Abstract
As we move further towards comparing regions on levels of peace attained, we should keep in mind that the movement from a zone of conflict to negative peace is not exclusively a matter of political intervention. Presumably, negative peace can be achieved by a variety of pathways—including regional and global hegemonic initiatives, improvements in state capacity, and the enhancement of deterrence programs. Assuming that negative peace is an improvement on the hazards of zones of conflict that is all well and good. But negative peace can also characterize regions that are fragmented by a set of largely dyadic relations that never quite merge into a fully regional interaction pattern. In this type of context, negative peace can be achieved as much by default as anything else. Central Asia appears to provide a good illustration of this phenomenon. Although its contemporary history as an independent set of interacting states is limited in duration, its record of interstate and intrastate conflict has waned over time without the waxing of regional peace. In the devising of scales of regional peace, we need to be cautious about assuming that regions can transit up and down the scales at will. Some (or all?) levels may prove to be collective cul de sacs with few exits for some regions.
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Notes
- 1.
There is some talk of a double balance hypothesis in this literature (Levy, 2013; You, 2013). Economic and political organizations need to be in alignment. An open economic organization is unlikely to survive if managed by a limited access political organization or vice versa. That seems defensible but leaves open the question of whether the “premature” emergence of one type of organization can lead to appropriate changes in the other type of organization. For instance, can democratization in a limited access economy lead to more open governing political organization? Does a more open economy lead to a more opened political system?
- 2.
The five-to-ten-thousand-year ambiguity refers to the uneven emergence of agrarian practices around the world. The agrarian revolution began some ten thousand years ago in the Middle East followed by its emergence in China several thousand years later, possibly with some help from the Middle East. Subsequent relatively pristine revolutions in practice took place in West Africa and South America.
- 3.
- 4.
Selectorate theory Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) emphasizes that members of the winning coalition wish to keep their benefits, and this can only be done by controlling the government. Acemoglu and Robinson stress elite preferences for increasing their own wealth. Either motivation, or their combination, seems more attractive as a primary motivation than regulating violence. However, maintaining stability and minimizing domestic violence should be appealing to individuals seeking to preserve their elite status and increase their wealth. In that respect, the different motivations are at least related. As we will note later, however, alternative assumptions about what drives these processes do not necessarily lead to fundamentally different types of society, as manifested in the limited-open access framework.
- 5.
That does not mean that all limited access societies will be characterized by a single patron-client pyramid. There could be two or more competing pyramids. Radnitz (2010: 5) talks about subversive clientelism in which wealthy actors and political aspirants not linked to the state have incentives to create support networks in local communities that can be mobilized if the dominant coalition cracks down on them. So, there can be national, regional, and local power pyramids, some of which are linked to the national regime while others are potentially antagonistic to higher level elite structures. See Epkenhans’ (2016) description of the multiple groups and strongmen in the outbreak of the Tajikistan civil war.
- 6.
The patronalistic term comes from Hale (2015).
- 7.
Some of the high gdp per capita countries have benefited from “inheriting” the British allergy to military rule that stemmed from the Cromwell era. The United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand come to mind. If one adds Britain, that is roughly a quarter of the states in the open access category.
- 8.
It could be that military subordination to civilian politicians is simply another one of the products of making the shift from limited access to open access societies. North, Wallis, and Weinstein depict it as an independent variable when it might be better viewed as another dependent variable responding to the shift in societal type.
- 9.
They say instead “We have not attempted statistical analyses because no straightforward measures of our concepts exist. We believe that our concepts can be operationalized, but the concepts of limited and open access in both economics and politics are subtle and multidimensional (North et al., 2009: 263). However, see Meisel and Aoudia (2008), and Franke and Quintyn (2014).
- 10.
Islands with small populations such as Bermuda have been removed from this list.
- 11.
Based World Bank data stated in US current dollars at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD.
- 12.
At the same time, it is not clear that anyone has empirically examined the causal relationship between economic development and open access status per se, even though there is a large literature on this topic.
- 13.
There is also the bellicist interpretation of the development of strong states which has been omitted from consideration here. Where does the question, raised indirectly by summarizing Tilly’s interpretation of parliamentarization, of whether or to what extent war made the state fit into these interpretations?
- 14.
Selectorate theory offers an alternative in which the size of the selectorate (actors who are in a position to change the identity of the ruling coalition) expands in democratic societies in comparison to autocratic societies. While this approach has some attractions because it evades the problem of why hierarchy emerges in the first place, it does not generate a world populated by two parallel and coexisting societal structures—merely states with different sized selectorates, conforming to different strategies based on the extent to which the polity is autocratic.
- 15.
See also Cox et al. (2019) for its emphasis on trading complexity as a critical factor in moving from limited access to open access societies.
- 16.
- 17.
- 18.
The Caucasus region could/would be larger if separatist tendencies had proceeded farther or more successfully (Chechniya and a number of other areas that are in a frozen limbo status or that have not yet escalated into successful separatism). As a consequence, it is the South Caucasus that remains independent.
- 19.
One awkwardness here is that the theory calls for rule of law for elites, not the entire society. But we unaware of any systematic data on rule of law for elites. Consequently, we employ societal rule of law measures here as a proxy for elite rule of law. Elite rule of law presumably precedes societal rule of law so our proxy is is a lagged indicator. It is hard to imagine, nonetheless, a country that is characterized by societal rule of law that does not also encompass elite rule of law.
- 20.
The gdp per capita data are taken from the World Bank Databank (WDI) at https://databank.worldbank.org/home.aspx. The Polity data are found at the Center for Systemic Peace, Polity5 version. https://www.systemicpeace.org/polityproject.html.
- 21.
The Worldwide Governance Indicators, 2021 Update, World Bank. www.govindicators.org.
- 22.
The presumption is that fragile or basic limited access societies are unlikely to make the jump directly to open access without passing through the mature category, but that, too, is a theoretical and empirical question that remains to be resolved.
- 23.
Exceptions are the renewed combat between Armenia and Azerbaijan and the escalated border clash between Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in September, 2022.
- 24.
The Uppsala data comes from the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Dataset version 21.1, https://ucdp.uu.se/downloads/index.html#armedconflict (Pettersson et al., 2021; Gleditsch et al., 2002) and the Correlates of War Intra-State War Data (v5.1), https://correlatesofwar.org/data-sets/COW-war/intras-state-wars-v5-1.zip/view (see Dixon & Sarkees, 2015 and Sarkees & Wayman, 2010).
- 25.
The number of active interstate boundary disputes and active separatist movements is taken from Central Intelligence Agency (2021).
- 26.
That the Caucasus is smaller than Central Asia in terms of the number of states will prove to be a significant clue. The Caucasus that currently exists is the Southern Caucasus. The Northern Caucasus (for example, Chechnya) might have been independent if that option had not been blocked by Russian coercion and two civil wars. The number of states in the Caucasus might also expand in the future if break-away territories in the Southern Caucasus, currently protected by Russia, become independent.
- 27.
That is not to say that states in Central Asia have no ethnic minorities. They certainly do but they tend to be, so far, less concentrated (as in Kazakhstan) with a large number of Russians in the north or smaller in number as in most of the other Central Asian states. It may also be that the other ethnic minorities have not yet experienced sufficient discrimination to rebel or, alternatively, that political leaders in states without considerable ethnic violence are better at managing inter-ethnic strife along the Tito pattern in Yugoslavia. It also helps to be located farther away from Russia. Still, there were public suggestions in Russia that Kazakhstan, which has not been supporting the currently ongoing Russian effort in the Ukraine, should be the next target of Russian military intervention.
- 28.
The Azerbaijani victory in the latest war with Armenia is the exception in that its victory relied on drones obtained from Turkey.
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Thompson, W.R., Zakhirova, L. (2023). All that Glitters is not Gold: Comparing Regional Peace in the Caucasus and Central Asia. In: Thompson, W.R., Volgy, T.J. (eds) Turmoil and Order in Regional International Politics. Evidence-Based Approaches to Peace and Conflict Studies, vol 10. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0557-7_11
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