Does background matter for foreign policy choices? This article examines the role of Western education in leaders' decisions.

Background Experiences Matter: Drawing from soft power theory and impressionable-years hypothesis, it theorizes that leaders educated in Western democracies are less likely to start conflicts. A dataset combining Archigos and LEAD with details on over 900 non-Western leaders (1947-2001) was analyzed.

New Dataset Combines Info: Building a comprehensive dataset by merging Archigos and LEAD, it includes leader backgrounds from more than 147 nations. This allows testing the hypothesis while controlling for various factors including selection effects, country-level variables, fixed effects, etc.

Results Support Hypothesis: Findings strongly suggest Western-educated leaders are indeed less prone to initiate militarized interstate disputes. Even after accounting for multiple controls and background characteristics, this pattern holds.

Implications for Leaders' Roles: The results validate the soft power thesis of academic institutions shaping international relations through experienced sojourners.