Piecing Together the Peaces: The Agricultural-Industrial Transition and the Rise of Zones of Peace [Hardcover]

InPiecing Together the Peaces, Alexander K. Antony and William R. Thompson provide a novel explanation for how peace took hold in the international system and why state behavior drastically changed. According to the standard line of reasoning, states need only democratize, liberalize their trade, modernize their economic culture, or choose to forego territorial pursuits to reach peace with another state. A bold challenge to the conventional wisdom that dominates interstate peace research, Antony and Thompson make the case that industrialization provides the starting point from which we can begin to unpack the transformation in conflict propensities among certain states.Many debates in interstate conflict and peace research address an important yet complex question: how, and to what degree, are the behavior of states and their relationships among one another fundamentally changing? The period after 1945 has seen a significant decline in the degree and intensity of warfare among states. While civil wars remain common, numerous scholars argue that a long peace has taken hold in which militarized interstate violence has become less common. Some argue that war has become obsolete as cultural attitudes toward war have changed, while others emphasize cognitive shifts that have reduced overall levels of human violence. Others favor material factors that have altered the historical net benefit of warfare among states.InPiecing Together the Peaces, Alexander K. Antony and William R. Thompson provide a novel explanation for how peace took hold in the international system and why state behavior drastically changed. According to the standard line of reasoning, states need only democratize, liberalize their trade, modernize their economic culture, or choose to forego territorial pursuits to reach peace with another state. As Antony and Thompson argue, most, if not all, of the processes put forward as causes of modern peace are highly intertwined with the macrol³;