ABSTRACT
This chapter combines Jack Snyder's classical formulation of strategic culture with Hedley Bull's notion of "diplomatic culture" to advance a new explanation for South America's puzzling long history of peaceful inter-state relations amid persistently high levels of intra-state violence. It offers a preliminary stylized application of this merged concept of diplomatic culture qua strategic culture to the South American case, suggesting a new theoretical explanation for this regional 'long peace' that can avoid some of the common limitations, paradoxes, and dead-ends of the existing theoretical literature. It has been to offer a historical overview of the most relevant trends and developments substantiating the idea of a regional "diplomatic culture" underpinning a South American society of states. Intellectual complacency, more than any menacing army, is today the most dangerous threat to the continued existence of our long, but fragile, regional peace.
