The Political Economy of Global Conflict

Abstract

The global conflict process and the global economy are viewed as being interconnected at the global level through a process that has distinctive characteristics and a momentum of its own. This political economy of global conflict is examined from a broad-gauged, historical, and dynamic perspective. Evidence is presented from the 1954–1980 time period that supports the viewpoint that changes in civil war, international war, size of the global economy, economic interdependence, and economic hegemony are interrelated in a complex behavioral pattern with higher order lag structures, autoregressive components, and multivariate relationships involving some feedback mechanisms.