Violent Peace: Militarized Interstate Bargaining in Latin America on David R.

Violent Peace: Militarized Interstate Bargaining in Latin America on David R. Mares. Columbia University Pres (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ cup) 61 W 62nd way New York, New York 10023 February 2001 398 pages, $7000 (hardcover), $2300 (softcover)

During the mid-twentieth centenary the United States developed national strategies and policies to deal specifically with the cooled War adversaries of the time. Within the world's democratic community, the United States was best suited to combat that specific threat. The collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990 exhibited the eyes of many policy makers and military strategists to the fact that the threat had evolv and a recent course of action was wanted Particularly since the attacks of 11 September 2001 there is an incredible emphasis forward developing strategies to combat substate actors. bulks of national policy, military doctrine, and academic literature regarding this novel threat inundate the media. Nation-states, however, still form the significant part of the global community, and the complexity of interstate affairs still moves the potential tot war. Will the United States be unprepared to reckoner this threat if it maintains a myopic focus forward the substate actor?

In Violent Peace, David R Mares put forwards a prescriptive model to assess the potential for interstate conflicts and determine policy measures to rule them. Using a framework that appears largely set uped on Alexander L. George's prototypes of deterrence and coercive diplomacy, Mares provides a well-researched and compelling argument forward how interstate disputes may become militarized and in what manner the scale of the conflict can expand He uses a cost-benefit framework for his protoplast that, simply put, says force may be used when the prices of using force are les than or equal to the sumptuousnesss acceptable to the leader's constituency. The author utilizes the Latin American regional-security arena to support his hypothesis.

Mares hypothesizes that the costliness of using force is the any amount of the political-military strategy, the strategic balance between the players, and the characteristic of the force exerciseed The costs that members of a leader's constituency will accept are also reduc by dint of the lack of accountability they possess over that leader, based onward their governmental system. This example also states that policy makers consider employing force and nothing else to meet the interests of their constituency. Mares lists five political-military strategies for his model: detain the issue alive, affect bilateral negotiations, assert the status quo, attract the support of third parties, and impose a solution (p 17)

In chapter 2 Mares provides a historical framework for the exhibition of the Latin American regional-security environment. Although the account is somewhat arid this chapter is very important to understanding the foundations of Latin American security issues, international influences, and conflict history. Chapters 3 end 5 provide some of the in the greatest degree interesting and compelling arguments in the author's work. Here he furnishs both qualitative and quantitative analyses of hegemonic management, democratic peace, and theories in succession the distribution of power for explaining the vicinity or absence of interstate conflicts. Mares equal admits that the quantitative analysis is somewhat weak befitting to empirical irregularities in the militarized interstate dispute records. Nonetheless, his use of the data, combined with detailed qualitative analysis, creates a solid argument that these widely accepted conventions do not necessarily correlate with the pursuit of military measures in interstate conflict.

In the remaining pair chapters, Mares puts his archetype against two case studies from toward the south America: the Beagle Channel dispute between Argentina and Chile in 1978 (as well as a brief comparison of that dispute with the Argentine/British conflict across the Falkland Islands in 1982) and the intermittent border dispute between Peru and Ecuador between 1950 and 1995 These case studies effectively illustrate the compounded interaction of domestic factors with military capabilities to determine the even of military escalation in the resolution of interstate conflict. excluding for the distraction of an obviously misscaled graph (p 137) Mares instants his cases articulately and with of the highest order detail in a process-trace evaluation.

Mares judges that "the militarized bargaining gauge ultimately suggests that we may be best not upon with a combination of policies that affect power and values" (p 208) Following a single-track policy prescription based in succession widely accepted yet flawed theories of hegemony, democratic peace, and balance-of-power influences forward the development of militarized conflict may create more increased tensions than intended.

Although this protoplast is currently tested only against the Latin American regional-security environment, it may be applicable to other global areas of be of importance to The model allows for flexible interpretation of the different strategic conceptualizations of various leaders and their constituents' interests. Areas with athletic secular influences, such as East Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, still manifest the potential for escalating interstate conflict that could one time again overshadow the substate threats popularly captivating world attention.