Clashes in the Assembly

Since the end of the Cold War, scholars of international politics have searched for paradigms that can make powerful and parsimonious claims about conflict and coop-eration in post–Cold War global politics. According to some, the everlasting struggle between rich and poor countries has become the dominant division in world politics, meaning that the old North-South cleavage has superseded the Cold War East-West division.1 Others argue that global conflict has become dominated by clashes be-tween different civilizations2 or that the dominant mode of conflict in global politics is between liberal democracies and nondemocracies.3 Still others discern the rise of a counterhegemonic bloc of states seeking to challenge the dominant power of the United States.4 One could argue that all of these views are correct on specific issues but that in general there is no single dimension that can explain global conflict since the end of the Cold War. Although theoretical debates about the structure of post–Cold War conflict have been rich, few empirical studies have analyzed the merits of different perspectives. One of the problems faced by such empirical studies is the lack of data on stat