Is East Asia heading toward war? Throughout the 1990s, conventional wisdom among U.S. scholars of international relations held that institutionalized cooperation in Europe fosters peace, while its absence from East Asia portends conflict. Developments in Europe and Asia in the 1990s contradict the conventional wisdom without discrediting it. Explanations that derive from only one paradigm or research program have shortcomings beyond their inability to recognize important empirical anomalies. International relations research is better served by combining explanatory approaches from different...

Is East Asia heading toward war? Throughout the 1990s, conventional wisdom among U.S. scholars of international relations held that institutionalized cooperation in Europe fosters peace, while its absence from East Asia portends conflict. Developments in Europe and Asia in the 1990s contradict the conventional wisdom without discrediting it. Explanations that derive from only one paradigm or research program have shortcomings beyond their inability to recognize important empirical anomalies. International relations research is better served by combining explanatory approaches from different...