No Subject

Dear Colleagues;  

     I am currently working of a 'revise and resubmit' of a paper that
contrasts traditional international politics with world system (broadly
defined, both with and without the hyphen) treatments.  I trash
traditional studies in favor of those that are historically informed, non
State-centric, non-Eurocentric, and transdisciplinary.  I then turn to the
question of criticisms of world system work, which include charges of
determinism and indeterminance.  I find little support for charges of
determinism, but real concern over indeterminance.

     Indeterminance exists when different theories predict the same
outcome for different reasons.  I highlight predictions of war-pronness
during the period from 2030 to 2050 by Modelski and Thompson, Arrighi,
Wallerstein, and Joshua Goldstein.  Each has different reasons for making
this prediction, and some of them are contradictory.

     The editor wants me to address ways in which to solve this problem.
More traditional social science treatments that would have us search for
microfoundations are not particularly helpful.  First, they counsel that
we start from individual preferences and incentives when I argue we want
to start from system level attributes. Second, in that these are complex
phonemona they contain some of the attributes of chaos - making it quite
difficult to trace outcomes back to individual incentives or events.

     I have a few ideas, but none are particularly satisfying.  How might
we go about designing studies to decide which of a set of different
analyses that come to the same conclusion is best?

     Any and all help will be appreciated.

      Best,  Bob Denemark  
             Political Science
             University of Delaware