The Maya and IR Theory of Conflict

So, one of the problems with international relations theory, and
especially the study of international conflict, is that there is a
finite universe of cases from which to test theory, and in general,
because the number of international conflicts is limited, there is a
problem (of varying severity, depending on who you ask) with scholars
deriving theory using the same data we use to test the theory. This
definitely takes place--we look at the record, and say, "Gee...
Democracies don't seem to fight one another very much," and then we go
out and formally test that idea using (often) huge datasets of
country-year-pairs of countries.

Depending on who you ask, this might be a major problem, or not much of
one at all--many historical institutionalists, for example, who have no
problem generating theory while testing it, as something of a dynamic
process of working with historical cases--that's a poor attempt at the
way Steinmo puts it in one of his books. On the other hand, to a lot of
positivistic-types, this sort of thing is anathema to scientific
inference.

Regardless, one interesting project might be to find a way around this
sort of thing by tapping cases and observations which haven't been very
often used for this sort of thing.

Specifically, I'm thinking about Mayan city-states, although there are a
number of other potential cases for the fruitful harvest of country-city
state-dyadic pairs.

It would be an interesting thing to go back and generate a number of
case studies and a quantitative dataset of the interaction between
different mayan city-states to determine if realist, liberal,
constructivist, or rationalist approaches to IR better explain the
outbreak of conflict between these "countries." I believe that there is
a strong argument to be made for the utility of this research
design--the only question that I have is whether archaeologists know
enough about the relations between these city-states to generate enough
data to engage in an exercise in hypothesis testing.

I am, of course, nothing but a hirsute nerd, but wouldn't it be
interesting to go back and try to build a statistical dataset of
conflicts between Central American empires, to test if, for example,
trade pacified conflict between Mayan city-states or increased it, if
similar values between societies pacified countries (for example, as
Aztec ideas waxed and waned in the Mayan territory), and if power parity
increases or decreased conflict back before Cortéz and Alvarado? And of
course, the case-study research that would go along with that process...

Man, think of the interesting people you'd get to talk to!