Violent
Peace: Militarized Interstate Bargaining in Latin America
by David R. Mares. Columbia University Press
(http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ cup), 61 W. 62nd Street, New York, New York
10023, February 2001, 398 pages, $70.00 (hardcover), $23.00 (softcover).
During
the mid-twentieth century, the United States developed national strategies and
policies to deal specifically with the Cold 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 1990s opened the eyes of many policy makers and military
strategists to the fact that the threat had evolved and a new course of action
was needed. Particularly since the attacks of 11 September 2001, there is an
incredible emphasis on developing strategies to combat substate actors. Volumes
of national policy, military doctrine, and academic
literature regarding this new threat inundate the media. Nation-states,
however, still form the significant part of the global community, and the
complexity of interstate affairs still offers the potential for war. Will the
United States be unprepared to counter this threat if it maintains a myo-pic
focus on the substate actor?
In Violent
Peace, David R. Mares offers a prescriptive model to assess the potential
for interstate conflicts and determine policy measures to control them. Using a
framework that appears largely founded on Alexander L. George’s models of
deterrence and coercive diplomacy, Mares provides a well-researched and
compelling argument on how interstate disputes may become militarized and how
the scale of the conflict can evolve. He uses a cost-benefit framework for his
model that, simply put, says force may be used when the costs of using force are
less than or equal to the costs acceptable to the leader’s constituency. The
author utilizes the Latin American regional-security arena to support his
hypothesis.
Mares
hypothesizes that the cost of using force is the sum of the political-military
strategy, the strategic balance between the players, and the characteristic of
the force employed. The costs that members of a leader’s constituency will
accept are also reduced by the lack of accountability they hold over that
leader, based on their governmental system. This model also states that policy
makers consider employing force only to meet the interests of their
constituency. Mares lists five political-military strategies for his model: keep
the issue alive, affect bilateral negotiations, defend 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 development of the
Latin American regional-security environment. Although the account is somewhat
dry, this chapter is very important to understanding the foundations of Latin
American security issues, international influences, and conflict history.
Chapters 3 through 5 provide some of the most interesting and compelling
arguments in the author’s work. Here he offers both qualitative and
quantitative analyses of hegemonic management, democratic peace, and theories on
the distribution of power for explaining the presence or absence of interstate
conflicts. Mares even admits that the quantitative analysis is somewhat weak due
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 employment of
military measures in interstate conflict.
In
the remaining two chapters, Mares puts his model
against two case studies from 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 over the Falkland Islands in 1982)
and the recurrent border dispute between Peru and Ecuador between 1950 and 1995.
These case studies effectively illustrate the complex interaction of domestic
factors with military capabilities to
determine the level of military escalation in the resolution of
interstate conflict. Except for the distraction of an obviously misscaled graph
(p. 137), Mares presents his cases articulately and with excellent detail in a
process-trace evaluation.
Mares
concludes that “the militarized bargaining model
ultimately suggests that we may be best off with
a combination of policies that affect power and values” (p. 208). Following a
single-track policy prescription
based on widely accepted yet flawed theories of hegemony, democratic
peace, and balance-of-power influences on the development of militarized
conflict may create more increased tensions than intended.
Although
this model is currently tested only against the Latin American regional-security
environment, it may be applicable to other global areas of concern. The model
allows for flexible interpretation of the different strategic conceptualizations
of various leaders and their constituents’ interests.
Areas with strong secular influences, such as East Asia, the Middle East,
and Africa, still manifest the potential for escalating interstate conflict that
could once again overshadow the substate threats currently captivating world
attention.
Strategic
decision makers, operational military planners, and academic professionals would
all benefit from reading Violent Peace. It is probably the most current
and applicable work dealing with conflict between nation-states since the events
of 9/11. At a minimum, Mares’s model will help maintain awareness of the
potential for interstate conflict and the development of a framework on how it
is considered in military strategy.
Michael
McNerney
Monterey, California
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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