Research on enduring rivalry has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention in the last few years. As scholars begin to relax assumptions regarding event independence and historical memory, rivalry has emerged to explain dependencies across countries and over time. Despite the evidence to date, some scholars challenge the rivalry distinction and suggest that a stochastic model may explain the distribution of militarized disputes equally as well. However, if the pairings of states that define the list of enduring rivals are fundamentally different than other pairs of states, differences in behavior should be evident in crisis situations. For rival states in crisis, conflict patterns should vary systematically across conflicts. The likelihood of military action should be lower in dispute one compared to dispute six, or eight, or twelve. Moreover, the conflict strategies of rival states in crisis should differ from the conflict strategies of nonrival states in crisis. Using data from the Interstate Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project, the evidence uncovered here supports the conjecture that states in rival contexts tend to behave differently in crises than their nonrival counterparts, although an indirect effect of rivalry is observed as well. Rival states in crisis frequently resort to a military response against nonrivals. The evidence also provides empirical support for the evolutionary model of rivalry, rather than the punctuated equilibrium model.
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References
1.
The term enduring rivals refers to pairs of countries that have fought repeatedly over time. Thus a protracted militarized relationship characterizes these nation-states. See below for additional discussion.
2.
Erik Gartzke and Michael Simon, “Hot Hand: A Critical Analysis of Enduring Rivalries,”Journal of Politics63 (1999): 777–798.
3.
William R. Thompson, “Identifying Rivals and Rivalries in World Politics,”International Studies Quarterly45 (2001): 557–586.
4.
See Gary Goertz and Paul F. Diehl, “Rivalries: The Conflict Process,” in What Do We Know About War, ed. John A. Vasquez (New York: Rowman Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2000), 197–218; Paul F. Diehl and Gary Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001); and Paul R. Hensel, “Interstate Rivalry and the Study of Militarized Conflict,” in Conflict in World Politics: Advances in the Study of Crisis, War, and Peace, ed. Frank P. Harvey and Ben D. Mor (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998).
5.
Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace.
6.
See discussion in notes 60 and 61 below for definitions of crises.
7.
Sara M. Mitchell and Brandon C. Prins, “Rivalry and Diversionary Uses of Force.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Peace Science Society International, Atlanta, GA, October 26–28, 2001.
8.
See Michael Colaresi and William R. Thompson, “Hot Spots or Hot Hands? Serial Crisis Behavior, Escalating Risks, and Rivalry,”Journal of Politics64 (2002): 1175–1198; and Michael Colaresi and William R. Thompson, “Strategic Rivalries, Protracted Conflict, and Crisis Escalation,” Journal of Peace Research 39 (2002): 263–287.
9.
Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1999), 104–104.
10.
See Adam B. Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence: Soviet Foreign Policy 1917–73 (New York:Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1974), 630–630.
11.
Thompson, “Identifying Rivals,”558–558.
12.
Keesing’s Record of World Events, volume 27 (1981), 307–363.
13.
England and France, for example, fought repeatedly during the Hundred Years War, such as at Crécy (1354), Poitiers (1356), and Agincourt (1415). Germany and Russia feared each other’s national power and fought twice in the twentieth century over European dominance. India and Pakistan emerged from British rule as opponents and have militarily engaged each other nearly every year since independence.
14.
Although Edward Azar initiated much of the research into protracted international conflict, followed soon after by Michael Brecher, Paul Diehl effectively launched the current research program into rivalry, along with fellow University of Michigan graduate Gary Goertz. Both studied under David Singer and worked on the Correlates of War Project. Paul Hensel studied under Diehl at the University of Illinois and has written extensively on international rivalry. William Thompson trained under George Modelski (professor emeritus at the University of Washington) and has worked on the role of power and rivalry in international politics. Michael Colaresi was a student of Thompson at the University of Indiana and has continued to work on great power rivalries.
15.
Gary Goertz and Paul F. Diehl, “The Empirical Importance of Enduring Rivalries,”International Interactions18 (1992): 151–163.
16.
Gary Goertz, Contexts of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1994).
17.
Thompson, “Identifying Rivals,”560–560.
18.
Paul F. Diehl (ed.), The Dynamics of Enduring Rivalries (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1998).
19.
Thompson, “Identifying Rivals,”563–563. Also see John Vasquez, The War Puzzle (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1993).
20.
Diehl, Dynamics of Enduring Rivalries, 4–4.
21.
See John A. Vasquez, “Distinguishing Rivals That Go to War From Those That Do Not,”International Studies Quarterly40 (1996): 531–558.
22.
Diehl, Dynamics of Enduring Rivalries.
23.
Diehl, Dynamics of Enduring Rivalries, 3–3. Also see Gary Goertz and Paul F. Diehl, “Enduring Rivalries: Theoretical Constructs and Empirical Patterns,” International Studies Quarterly 37 (1993): 147–171.
24.
Vasquez, “Distinguishing Rivals,”532–532.
25.
See, for example, Frank W. Wayman, “Rivalries: Recurrent Disputes and Explaining War,” in What Do We Know About War (see note 4), 219–234. Also see Michael Brecher and Patrick James, “Patterns of Crisis Management,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 32 (1988): 426–456.
26.
Goertz and Diehl, “Rivalries,” in What Do We Know About War (see note 4).
27.
Goertz and Diehl, “Enduring Rivalries” (see note 26), 148–148.
28.
See, for example, Paul K. Huth, “Enduring Rivalries and Territorial Disputes, 1950–1990,”in A Road Map To War: Territorial Dimensions of International Conflict, ed. Paul F. Diehl(Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999).
29.
Paul R. Hensel, “Hot Hands and Cold Wars: A Reassessment of the Stochastic Model of Rivalry.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, CA, August 29–September 2, 2001).
30.
Diehl, Dynamics of Enduring Rivalries, 7–7.
31.
Vasquez, “Distinguishing Rivals.”
32.
Russell J. Leng, “When Will They Ever Learn? Coercive Bargaining Behavior in Recurrent Crises,”Journal of Conflict Resolution27 (1983): 379–419.
33.
Ibid.
34.
Ibid.
35.
See Colaresi and Thompson, “Hot Spots or Hot Hands,” and Colaresi and Thompson, “Strategic Rivalries.”
36.
Gartzke and Simon, “Hot Hand,” and Colaresi and Thompson, “Hot Spots or Hot Hands?”
37.
Ibid., 1188–1189.
38.
Ibid., 1190.
39.
Colaresi and Thompson similarly examine ICB escalation among rival and non-rival states.Two methodological choices distinguish their work from my own here. First, Colaresi and Thompson use Thompson’s principal rivalry distinction and not the rivalry distinction used by Diehl and Goertz. Second, Colaresi and Thompson examine crisis reoccurrence, while I examine the foreign policy response to the initial crisis trigger. In this way, the analysis here is more closely tied to Leng’s accommodative and bullying strategies distinction. My results, nonetheless, support the conclusions drawn by Colaresi and Thompson. See Colaresi and Thompson, “Hot Spots or Hot Hands?”; Thompson, “Identifying Rivals”; and Leng, “When Will They Ever Learn?”
40.
George Blainey, The Causes of War(New York: Free Press, 1973), 122–122.
41.
See James Fearon, “Domestic Political Audiences and the Escalation of International Disputes,”American Political Science Review88 (1994): 577–592.
42.
See Zeev Maoz and Ben D. Mor, “Learning, Preference Change, and the Evolution of Enduring Rivalries,” in Dynamics of Enduring Rivalries (see note 18), 129–164.
43.
See Russell J. Leng, “Escalation: Crisis Behavior and War,” in What Do We Know About War (see note 4), 237–237. Bennett, though, finds an increasing hazard rate for rivalries, which indicates that rivalrous relationships are not self-sustaining but will eventually end. As the rivalry duration increases, the likelihood of the conflict ending increases rather than decreases. See D. Scott Bennett, “Integrating and Testing Models of Rivalry Duration,” American Journal of Political Science 42 (1998): 1200–1232.
44.
Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace.
45.
See Edward E. Azar, “Peace as Crisis and War as Status-Quo: The Arab-Israeli Conflict Environment,”International Interactions6 (1979): 159–184; and Edward E. Azar, “Protracted International Conflicts: Ten Propositions,” International Interactions 12 (1985): 59–70. Also see Gary Goertz and Paul F. Diehl, “The Volcano Model and Other Patterns in the Evolution of Enduring Rivalries,” in Dynamics of Enduring Rivalries (see note 4).
46.
See Goertz and Diehl, “The Volcano Model;” Goertz and Diehl, “Rivalries.”
47.
Goertz and Diehl, “The Volcano Model.”
48.
Goertz and Diehl, “Rivalries” (see note 4), 202–202.
49.
Maoz and Mor, “Learning, Preference Change, and the Evolution of Enduring Rivalries.”
50.
Paul R. Hensel, “An Evolutionary Approach to the Study of Interstate Rivalry,”Conflict Management and Peace Science17 (1999): 175–206. Also see Goertz and Diehl, “Rivalries” (see note 4).
51.
Hensel, “An Evolutionary Approach.”
52.
For a nice review of rivalry literature, see Gary Goertz and Paul F. Diehl, “(Enduring) Rivalries,” in Handbook of War Studies II, ed. Manus I. Midlarsky (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
53.
Hensel, “An Evolutionary Approach.”
54.
Ibid.
55.
Hensel, “Hot Hands or Cold Wars,” 8.
56.
See Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace; Hensel, “An Evolutionary Approach”; and Gartzke and Simon, “Hot Hand.”
57.
See Goertz and Diehl, “Enduring Rivalries” (see note 26).
58.
Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace.
59.
Ibid.
60.
A crisis, according to Brecher and Wilkenfeld, is a situation in which state leaders perceive “a threat to one or more basic values, along with an awareness of finite time for response to the value threat, and a heightened probability of involvement in military hostilities.” See Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). Also see Michael Brecher, Crises in World Politics: Theory and Reality (New York:Pergamon Press, 1993).
61.
Hewitt and Wilkenfeld find important differences between single-actor and multi-actor crises, and they caution researchers about possible inference problems if such cases are combined in empirical analyses. See J. Joseph Hewitt and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, “One-Sided Crises in the International System,”Journal of Peace Research36 (1999): 309–323.
62.
The crisis trigger is defined by Brecher and Wilkenfeld as the “specific act, event, or situational change perceived by the decision maker(s) as a threat to basic values, with finite time for response and a heightened probability of military hostilities.” See Brecher and Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis, 48–48.
63.
The original variable from the ICB actor dataset is labeled “Crisis Management I: Major Response to Crisis Trigger.” The original coding has nine separate categories: (1) no response, (2) verbal act, (3) political act, (4) economic act, (5) other non-violent act, (6) non-violent military act, (7) multiple including non-violent military act, (8) violent military act, and (9) multiple including violent military act. The ordinal variable utilized in the empirical analyses collapses categories 1 and 2, 3 through 5, and 6 through 9 to create the three-category ordinal dependent variable. This categorization follows a principle interest here with the decision to respond initially to a crisis trigger by relying on the military, even if violent clashes do not in the end occur. Further, separate analyses of different cut-points largely support a dichotomous distinction between a military response and a response that involves either diplomatic and/or economic statecraft. I do not utilize the Crisis Management II variable provided by ICB because it bases its coding on the primary conflict management technique used throughout the entire crisis, rather than the specific response to the trigger and whether any type of military action was taken.
64.
Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace.
65.
Hensel, “An Evolutionary Approach.”
66.
See, for example, Goertz and Diehl, “Rivalries” (note 4).
67.
Ibid.
68.
Hensel, “An Evolutionary Approach,”187–187.
69.
Ibid.
70.
See Vasquez, The War Puzzle, and Vasquez, What Do We Know About War.
71.
Sara McLaughlin, Scott Gates, Håvard Hegre, Ranveig Gissinger, and Nils Petter Gleditsch, “Timing the Changes in Political Structures: A New Polity Database,”Journal of Conflict Resolution42 (2001): 231–242.
72.
See, for example, William J. Dixon, “Democracy and the Peaceful Settlement of International Conflict,”American Political Science Review88 (1994): 14–32; and William Reed, “A Unified Statistical Model of Conflict Onset and Escalation,” American Journal of Political Science 44 (2000): 84–93.
73.
While dichotomizing the ordinal democracy index of Polity IIId does discard information, theoretically the regime type and conflict relationship is a threshold one. That is, a certain type of regime or set of institutions alters the relationship. The 11-point index goes from zero to 10, with 10 coding a regime characterized by strong institutional constraints on the executive, competitive political participation, and openness of executive recruitment.
74.
Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post-Cold War World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
75.
Cliff Morgan and Sally Campbell, “Domestic Structures, Decisional Constraints, and War,”Journal of Conflict Resolution35 (1991): 187–211.
76.
See J. David Singer and Melvin Small, Resort to Arms (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1982).
77.
Brecher and Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis, 27–27. To reduce the range of this series and the potential for heteroskedasticity, the natural log of power discrepancy is used in the empirical analysis.
78.
Analyses were also run without intrawar crises included in the dataset. Results remain robust to the deletion of these cases.
79.
J. Scott Long, Regression Models for Categorical and Limited Dependent Variables (Thou-sand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1997).
80.
See Goertz and Diehl, “The Volcano Model.”
81.
See Gartzke and Simon, “Hot Hand.”
82.
This finding implies that not only should temporal and spatial dependence be modeled in pooled time series datasets, but temporal-spatial correlation also needs to be considered. That is, the US-UK dyad in 1920 is in part dependent on the US-UK dyad in 1919 (temporal correlation), and the US-UK dyad in 1920 may be influenced by the US-France dyad in 1920 (spatial correlation), but it also is quite likely that the US-UK dyad in 1919 influences the US-France dyad in 1920.
83.
Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace.
84.
The marginal effects represent the change in probability of Y given some unit change in Xi. So, using table 3 and model 3 as examples, going from nonrival to rival increases the probability that Y equals three by 17 percent. That is, states involved in an enduring rivalry are 17 percent more likely to use military statecraft than states not involved in an enduring rivalry.
85.
The impact of regime type probably plays out at the initiation stage of crises. States involved in crises are already on average much more resolved.
86.
See Hensel, “An Evolutionary Approach.”
87.
Ibid.
88.
Admittedly, rivalry may not be the causal factor, but the characteristics of certain regimes themselves. Some regimes may simply be more belligerent than others, and this pushes them into rivalry as well as into conflict with other states. However, it seems likely that rivalry helps prepare regimes for conflict.
89.
Bercovitch, Diehl, and Goertz find conflict management efforts prevalent in enduring rivalries. They suggest that the need to demonstrate resolve with a rival limits the usefulness of direct negotiation and thus mediation offers an attractive alternative. However, while enduring rivalries are much more likely to receive mediation efforts, these efforts typically end in failure. Bercovitch et al. found “no moderating effects on the severity of subsequent disputes, or even on the lessening of the likelihood of war following a mediation “(p. 761). See Jacob Bercovitch, Paul Diehl, and Gary Goertz, “The Management and Termination of Protracted Interstate Conflicts: Conceptual and Empirical Considerations,”Millennium26 (1997): 751–769.
90.
The evolution variable essentially counts the number of crises between two rival states over time. I collapse the counts into a four-category ordinal variable to match the Goertz and Diehl distinctions. Thus, no previous crises between rival states gets coded a 0, one to five previous crises receives a 1, six to thirteen a 2, and greater than thirteen previous crises gets coded a 3. A continuous count variable was also run and the results were nearly identical. See Goertz and Diehl, “Rivalries” (see note 4).
91.
See Hensel, “An Evolutionary Approach.”
92.
Thompson, “Identifying Rivals,”558–558.
93.
See Hensel, “An Evolutionary Approach”; and Colaresi and Thompson, “Hot Spots or Hot Hands.”
