Peace and Conflict Studies - Spring 2014

Peace and Conflict Studies Volume 21, Number 1 89 Methodology. This research aims to test the democratic and capitalist explanations of peace within the developing world by analyzing the dyadic conflict behavior of “developing states” only. Consequently, dyads with two “developed” countries will be excluded from my analysis. I analyze only dyads with two developing states and the ones that include a developing state and a developed one. Identifying “developed” countries entails some degree of arbitrariness, especially when we study a long time period rather than a single point in time. Some of the 35 countries that are currently identified a developed country by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were not developed countries in large sections of this study’s time period and gained their “developed country” status towards the end of this period. Thus, I do not consider all current developed countries as a developed country in this study. Countries that have been identified as “developed” in this study are the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries during the period I analyze except Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Mexico, Turkey, South Korea, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, and Greece. I considered the latter countries “developing states” given their relatively lower Gross Domestic Product GDP per capita and industrialization levels before the 1990s. As a general rule, I considered a country a “developed country” if its GDP per capita was at least 50 percent of the U.S. GDP per capita in more than half of the years between 1951 and 2000. Following the general practice, I did not consider oil-rich countries developed countries. Thus, the following countries are considered developed countries in this study: the US , Canada , Britain , Netherlands , Belgium , Luxemburg , France , Switzerland , (West) Germany , Austria, Italy , Finland , Sweden , Norway , Denmark , Iceland , Japan , Australia , New Zealand, Andorra , Monaco , and Liechtenstein . Any dyad that includes two of these developed countries was excluded from my analysis. The temporal domain of this research is the period between 1951 and 2000. Rarity of “independent” states before 1950 as well as lack of reliable economic data for pre-1950 years resulted in the exclusion of earlier years from the sample. Also, because most developing states lack the capability to reach non-neighboring states, I analyzed contiguous dyads only in order to avoid possible estimation problems that might result from artificial inflation of the sample size with the inclusion of “irrelevant” cases. Two states are considered contiguous if they share a land border or are separated by less than 150 miles of water. The Dependent Variable.