2023 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
The Balance of Power: Analysis of Interstate Wars and Peaceful Resolutions of Conflict, 1000-2000 AD
| Project/Area Number |
22K01533
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| Research Institution | The University of Tokyo |
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Principal Investigator |
Weese Eric 東京大学, 社会科学研究所, 准教授 (50777844)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2022-04-01 – 2025-03-31
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| Keywords | War / National boundaries / Political economics |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
This project consists of joint research with David Schonholzer at Stockholm University. Our major achievement this year is that we received a "revise & resubmit" request from the Review of Economic Studies for one of our papers from this project. The revisions requested appear feasible and we hope to complete them in the next few months.
Our other major achievement is that we have completed the data processing stage of our analysis of war and its relationship to boundary changes in Europe. A preliminary analysis has suggested that most boundary changes during this period were peaceful (about 80%). This is somewhat at odds with our intuition, which had been that boundary changes during this period were mostly associated with violent conflict.
One possibility is that the peaceful transfers are made mostly "in the shadow of conflict", where it is obvious which side would win a war and so there is a territorial transfer without a war ever being necessary. To analyze this we believe it is first important to determine the coalition structures of wars that actually occur. We observe at least 100 wars with more than 2 participants. We have attempted to analyze the determinants of which countries choose to ally with which other countries in these 3+ country wars, with the aim of eventually developing a simple model of how countries choose to go to war during this period. A difficulty here is that we have been as yet unable to identify particular characteristics of these alliances.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
2: Research has progressed on the whole more than it was originally planned.
Reason
We have an R&R from a top 5 journal, which I consider to be acceptable progress.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
For the remainder of this grant we hope to produce an early draft of our analysis of the relationship between war and changes in political boundaries in Europe during the 1000-1850 period.
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| Causes of Carryover |
Shuhei Kainuma is doing data analysis work for this project and due to his schedule he is working slightly more in the following fiscal year.
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