International relations scholars have traditionally focused on explaining war rather than peace, resulting in the concept of peace being understudied and underemphasized. This book in contrast explains the maintenance of extensive periods of international peace into regions of the Third World: South America and West Africa.Kacowicz explores how regional peace is maintained in South American and West Africa through the distilling of alternative explanations, including Realism, Liberalism, and satisfaction with the territorial status quo. He also examines how peace can be maintained among states that usually sustain Western democratic regimes by offering a critique (and improvement) upon the "democratic peace" theory. Peace can indeed be maintained, he asserts, among nondemocratic states, although there is a direct relationship between the quality of the regional peace and the type of political regimes sustained by the countries in any given region.