6 x 9. 280 pgs. 26 drawings, 23 tables, 6 maps. (2002) Cloth 978-0-472-11267-8 $75.00S  Available Add to Cart Search this Book's Content About the Book Praise Look Inside Subjects Political Science--International Relations

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

Kristian Skrede Gleditsch

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About the Book

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.

Kristian Skrede Gleditsch is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.