ABSTRACT
This chapter examines political interdependencies. The emphasis of the analysis of global politics will be on a particular—one might even say narrow—standpoint, namely the use of physical violence or the threat of violence in interstate or intrastate conflicts, or both. The chapter theorizes political conflicts as zero-sum games with the potential for the occurrence of violence, meaning death from political violence. It presents a comparative data source on the occurrence of violent conflicts, which may be employed for drawing a broad picture of the types of political conflicts in the world since 1945. Theories of international relations model the relations between states in different ways. Game theorist and mathematician Zermelo showed early in the twentieth century that zero-sum games with many nodes may be open games, meaning there is no strategy that will lead to a specific outcome. An ideal-type of political violence is to be found in the form of the rational choice model of conflict behavior.
