Date of Award
5-1-2014
Degree Name
Master of Arts
Department
Economics
First Advisor
Watts, Alison
Abstract
While most scholars agree that revolution is linked to international confrontation and violence, we do not understand why some revolutions lead to long, drawn out conflicts while others are largely ignored. Part of the problem is due to improper methodology, which uses models that make independent and identically distributed assumptions and do not take the complex network of relations that states share into account. Using social network analysis, we devise a network theory of revolution and international conflict that incorporates the revolutionary state's status and relational ties within other states into the relationship between revolution and international conflict. We find that larger and more well-connected revolutionary states, particularly those integral to global alliance networks and possessing a larger share of global military capacity, are more likely to become involved in international conflict. We also find evidence of non-normality in conventional logit and poisson probability models, showing current methods of measurement of revolution and international conflict to be flawed.
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