的概念和行动范围内是不存在的。这种新数据的收集是这项研究的次要目标，但也会带来附带好处，即建立一个新的国际冲突管理数据资源，其潜在应用远远超出本研究的范围。因此，这一努力的新和独特之处在于，它将对冲突管理的明确考虑扩展到迄今未知的军事化国家间争端领域。

This project is directed at improving our understanding of the interplay of democracy and third party intermediaries in shaping the contours an outcomes of international conflict. Four empirically testable hypotheses are derived from an evolving theory of democratic norms positing that democratic leaders operate within certain normative constraints to regulate and resolve political conflict both at home and abroad. These hypotheses contend that democracy, working through norms instilled in political leaders, will both influence states' acquiescence to third party conflict managers and condition the effectiveness of their management efforts. The primary objective of the research is to systematically evaluate these hypothesized relationships against the historical record of militarized interstate disputes. Because there were so few fully democratic states in existence prior to World War II, the temporal domain of the study begins in 1946 and extends through 1992, the last year of recorded interstate disputes. Militarized interstate disputes provide a novel and important test bed for these hypotheses, not only because much of what is known about international conflict has been derived from studies of militarized disputes, but also because they constitute the most widely used and thoroughly investigated compilation of interstate conflict episodes currently available. Empirically based answers to the questions raised by these hypotheses are expected to have both theoretical and practical implications for how we understand and deal with international conflict. But this empirical evaluation cannot proceed without systematic identification and documentation of conflict management by third parties, information that does not now exist within the conceptual and operational context of militarized disputes. This collection of new data constitutes a secondary objective of the research, but also entails a side-benefit in the form of a new data resource on international conflict management with potential application well beyond the present study. Thus what is new and distinctive about this effort is that it extends explicit consideration of conflict management to the heretofore uncharted territory of militarized interstate disputes.