EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Are Military Regimes Really Belligerent?

Nam Kyu Kim

Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2018, vol. 62, issue 6, 1151-1178

Abstract: Does military rule make a state more belligerent internationally? Several studies have recently established that military autocracies are more likely than civilian autocracies to deploy and use military force in pursuit of foreign policy objectives. I argue that military regimes are more likely to resort to military force because they are located in more hostile security environments, and not because they are inherently aggressive. First, I show that rule by military institution is more likely to emerge and exist in states facing external territorial threats. Second, by examining the relationship between military autocracies and conflict initiation, I find that once I control for states’ territorial threats, the statistical association between military regimes and conflict initiation disappears. Additionally, more evidence suggests that civilian dictatorships are more conflict-prone than their military counterparts when I account for unobserved dyad heterogeneity. The results are consistent across different measures of international conflict and authoritarian regimes.

Keywords: interstate conflict; militarized interstate disputes; domestic politics; political leadership (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022002716684626 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jocore:v:62:y:2018:i:6:p:1151-1178

DOI: 10.1177/0022002716684626

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Conflict Resolution from Peace Science Society (International)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:sae:jocore:v:62:y:2018:i:6:p:1151-1178