Does Cooperation Inhibit War?

Abstract

The object of the paper is to explicate two opposing intuitions: the belief that peace and security will benefit from international cooperation, and the belief that this is an illusion. The proposition that sustained cooperation inhibits war is taken to rest on two assumptions, one about images and the other about interests. An unfavorable image of the adversary is presumed to promote conflictive action, and cooperation is presumed to make contenders view each other more favorably. At the same time, cooperation is presumed to create values that would be endangered by war and hence to inhibit war by making it more costly. The first part of the paper is devoted to an elaboration of this view. Then, in the second part, several limitations of this theory about the way in which cooperation relates to conflict are identified, including its narrow scope, its limited testability, and its several theoretical weaknesses. The proposition is plausible only with regard to particular contenders and particular circumstances. There is reason to believe domestic-political factors to be important for the link between international cooperation and international conflict.