Funciones de distribución triangulares para las ponderaciones de inversión

As Kastner (2005) had reviewed, there are at least three arguments commonly used to link economic interdependence with a reduced likelihood of military conflict in liberal commercial peace literature as causal mechanisms: the constraint arguments, the informational arguments, and the transformative arguments. The constraint arguments state that as interdependence increases, the cost of military conflict also increases due to the loss of valuable assets and trade flows (Papayoanou, 1996; Oneal & Russett, 2001b; Gelpi & Grieco, 2003; Smith, 2014). The informational arguments claim that

interdependence enables states to signal more efficiently their true level of resolve

through threatening to use costly economic sanctions, therefore reducing the likelihood of dangerous miscalculations about each other’s resolves (Fearon, 1995; Gartzke, 1999; Morrow, 1999, 2003; Gartzke, Li, & Boehmer, 2001; Powell, 2002; Gartzke & Li, 2003; Gartzke, 2003; Stein, 2003). The transformative arguments posit that interdependence can reduce the probability of conflict by reshaping the underlying states’ interests and

preferences, either through changing the states’ core international objectives or through changing the balance of domestic political coalitions (Mitrany, 1948, 1966; Haas, 1958, 1964; Deutsch et al., 1957; Deutsch, 1961; Adler & Barnett, 1998a; Solingen, 2001, 2003, 2007; Simmons, 2003). Although the pacifying effect of the liberal commercial peace is not always a positive one, since in a dyadic level of analysis peace may result from the fact that the target state is successfully coerced by the sender state so that there is no overt

conflict; however, by and large, as a final phenomenon, trade does reduce the probability of conflict.

According to these three causal mechanisms of the liberal commercial peace theory, the pacifying effect of trade should be universal and ubiquitous across the whole world since these three causal mechanisms, no matter one, two, or all of them, should be found in any pair of countries with sufficient economic ties. However, two empirical evidences have put the liberal commercial peace effect into doubt. First, although the liberal commercial peace effect has been empirically supported as very prominent in many studies (Oneal & Russett, 1999, 2001a; Maoz, 2009; Hegre et al., 2010), it is interesting that when it comes to the regional peace, few scholars attribute it to interdependence. For example, regional security research seldom confirms the contribution of the liberal commercial peace effect outside the Western European countries, especially the long peace in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East (Lake & Morgan, 1997; Acharya, 2001; Lemke, 2002; Ray, 2002; Buzan & Wæver, 2003; Miller, 2005; Goldsmith, 2007). Second, in statistical models, the liberal

commercial peace effect usually does not hold in regional subsamples. For instance, by dividing the world into five different regions – the West, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Goldsmith (2006) finds that at odds with the liberal commercial peace literature, interdependence is actually positive with the probability of the onset of dyadic militarized interstate dispute (MID) in all the five regions, even including the West. As a result, the pacifying effect of interdependence demonstrated in most of the literature may be very likely resulting from the inter-regional commercial peace rather than the intra-regional one. In other words, intra-regional trade leads to conflict rather

than reduces it, and inter-regional trade vice versa. Although it should be quite reasonable that countries tend to have more trade and conflict with neighboring ones than with those who are far away, this still arouses an inquiry of why the liberal commercial peace effect does not work, especially at the regional level. If trade only reduces the probability of conflict between pairs of countries between different regions but not between those in the same region, the substantive effect of the liberal commercial peace may be trivial and over-emphasized by the liberals since it cannot promote peace for countries that interact the most frequently.

Does the fact above result from some specific outlier states in each region that nullify the liberal commercial peace effect? Or does it result from the regional-specific characteristics that affect all the states in the region? In the monadic level of analysis, it is easier to understand why the liberal commercial peace effect does not work in certain countries because not all countries have the same characteristics. Since the goal of a scientific theory is to predict the central tendency, it is not surprising if we have some states as outliers against the prediction of the liberal commercial theory due to omitted variable bias such as other special preconditions. However, at the regional level of

analysis, if the outliers are at the regional level, which means that most of the states in the region are outliers, a revision or a reconsideration of the liberal commercial theory may be a necessity. This can be done by two different ways. First, it is possible that the liberal commercial peace theory is not a universally generalizable one because it is derived only from the experience of the modern European countries after 1816, especially after the end of World War II, so that it may not well account for the international relations in other regions. Therefore, we need new theories (adding new causal mechanisms) to explain the

relationship between trade and conflict. Another way is to accept the three main causal mechanisms of the liberal commercial peace theory, but reconsider the regional

preconditions that mediate the effectiveness of them, which, I argue, may be a more informative way since we have abundant literature of liberal commercial peace research and regional studies that help. In the next two sections, I will demonstrate why paying attention to the regional level of analysis is more helpful than looking at the monadic level of each outlier state, bringing the regional factors back in to enrich our

understanding of the liberal commercial peace theory as well as the regional peace across the world.