Great powers, international orders, and war | Maël van Beek

Great powers, international orders, and war

The collapse of the Soviet communist international order was quickly followed by a more than 60% reduction in the rate of international conflict initiation. This decrease has persisted since then. Today, the international order is experiencing significant changes that could be as impactful as the dissolution of the Soviet empire as China and Russia are challenging the U.S.-led Liberal International Order from without while far-right movements are undermining it from within.

This line of research examines how the creation and maintenance of international orders influence the strategic dynamics of states in the international system.

Publications

Maël van Beek, Michael Z. Lopate, Andrew Goodhart, David A. Peterson, Jared Edgerton, Haoming Xiong, Maryum Alam, Leyla Tiglay, Daniel Kent, Bear F. Braumoeller. Hierarchy and War. In the American Journal of Political Science (2024).

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Working papers

Dynamics of Change in International Organizations

This project investigates how states renegotiate international bargains after unexpected events undermine the initial deal and finds that internal reforms are most likely when powerful and weak states alike desire change. If there is an imbalance, however, and only one group is mobilized for change, then the creation of a new institution becomes more likely as it bypasses the veto of the other group.

The Trilemma of Hegemonic Order Competition

Great powers engaged in hegemonic competition face a trilemma as they can only achieve 2 out of the 3 desirable policy objectives that are: maximizing their influence, promoting their values, ensuring peace.

Work in progress

Hierarchy misalignment and war: Network effects of relational and material power

Uses computational modeling and network analysis to introduce a theory of hierarchy misalignment, where discrepancies between states' material and relational power drive conflict in multiple domains.

Measuring International Order: Three Approaches to an Amorphous Concept

This paper proposes to quantify common usages of "international order" in order to catalyze a more robust scientific research program on this important concept.

Refining known unknowns? Modeling and Measuring Uncertainty

This project leverages a partial observability model of conflict initiation to estimate systemic uncertainty, where values of the unobserved variables are inferred from the relationship of observed variables to outcomes.

Warring Leviathans: Conflict Among Hierarchies and the Evolution of Human Prosociality

Using a computational model, this project argues that intergroup conflict makes the creation of coercive centralized hierarchy more likely by increasing within-group cooperation and that institutions which were built up during conflict can be ex-post efficient even in times of peace and therefore can outlast the conflicts which provided their initial impetus.