Abstract

Economic integration agreements – also called preferential trade agreements or regional trade agreements – have dramatically expanded in scope since World War II. While the proximate goal of economic integration is to increase commercial exchange between member states, there are strong reasons to believe integration influences relations across economic agreements as well. I argue that economic agreements foster enclaves of regional interdependence at the expense of multilateral, global interdependence. As a result, highly central economic agreements are partially insulated from the ill-effects of militarized conflict with other agreement areas. Furthermore, the coveted markets of highly central trade blocs afford them a degree of economic leverage that increases the effectiveness of non-violent conflict resolution mechanisms. Ultimately, these dynamics suggest highly central agreements will tend to engage in conflict with other central agreements due to the mutual isolation of said agreements. Relations between central and marginalized agreements, however, will be more peaceful given the latter’s dependence on access to central agreement markets. Using eigenvector centrality scores as my primary measure of agreement centrality, I test my theory using a large-N statistical analysis. I ultimately find support for the notion that dyads with more central agreements are more conflict prone other types of dyads.

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