All International Politics is Local: The Diffusion of Conflict, Integration, and Democratization

Published by the University of Michigan Press, 2002
6 x 9. 280 pgs. 26 drawings, 23 tables, 6 maps.
Cloth. ISBN 978-0-472-11267-8

How does regional interdependence influence the prospects for conflict, integration, and democratization? Some researchers look at the international system at large and disregard the enormous regional variations. Others take the concept of sovereignty literally and treat each nation-state as fully independent. Kristian Skrede Gleditsch looks at disparate zones in the international system to see how conflict, integration, and democracy have clustered over time and space. He argues that the most interesting aspects of international politics are regional rather than fully global or exclusively national. Differences in the local context of interaction influence states' international behavior as well as their domestic attributes.

In All International Politics Is Local, Gleditsch clarifies that isolating the domestic processes within countries cannot account for the observed variation in distribution of political democracy over time and space, and that the likelihood of transitions is strongly related to changes in neighboring countries and the prior history of the regional context. Finally, he demonstrates how spatial and statistical techniques can be used to address regional interdependence among actors and its implications.

  Front Matter and Index (University of Michigan Press website)

  John Ikenberry, Foreign Affairs 82(1):158, 2003
  William Reed, Armed Forces and Society 29, 2003
  Erik Gartzke, International Studies Review 5:371-373, 2003
  Paul Huth, Perspectives on Politics 1(4): 830-831, 2003

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