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(iPoster) Measuring Militarization and the Link with Interstate Conflict
Fri, September 12, 1:30 to 2:00pm PDT (1:30 to 2:00pm PDT), TBAAbstract
In 2023, there were the largest number of conflicts since the Cold War. The last three years had the most conflict-related deaths in the past three decades (Peace Research Institute Oslo, 2024). The relationship between arms races and war has not been heavily studied since the Cold War. This paper develops different militarization measures to determine how they affect the relationship with conflict using more recent data and measures. Prior research typically uses military expenditure rather than a measure of military power which is less generalizable due to different costs of labor and weaponry (Rider, 2013; Rider et al., 2011; Stoll, 2017). I first measure militarization using the Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC) Global Militarization Index (GMI) on armed weaponry, personnel, and military spending. I then modify the GMI to investigate how changing factors in the BICC’s measure—such as, weighting by Surplus Domestic Product (Anders et al., 2020) and size of the total workforce—impacts the correlation with conflict. Using the different measures of militarization will enable the paper to distinguish between stock and flow variables. The stock of military capabilities may capture deterrence while the flow may capture the immediate risk of conflict. While increasing tensions associated with future conflict might induce militarization, this would bias my results toward finding a positive correlation between militarization and conflict. Preliminary results using existing measures of militarization find this correlation for current year militarization (possibly reflecting existing tensions, as a flow variable) but indicate that prior militarization (better reflecting the stock of military capabilities) correlates with a reduced probability of war, potentially supporting the deterrence hypothesis despite potential endogeneity.