Routledge has just published a new book on Assessing the Capitalist Peace, edited by Gerald Schneider & Nils Petter Gleditsch. The book reviews the empirical evidence for a capitalist peace and discusses several interpretations of its mechanisms, such as the contract intensity of market economies, the openness of the economy, and public vs private ownership of the means of production. Chapters by Erik Gartzke, Bruce Russett, Michael Mousseau (and several co-authors) air a persistent controversy in the field, whether or not the capitalist peace supersedes the democratic peace. The book also contains chapters by some of the pioneers in thinking about the relationship between the market economy and peace, such as John Mueller, Richard Rosecrance, and Erich Weede.
The book is an expanded version of a 2010 special issue of International Interactions. The bulk of the papers in the journal issue and the book were first presented at three ISA-sponsored panels on the capitalist peace at the Fifth General Conference of the European Consortium for Political Research in Potsdam in 2009.
Gerald Schneider & Nils Petter Gleditsch (eds) Assessing the Capitalist Peace (Abingdon & New York: Routledge, 2013), 170 pp, ISBN13: 978-0-415-52989-1, GBP 85. For Table of Contents and order form, please follow this link.
