ReSumenEste artículo analiza la política exterior colombiana desde una perspectiva liberal, durante el primer año de la administración Santos. El mismo explora la relación entre el comercio internacional del país y sus maniobras diplomáticas, utilizando datos estadísticos e informes de tipo oficial y académico sobre las acciones realizadas en las relaciones exteriores contemporáneas. Los autores sustentan el liberalismo comercial como una perspectiva útil para analizar la actual política exterior de Colombia, particularmente haciendo uso conceptual de la paz capitalista, ya que han identificado en el comercio una plataforma base para las relaciones internacionales colombianas.

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How might businesses foster peace? We borrow insights from political science on the causes of war to guide IB scholarly research. We analyze war as a bargaining failure and present five causes of war (unchecked authority, intangible incentives, uncertainty, commitment problems, and misperceptions). We then identify business-for-peace initiatives (modifying incentives for war and peace, ex-combatant demobilization and reintegration, providing information, mediation and track-two diplomacy, peace guarantees, and community engagement) and propose research questions for each. Our work has important implications for IB scholars conducting research on firms operating in conflict-prone environments.

Purpose: Culturally bound communication styles affect the length of verbal and written messages. Legal contracts are no exception. This paper aims to explore the relationship between cultural communication style and the level of written detail in international joint venture (IJV) contracts. Using a database of actual IJV contracts, we empirically test the relationship between the parties’ cultural communication styles, cultural distance, and the textual length of contracts. We apply Edward T. Hall’s high- and low-context communication construct and find that contracts are longer when made between parties of low- and high-context cultures and shorter when both parties come from high-context cultures relative to when both parties are low context. Additionally, we find that the higher the cultural distance in terms of individualism versus collectivism between partners, the shorter the text of the contracts. The results highlight the influence of culture on contract text length and, as such, on contract negotiation and design costs. This article contributes to the culture and strategic alliance literature by going beyond the assumption that low-context culture contracts are longer and high-context culture contracts shorter by testing it empirically.

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