Are States Like Children? International Organizations and Conflict.

A growing number of scholars argue that international governmental organizations (IGOs) promote peace and cooperation among states. Existing approaches emphasize the number of IGO memberships as an important causal attribute of individual states (much like economic development and regime type). Our paper provides an alternative approach to the study of IGOs and conflict. We introduce a social network perspective that borrows from behavioral studies of human and animal groups in anthropology, psychology and sociology. We argue that the international system of IGOs is best understood as a relational social network through which states’ international conflict positions and actions emerge. These organizations are not simply state attributes reducible to the properties of the agent. Moreover, these IGO ‘networks’ are not neutral or apolitical; they make certain states more powerful than others and they generate the seeds for conflict among certain members. We introduce new IGO relational data and test our claims on a sample of politically relevant dyads during the period 1885 to 1992. We demonstrate that social network hypotheses successfully contribute additional predictive power to existing models of conflict. While some relative positions generated and reinforced by the patterns of IGO membership decrease the likelihood of conflict, others can actually increase it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]