Introduction

Identifying the conditions under which states avoid the recurrence of war and establish a durable peace is one of the most difficult challenges for practitioners and theorists of international relations. While there is an abundant literature on the causes of war,1what leads states to self-consciously abandon war as a means of policy towards other states has been a far more problematic issue, and one that has received considerably less attention. Thus, it is hardly surprising that one of the most promising concepts used to explore peaceful change in international relations, that of ‘security community’ developed by Karl Deutsch and his associates in the 1950s, has been more or less ignored by a discipline traditionally dominated by the realist paradigm which accepts competition possibly leading to war as an inevitable and permanent condition of international relations.2