Allying for Peace: Treaty Obligations and Conflict between Allies

Abstract

We argue that certain provisions of alliance treaties can signal credible commitments to a peaceful relationship among members and establish institutional mechanisms that promote the settlement of disagreements through peaceful negotiation. Nonaggression, peaceful dispute settlement, military institutionalization, and permanent organization provisions should increase the duration of peace between alliance members; we test our hypotheses with a duration model. The analysis generally supports our expectations except that alliances that create permanent organizations, even those specifically established to arbitrate disagreements, are associated with shorter durations of peace. We conclude with some implications of our argument for the study of military alliances and international institutions more broadly. C ompeting theoretical perspectives in the quantitative study of conflict among allies predict that intra-alliance conflict will be either more or less prevalent, with empirical evidence in support of each perspective. The inconsistency in both theory and evidence may be a consequence of interstate conflict scholars primarily focusing on the deterrent properties of alliances through capability aggregation. 1 Snyder (1997), espousing a realist theory of alliance formation, explicitly states that the outward looking nature of alliances makes alliances different than other institutions. Such a perspective leaves little room for placing alliances within the larger set of international institutions as we think about international conflict processes. With attention focused on the external effects of alliances, it is not surprising that quantitative studies of alliances and conflict have only begun to examine the conflict process within alliances.This gap in the alliance-conflict literature is particularly vexing because of the volume of theoretical and qualitative work in international relations that incorporates alliances into the broader institutional picture. Building upon on the themes recognized by diplomatic historians such as Schroeder (1976), these scholars explicitly consider the formation and maintenance of international institutions (including alliances) to address security concerns with fellow members (e.g., Krebs 1999;Lake 1999;Weber 1997;Weitsman 2004). Therefore, a more complete understanding of the relationship between alliances and military conflict requires investigating whether or not alliances that form are successful at maintaining peace. We contribute to the literature on alliances and conflict by investigating the relationship between alliance treaty obligations and the duration of peace (i.e., the period of time between alliance formation and military conflict) between signatories. In other words, our argument concerns the extent to which alliances are effective at reducing military conflict once they are established.As it turns out, many alliances incorporate institutional mechanisms designed to promote peace. We argue that states design alliances in part to regulate internal political dynamics...

Treaty Compliance and Violation

“…She argues that higher cost treaty ratification is useful to assure other countries that the United States intends to comply (Martin 2005). Similarly, in their research on alliance agreements, Andrew Long and co-authors argue that because of the up-front cost of negotiating and ratifying formal alliance agreements (compared, presumably to mere political agreements), these constitute credible commitments about a state's intent to maintain peaceful relationships among the contracting parties (Long et al 2007).…”

Treaty Compliance and Violation

“…Examples include the International Criminal Court (Simmons & Danner 2010), bilateral investment treaties (Elkins et al 2006) and the more institutionalized provisions of some alliance pacts (Long et al 2007).…”

Addressing Endogeneity in Actor-Specific Network Measures

“…To construct the instrument, we regress this variable on a set of covariates associated with alliance formation, relying on the alliance formation equation from Long, Nordstrom and Baek (2007). The results of the model used to create the instrument are presented in (Singer 1987).…”