Visualising defence and war in economic history journals (1989–2018)

ABSTRACT

Economics usually takes for granted a peaceful world with peaceful market transactions, where war and conflict are anomalies to the current state of business life. However, as History shows violence is a pervasive phenomenon. How is the current state of the art of research on war and defence in economic history journals? This paper provides an overview of research published on this topic by a selection of economic history journals since the fall of Berlin wall. By means of bibliometric and cluster analysis, and using visualising analytical tools, we show the production, main topics, authors, sources, etc. on this research area, and compare with the treatment received in economic journals. The main findings are that publications in economic history journals have increased in the last decades; cover a list of themes broader than that in economic journals; give an increasing importance to quantitative techniques; cite sources from the same area as well as from the top economic journals; and show a relative lack of appeal to neighbouring disciplines. Although economics and economic history influence each other, the direction of the scientific knowledge is going mostly from economics towards economic history rather than the opposite.

KEYWORDS:

• Defence
• war
• economic history journals
• bibliometric analysis

SUBJECT CLASSIFICATION CODES:

• A12
• F50
• N01
• N40
• N10
• Z00

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the anonymous referees and the editors of SEHR for their very helpful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Nadia Fernández-de-Pinedo http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6708-1480

Félix-Fernando Muñoz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5460-9108

Notes

1 ‘This figure is comprised of USD 4.73 trillion of direct and indirect costs as well as an additional USD 4.73 trillion in additional economic activity that would flow from the reinvestment of these costs into more fruitful economic activities’. http://economicsandpeace.org/research/#economics-of-peace (accessed September 3, 2018).

2 According to the U.S. Department of State, from 2002 through 2012, in constant 2012 USD, the annual value of world military expenditures appears to have increased approximately 40% to 52%, from approximately USD 1.28 to USD 1.59 trillion in 2002 to approximately USD 1.79 to USD 2.42 trillion in 2012, and to have averaged between USD 1.59 and USD 2.04 trillion for the 11-year period. The range of values results from using diverse methods to convert non-U.S. military expenditures to USD (WMEAT, 2017). Other estimations of the cost of violence in a broader sense increase the figure to more than USD 13 trillion in 2015 (World Economic Forum, 2017).

3 In this analysis, we do not explicitly include terrorism, military industry, and so on covered, to some extent, by defence.

4 At best, ‘defence’ usually appears in economics textbooks as an example of public good (Coyne & Lucas, 2016). See also Coulomb (2004).

5 War and defence are not usually present in universities as part of ordinary academic curricula. Studies on defence, war, and economics are carried out mainly in think-tanks and other types of state organizations, such as ministries of defence, although usually in collaboration with universities or university researchers. Currently, when economic history syllabi deal with the economic consequences of wars, they refer to the First and Second World Wars. See, for example, Allen (2011), Graff, Kenwood, and Lougheed (2014), Neal and Cameron (2016), and Zamagni (2017). As Diebolt and Haupert (2018, p. 9) point out, ‘the disappearance of economic history from leading economics graduate programs is problematic’.

6 Kant, like Adam Smith before him, believed that human beings have an innate propensity for ‘truck, barter and exchange’, which has led to an underestimation of human beings’ other innate propensity for violence and its use in the economy (Fleischacker, 1991). Fukuyama assumes that globalisation, along with the disappearance of discredited ideologies and totalitarian systems, allows for the eradication of poverty; combined with the new possibilities for education provided by new information technologies, these changes then can produce a peaceful world. For a history of economic thought on conflict, see Coulomb (2011). A recent revision of Smith’s received conception is that of Paganelli and Schumacher (2018).

7 For example, if population growth exceeds economic growth, the pressure on scarce resources may bring an increase in violence and mass migration (Bardsley & Hugo, 2010).

8 Because of environmental stress, a new type of migrant has emerged – the environmental refugee (Biermann & Boas, 2010). Natural resource (especially water) management has already become a matter of national security (Mobjörk et al., 2016).

9 Morris (2015, p. 25) prefers the term globocop. For hegemony, see Kaplan (2012), Bremmer (2012), Lal (2004), Turchin (2012), Turchin, Currie, Turner, and Gavrilets (2013), Chua (2004), or Ferguson (2013).

10 During the Cold War, an influential group of scholars interested in the scientific study of war emerged and established the Center for Research on Conflict Resolution in Michigan in 1957. In 1959, John Galtung inaugurated the discipline of peace and conflict studies with the creation of the International Peace Research Institute and the Journal of Peace Research in 1964. In 1963 in Sweden, the Peace Research Society (now IPRA) was established. Since then, an enormous variety of centres, institutions, think-tanks and specialised journals have proliferated, especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the new balance of powers. For example the American Center for Democracy (New York), the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation and Security (Birmingham, England), and the Center for Conflict Resolution (Chicago).

11 The recent quantitative turn in political science has turned to the language and methods traditionally used by empirical economists and cliometricians. The seminal work on the logic of civil war by Kalyvas (2006) is a good example. Besides Kalyvas’ extensive research, a non-exhaustive list of prominent quantitative political scientists working on conflict (often from a historical perspective) includes names such as McLauchlin and La Parra-Pérez (2018), Balcells (2017), or Kocher (Kalyvas & Kocher, 2009; Kocher, Pepinsky, & Kalyvas, 2011; Muchlinski, Siroky, He, & Kocher, 2016).

12 Because in this article we focus on the publication on these topics in economic history journals, we cannot explore this important connection between war and other disciplines in the social sciences, so we leave it for further research.

13 The list of journals, with the year publication was established in parentheses, is as follows: Economic History Review (1927), Journal of Economic History (1941), Explorations in Economic History (1969), European Review of Economic History (1997), and Cliometrica (2007).

14 Although this selection may seem too narrow, the scope that it provides is wide enough to include military expenditure and so on. However, ‘conflict’ is used so widely that many references obtained are spurious – for instance, most of the literature on game theory incorporates this term.

15 Although for academic book authors and the institutions assessing their research performance, the relevance of books is undisputed, the absence of comprehensive international databases covering the items and information needed for the assessment of this type of publication imposes a severe limitation. Several European countries are developing custom-built information systems for the registration of scholarly books, as well as weighting and funding allocation procedures. For details, see Giménez-Toledo et al. (2016).

16 For references and discussion, see Wei (2018, p. 4ff).

17 VOSviewer and CitNetExplorer are two freely available network analysis tools available at https://www.cwts.nl/. For technical details, see van Eck and Waltman (2014).

18 For recent developments and the agenda of this journal, see Arce and Kollias (2010) and McGuire (2010).

19 There are some obvious common elements to both EconHistJ and EconJ, such as the cost and the economic effects of war and violence. The differences have to do with the methods used, such as the importance of quantitative methods in economics, in particular the Granger causality test, although in economic history, these methods have been used increasingly since the ‘cliometric revolution’. On terrorism and defence and on economics, see Enders and Sandler (2011), Llussá and Tavares (2011), and Sandler (2014).

20 The time span in Figure 3 (2006–2012) is consistent with the average life cycle of citations.

21 Although Williamson figures among the authors of the first group, his work is mainly linked with trade and economic growth in the long run. In his investigations, which cover the two world wars and take into account their economic impact, war is not the main research topic.

22 However, contrary to VOSviewer, CitNetExplorer can manage data only from the WoS, which forced us to use a list of records slightly different to Scopus#509. However, the difference in the final results is minimal.

23 See the list in Appendix 2.

24 The World Bank policy research report, Breaking the Conflict Trap, claims that ‘economic development is central to reducing global incidence of conflict’ (Collier et al., 2003, p. 4).

25 When books are cited, citations refer to classic works or are related to historical statistical databases. ‘This reflects the fact that in both business and economic history journals the most cited articles tend to be “classics” that still gain citations even decades after their publication’ (Ojala et al., 2017, p. 314).

Additional information

Funding

Nadia Fernández-de-Pinedo’s research was funded by Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad (Agencia Estatal de Investigación) / Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Research Project HAR2016-78026-P.