This article investigates the relationship between civil war onset and state capacity through a focus on the role of primary commodities. This is accomplished by moving the focus of the civil war literature away from an almost exclusive concern with the incentives of rebels to a consideration of both rebels and rulers as revenue seeking predators. This predatory theory approach expects that higher levels of state capacity should deter civil war onset, while civil war onset should reduce state capacity. Further, natural resource rents are expected to enhance state capacity, rather than increase the likelihood of civil war onset. In order to deal with the endogeneity posed by including fiscal measures of state capacity in single equation models of civil war onset, this study employs a simultaneous equations framework. This framework allows us to capture the effects of civil war onset on state capacity and vice versa, as well as the effects of primary commodities on both endogenous covariates. The main findings from the statistical analyses include: state capacity does not affect civil war onset, but civil war onset reduces state capacity; and primary products directly affect only state capacity -they do not directly affect civil war onset, as found in previous contributions to the literature.

This paper seeks to understand the relationship between state building, interstate and intrastate rivalry. Previous studies of state building have focused primarily on the European experience, with selective application to cases in the developing world. Prior studies of interstate rivalry have focused primarily on their effects on interstate relations. This paper seeks to expand the domain of both literatures. First, the paper investigates the applicability of the predatory theory of the state, derived from the European experience, in the context of the postcolonial developing world. Second, the paper expands interstate rivalry research to an examination of the effects of both interstate and intrastate rivals on domestic politics. In particular, the literature derived from the European experience considers decisions about fiscal policy as central to the process of state building and survival. Therefore, this paper examines the effects of internal and external rivals on extractive capacity in the context of state development in sub‐Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, and Asia from 1975 to 2000. A series of pooled, cross‐sectional time‐series analyses suggest that external and internal rivals increase the extractive capacity of the state in a manner similar to the experience of early modern Europe.

Scholars of Latin America have recently begun to apply the bellicist approach to state building to the region, the central claim of which is that wars are a great stimulus to centralizing state power and building institutional capacity. This article argues that current applications of these models of state building are too narrowly specified to be of much use in Latin America or elsewhere in the developing world. Replacing the focus on interstate war with the more general phenomenon of interstate rivalry, alongside the consideration of intrastate rivals, allows us to account for the impact of both external and internal forces on the development of the state. I demonstrate the utility of this approach through several cross-sectional time-series analyses that provide evidence that external and internal rivals affect the Latin American state in a manner consistent with the general nature of bellicist theory.

This paper explores the state-building process in the developing world through an application of the Europeaninspired predatory theory of the state. Predatory theory relies heavily on war as a catalyst for state-building activities, but since it is such a rare event in the developing world, the paper turns to the literature on interstate rivalry for a theoretical and empirical substitute. The paper investigates whether this modification of predatory theory is portable to a spatial-temporal domain outside of early modern Europe by applying it in the context of the postcolonial developing states of sub-Saharan Africa. This is accomplished by examining the effects of both internal and external rivals on state extractive capacity in the region from 1975 to 2000. A series of pooled, cross-sectional time-series analyses suggest that both interstate and intrastate rivals affect state extractive capacity much as predatory theory would expect. However, predation to enhance state revenue in Africa has not set in motion the kinds of processes that ultimately led to the development of strong, cohesive, and responsive states as in the European experience.

This article assesses the possibilities for the development of foreign-policy role theory using the concepts of traditions and dilemmas from the interpretive approach to foreign policy, as well as narratives as an interpretive method for analysis. While role theory is rich in conceptualization, it still suffers from overt structuralism, inattention to domestic processes of divergence/convergence affecting national roles, and from methodological underdevelopment. This article goes beyond studies of national role conceptions that present foreign-policy behavior as determined by the national role, thus making it possible to understand the interplay of competing voices in determining a national role, the processes of role change, and the resulting reorientation of foreign policy. This article illustrates the possibilities and limitations of merging role theory and the interpretive approach through the study of Chile's and Mexico's attempts to join the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), their accession to APEC, and their performance once accepted into APEC.