Dr. Michael Aleprete, Westminster College assistant professor of political science, was a member of the "Regions, Borders, and Democracy" panel at the 50th annual meeting of the International Studies Association Feb. 15 in New York City.

Aleprete and Dr. Aaron Hoffman, assistant professor of political science at Purdue University, co-authored "Political Arrangements and Geographic Proximity: the Effect(s) of Interstate Conflict on Land Borders." The paper was presented at the panel.

"The paper examines the relationship between the relative access to border areas (measured by the extent of roads and railroads in the border areas) and the probabilities of both cooperation and conflict between the states which share the border," Aleprete explained.

"Typically, studies of international conflict focus on how accessibility impacts the prospects for conflict and cooperation. We argue that access itself results from prior strategic choices. That is, state decision-makers are motivated to build roads/railroads based on the anticipation of future interactions with their neighbors. To test our idea, we used variables commonly found to predict international conflict and cooperation to predict the level of accessibility among the 243 land borders which existed in 1981."

Aleprete, who has been with Westminster since 2007, earned an undergraduate degree from Duquesne University and a master's and Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh.

Contact Aleprete at (724) 946-7254 or e-mail alepreme@westminster.edu for more information.

Dr. Michael Aleprete