A Liberal Peace?: The Growth of Liberal Norms and the Decline of Interstate Violence

Abstract

How have understandings of fundamental norms of international society changed over time? How does this relate to the decline of interstate violence since 1945? Previous explanations have focused on regime type, domestic institutions, economic interdependence, relative power, and nuclear weapons, I argue that a crucial and underexplored part of the puzzle is the change in understanding of sovereignty over the same period. In this article, I propose a novel means of examining change in these norms between 1970 and 2014 by analyzing the content of UN Security Council resolutions. This analysis is then utilized in quantitative analysis of the level of violence dispute participants resorted to in all Militarized Interstate Disputes in the period. I find that as liberal understandings of fundamental norms have increased, that the average level of violence used has decreased. This points to a crucial missing component in the existing literature: that institutions can only constrain when political actors share the right norms.

The Development and Prospect of Neoliberalism International Relations Theory

“…Democratic norms refer to the default resolution of conflicts of interest by peaceful negotiation, fair competition, and reasonable compromise within a democratic country while resorting to violence is considered illegal. Democracies have extended such norms to the international community [12].…”

“…Democracies know each other will consciously follow "non-violent" norms to prevent conflicts, which is impossible among non-democratic countries. Institutional constraints refer to legal constraints, which means that launching a war not only requires the unanimous consent of all classes, interest groups, and bureaucracies in the country but also conforms to the law [12]. In this way, democracies have full confidence that the other side will not use violence, and both sides dare to solve problems through a non-violent approach.…”

A social prospect theory of intergroup relations explains the occurrence of incremental progressive social change

“…The Geneva Conventions established, for the first time, formal limitations on the use of extreme violence during wartime, resulting in numerous convictions for wartime atrocities. Additionally, interstate violence has declined in frequency and intensity since the end of World War II (Gill-Tiney, 2022). So, although inequality and injustice remain widespread around the world, considerable social progress has been made in attenuating these problems.…”

Change in armed conflict: An introduction

“…Scholars have elucidated such changes through data-driven trend analyses of conflict (e.g. Themnér and Wallensteen, 2014), or linked changes in the understanding of norms, such as sovereignty, with the decline of interstate violence (Gill-Tiney, 2022). Scholarship on trends from international to internal war (Berdal and Malone, 2000), on old versus new wars (Kaldor, 2006) and on shifts in the interaction of security privatization versus challenges to the state's monopoly on violence (Kapferer, 2005) added to these debates the changing roles of state and non-state actors in conflicts.…”