War and Reason: Domestic and International Imperatives - Tapa dura

Working in the rational choice tradition of economics, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman have written a work about foreign policy choices and their implications for a wide variety of events, including, but not limited to, war and peace. The book sheds light on a number of the most important questions in international relations. It contains over 25 propositions about the necessary and sufficient conditions for war, negotiations, status quo, capitulation, and acquiescence as outcomes of disputes. It addresses questions pertaining to norms that induce co-operation, as well as to conventional realist arguments about power and war. The authors pose five empirical puzzles about democracies (e.g., the absence of wars between democracies) and suggest deductively derived answers to each. The work addresss questions of co-operation and conflict; of full information and incomplete information; of deductive logic and empirical evidence. The results should be of great importance not just for theorists, but for practitioners as well.