Despite the significance of Great Power summitry to the maintenance and evolution of world politics and order, little attention has been allocated to this central phenomenon. One earlier exception (Galtung, 1964) did find that the volume or restrictedness of summitry (1941–1961) was associated...

The Gartner-Siverson war initiation model's focus on selection bias and initiators selecting vulnerable targets is attractive, but it demands further specification. A predictive model of war initiations might not retain statistical significance after 1945. The authors examine 16 possibly related...

Focusing on an initial and potentially expandable four-variable model combining leading sector innovation, leading sector concentration, naval capability concentration, and military preparation for warfare, a vector autoregression analysis of U.S. data for the 1801-1992 period reveals a...

The distribution of wealth in the world is manifested by the polarization of a rich North and a poor South. Is the North-South conflict increasing or decreasing, and does it depend on such variables as major power conflict, intra-Northern conflict, and world prosperity, as some schools of...

Alcock's (1972) two-phase theory of war and an earlier test of the theory are critically reviewed. Two pendulum hypotheses linking the onset of war (defined both broadly and narrowly), the formation of alliances, and changes in military expenditures are derived, operationalized, and tested....

There is little consensus and some degree of confusion over the meanings of the polarity and polarization concepts. An argument is advanced for viewing these phenomena as distinctly separate with polarity referring to the distribution of power among states and polarization referring to the...

This paper attempts to examine the extent to which military coups in one country influence in some fashion the occurrence of coups in other countries. The examination is conducted primarily via the application of three stochastic models (the Poisson, the "contagious Poisson," and the Gaussian...

Addressing Kondratieff's argument (1979) that long waves of economic activity are responsible for major wars, this study develops and tests three hypotheses relating war to long price waves. Focusing on the experiences of Great Britain and the United States between 1750 and 1977, we find that...

The basic assumptions associated with two approaches to analyzing the relationship between the distribution of capabilities and war, namely Waltz's analysis of systemic stability and Modelski's long cycle of global leadership, are examined and contrasted. The systemic stability model concludes...

Based on a model linking ascent prerequisites, relative decline, long-wave dynamics, and systemic war, the relationships among the pace of technological innovation, relative economic position, and naval capability are examined for Britain (1780-1913) and the United States (1870-1980). In both...