Correlates of War
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The Correlates of War project is an academic study of the history of warfare. It was started in 1963 at the University of Michigan by political scientist J. David Singer. Concerned with collecting data about the history of wars and conflict among states, the project has driven forward quantitative research into the causes of warfare. Specifically, it has distilled from historical patterns five criteria of a state's power, the inter-relationships of these criteria, and the result on global political status quo of one state's rise in power relative to another. In other words, the country with the highest cumulative C.O.W. score enjoys hegemony, or the condition of global dominance accompanied by the benefit of dictating the status quo, the political and philosophical norms which function as unwritten global law, inasmuch as it is girded by the hegemon's relative military and economic dominance. As a hegemon's C.O.W. score is approached by another nation's, "power transition" looms on the horizon.
The last such power transition took place during World War II, during which hegemon Great Britain was surpassed in cumulative C.O.W. power by the United States due to the birth of the tremendous U.S. military-industrial complex, nurtured by the combination of America's then-unparalleled natural resources, and the Allies' urgent need for food, textiles, and heavy machinery during the devastating European struggle. Because the U.S. and Great Britain shared a political and philosophical world view valuing capitalism, democracy, and human rights, the status quo did not change when the U.S. became hegemon. The result was a peaceful power transition. After WWII came the Cold War, a long period of nuclear brinksmanship during which the U.S. narrowly protected its hegemony from the Soviet Union, a communist authoritarian regime, as the latter approached C.O.W. parity with the former.
The lesson of the C.O.W. project is that, when a hegemon is about to be overtaken by a politically and philosophially dissimilar nation, the hegemon's global status quo regime is threatened and war breaks out. The C.O.W. project has discerned this pattern in every significant war in human history, earning the full faith of the CIA, think tanks, and government institutions worldwide.
External links
| The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor |
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