Great Power Politics in World History: Balance of Power and Central Wars Since Antiquity

초록

This article introduces a new dataset tailored to test theories of great power politics. The dataset covers the equivalent of 55 centuries of data throughout seven distinct international systems. Most significantly, it shows that tripolarity, unbalanced multipolarity, and bipolarity are especially prone to devastating wars while balanced multipolar systems appear more peaceful. For each system, I account for polarity, the date of appearance and disappearance of each great power, and the relative balance of power. I use central war — large conflicts that engulf most great powers — as a standard for comparison between systems. After explaining the architecture of the dataset and the coding, I give an overview of the data. These results are of import to the development of international relations theory; they are at odds with most of the international relations corpus but seem to support classical and offensive realism. © 2022 The Korean Journal of International Studies.

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