The conditions for war and peace in interstate crises: An Introduction to this special issue

Abstract

The articles in this special issue were originally presented at a conference held at the University of Buffalo, SUNY. As the purpose of the conference was to honor its distinguished professor, Frank C. Zagare, it included a number of his past and present associates, ranging from his early mentor, research collaborators and former students to career-long colleagues. While the participants reflected Zagare’s career path, the thematic and methodological diversity in their papers showed the common arc that brought them together with their honoree throughout his career—an eversearching work toward solving the puzzles of war and peace. This goal is indeed shared with our larger community gathered around the Peace Science Society (International) and its journal Conflict Management and Peace Science. Not surprisingly then, the conference participants included no fewer than five of the Society’s former presidents. Perhaps the best starting point to this issue is Zagare’s (1990) distinction between “procedural” and “instrumental” rationality, which effectively removed the fault lines between domestic decision-theoretic frameworks and strategic rational choice models. The path was set toward dispelling the long-standing chasm between domestic and strategic approaches, as demonstrated in several contributions to this issue. The decision-making framework was integrated into Zagare’s own work, both in formal-theoretic (e.g., Kugler and Zagare 1990) and detailed historical analyses (Zagare 2011). In their logical reexamination of deterrence, for example, Kugler and Zagare (1990) showed the critical role of a leader’s risk orientation under an already precarious condition of power transition. Risk avoidance and risk acceptance are also featured as critical factors in the formal stylization by Lisa J. Carlson and Raymond Dacey in this issue. Depending on a leader’s risk attitude and the particulars of the decision problem in crisis situations, especially whether a threat can potentially incur greater, moderate or lower costs, their model specifies the conditions under which inexperienced decision-makers are more or less likely than experienced ones to defy the threat. Given the contradictory empirical findings about the risk behavior of leaders based on their foreign policy (in) experience, their study demonstrates great potential in the use of formal rigor to resolve empirical