Graphical analyses of international relations: On the determinants of militarized conflicts

This article argues for the importance of graphical analyses examining the patterns of data available in the studies of international relations. It posits that there has been a relative lack of graphical analyses in the discipline of international relations, compared to other disciplines such as sociology. We could learn a significant amount of information from the well-performed graphical analyses, which are compatible to and produce important patterns that are not easily revealed from econometric or tabular analyses. In this article, the importance of graphical analyses is evidenced by examining the determinants of the onset of militarized conflicts, one of the most researched topics in the field of international relations.

► We emphasize the usefulness of different types of graphical analyses in depicting and highlighting the distinctive characteristics of international conflicts data.
► The well-performed graphical analyses are indeed compatible to and produce important patterns that are not easily revealed from econometric or tabular analyses.
► The graphical visualization of militarized conflicts allows researchers both to represent key aspects of the phenomena of interest and to discover new features that are neither apparent from the data in numerical form nor from the results from aggregate analyses.