Identifying rivals and rivalries in world politics (original) (raw)
Related papers
Strategic Rivalries in World Politics
2008
International conflict is neither random nor inexplicable. It is highly structured by antagonisms between a relatively small set of states that regard each other as rivals. Examining the 173 strategic rivalries in operation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this book identifies the differences rivalries make in the probability of conflict escalation and analyzes how they interact with serial crises, arms races, alliances and capability advantages. The authors distinguish between rivalries concerning territorial disagreement (space) and rivalries concerning status and influence (position) and show how each leads to markedly different patterns of conflict escalation. They argue that rivals are more likely to engage in international conflict with their antagonists than non-rival pairs of states and conclude with an assessment of whether we can expect democratic peace, economic development and economic interdependence to constrain rivalry-induced conflict.
Analyzing Strategic Rivalries in World Politics
Evidence-Based Approaches to Peace and Conflict Studies, 2022
This series aims to publish books on peace and conflict with evidence-based approaches, befitting an era best characterized by uncertainty and complexity. Even if occurrence of major wars among sovereign states has dramatically decreased, from 5 million soldiers killed between 1938 and 1945 per annum; through 100,000 soldiers killed between 1945 and 1989 per annum; to 10,000 soldiers killed between 1989 and 2019 per annum; many kinds of peace and conflict keep arising in the world, with extraordinary technological progress and unprecedented spatial coverage. All parts of the world now are so well connected and interdependent. At the same time, they easily and suddenly become sources of immense vulnerability and fragility, bringing one or another of them to the verge of collapse and destruction. The causes are diverse: climate change, migration, pandemic and epidemic disease, civil strife, religious dissonance, economic competition, arms races, terrorism, corruption-a virtual plethora of sources. Kofi Annan, former UN Secretary General, calls these and many others "problems without passports." The basic methodological orientation sought in this series is broadly that of modern social and behavioral science. Of importance is that verifiable evidence (quantitative and qualitative, graphs and photos) be solidly attached to whatever arguments are advanced.
Political Competition and the Initiation of International Conflict
World Politics, 2017
Although some scholars claim that the empirical evidence for the very low instance of interstate war between democracies is well established, others have raised new challenges. But even if democratic peace is observed, its theoretical explanation remains unresolved. Consensus has not emerged among competing approaches, some of which are criticized for offering monadic logic for a dyadic phenomenon. This article synthesizes recent literature to advance a simple, but distinct, explicitly dyadic theory about institutionalized political competition, leading to expectations that it is the most important source of democratic peace. While the authors are far from the first to consider political competition, their approach stands out in according it the central role in a dyadic theory focused on the regime type of initiators and target states. They argue that potential vulnerability to opposition criticism on target-regime-specific normative and costs-of-war bases is more fundamental than m...
Explaining Rivalry Escalation to War: Space, Position, and Contiguity in the Major Power Subsystem
International Studies Quarterly, 2000
Vasquez's~1996! rivalry escalation theory stressed territorial disputes as the principal focus for a two-path explanation of war. Neighbors fight over adjacent space and non-neighbors sometimes join ongoing wars between neighbors. But major powers are also much concerned with positional issues. Expanding the war motivation focus to encompass both spatial and positional issues facilitates the development of a new, more elaborate theory from which several new hypotheses can be derived, in addition to the older ones. Testing of the new theory can also proceed with rivalry data not based on dispute density measures, different types of contiguity can be assessed, and the presence of spatialpositional issues can be measured directly, as opposed to relying on a proximity proxy. The empirical outcome strongly supports the twopath, two-issue theory. In the major power subsystem, noncontiguous rivals outnumber contiguous rivals, dyadic wars are scarce, and war joining has been the norm. Spatial issues alone would have a hard time accounting for this pattern. Variable mixes of spatial and positional issues are able to account for it and a number of derived hypotheses reasonably well. This is not the last word on rivalry escalation to war but it appears to be an additional step in the right direction.
Although the empirical pattern of democratic peace – the very low instance of war between democracies – is well-established, its theoretical explanation is unresolved. While theory tends to focus on specific institutional or normative characteristics of regimes, empirical studies often use aggregate measures of regime type. Institutional theories have also been criticized for offering monadic logic for a dyadic phenomenon. We advance an explicitly dyadic theory about political competition leading to expectations that it, rather than political participation or constraining institutions, is the most important source of the observed democratic peace. Specifically, leaders facing a viable opposition are more concerned with forestalling potential criticism of their foreign policies. Initiating conflict with a democracy would leave them vulnerable to opposition criticism on target-regime-specific normative and costs-of-war bases. Our theory and evidence suggest that potential vulnerability to such opposition criticism is more fundamental than mechanisms such as audience costs, informational effects, or public-goods logic proposed by existing theories. We present robust statistical and machine-learning based results for directed dyads in the post-World War II era supporting our argument that high-competition states avoid initiating fights with democracies. (182 words)
International Studies Review, 2004
Can we put labels on states due to their history of conflict involvement? Popular folklore as well as the rhetoric of politicians suggests that we can. Germany up to the end of World War II and Japan in the same period were labeled ''revisionist'' or ''aggressive'' states. President Reagan called the Soviet Union ''the Evil Empire,'' due to its seemingly expansionist ideology, but also due to its presumably aggressive behavior. Israel is often depicted by many of its neighbors and other countries in and outside the Middle East as ''inherently expansionist.'' These examples suggest a notion that states can somehow be structurally characterized, independently of specific policies, leaders, political parties or regimes in power, economic and social conditions. If we can label states in structural terms, we can also label pairs or groups of states. For example, President George W. Bush branded North Korea, Iran, and Iraq as the ''Axis of Evil,'' due to these countries' pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. The Clinton administration identified Syria, Iran, and Iraq as a destabilizing axis in the Middle East, confronting the latter two through a policy of dual containment. The scholarly literature on international politics has identified structural patterns of warring or conflicting dyads through such concepts as protracted conflict, intractable conflicts, andFmore analytically definedFthe concept of enduring rivalries (Diehl and Goertz 2000; Maoz and Mor 2002). How scientifically sound are such labels? More importantly, are such labels helpful in understanding the causes, courses, and consequences of international conflicts? In other areas of human and social inquiry, structural characterization of units is of immense importance. Genetic research clearly indicates that certain people are far more prone to some diseases than others. Research on addiction attempts to identify structural propensities of drug or alcohol abuse. Research on recidivism in criminology is intent on identifying structural propensities for crime. Research on poverty systematically identifies structural characteristics including individual, family, and even national correlates of poverty. This study is motivated by the following empirical observation about international conflict: the distribution of national and dyadic conflict involvement during the last two centuries reveals extreme inequalities. A substantial number of states have engaged in little or no conflict with other states, while a small group of states has participated in a disproportionately high fraction of all conflicts. Likewise, a substantial number of politically relevant dyadsFdyads that are expected by virtue of their geographic proximity or span of strategic interests to be highly conflict proneFturn out to have little or no conflict experience over their joint history. On the other hand, a handful of dyads are responsible for most of the conflict activity in the international system. This observation runs contrary to both explicit and implicit notions about international conflict in the literature. Studies influenced by realist conceptions assert that conflict is an endemic feature of international anarchy. Hence, it follows that every stateFif it survives long enoughFis bound to get involved in militarized interstate
Rivalry, Uncertainty, and Militarized Compellent Threats
Journal of Global Security Studies, 2020
Rivalry scholars have done much to explain how rivalries begin and how they end, but little explanation has been given to how rivalries are maintained over long periods of time. Existing theories treat maintenance as simply the absence of termination or the continuing presence of structural conditions that birthed the rivalry, but we argue that this is an unsatisfying conceptualization that does little to tell us what mechanisms keep rivalries going. We argue that rivalry maintenance is not a passive condition of nontermination. Rather, rivalries persist because uncertainty about an opponent's resolve periodically surfaces, and states eliminate this uncertainty by issuing threats designed to compel the enemy to make concessions on the underlying issue. States issue threats to signal their commitment to continue disputing the issue or to force their opponent to reveal their level of resolve. States must remain resolved if they do not wish to concede the issue(s) at stake. Rivalry...