Dangerous dyads in the post-Soviet space: explaining Russia's military escalation decisions, 1992–2010

Paolo Rosa,Adriana Cuppuleri

doi:10.1017/ipo.2020.37

Abstract

AbstractThis paper analyses the military behaviour of Russia from 1992 to 2010. The method used is a combination of the dyad analysis introduced by Stuart Bremer in 1992 and the analysis of unit-level variables, which is distinctive of foreign policy analysis. We empirically test a set of hypotheses about the determinants of Russia's military behaviour in the post-Cold War period by considering the impact of changes of international variables – relative power, the presence of military alliance pacts, the territorial salience of the dispute – and state-level variables – the degree of democracy/autocracy and regime vulnerability. A bivariate and a multivariate analysis are carried out to explain the separate and joint impacts of independent variables.

Highlights

The subject matter of this paper is to identify the factors that increase or decrease the likelihood of Russia’s involvement in militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) in the period 1992–2010.1 According to the Correlates of War dataset, Russia was involved in 65 MIDs between 1992 and 2010.2 Some of these disputes were with states belonging to the post-Soviet space, and some of them were with states outside of this group; some of the states are great powers, and some are not; some have a defence pact with a third country, and some are not members of any alliance
Research design Our study examines to what extent Moscow’s military behaviour is a function of its relative power (RP), the presence or not of an external ally of the disputant state (All), the territorial salience of the disputed issue, the level of democracy/ autocracy (Pol), and regime vulnerability (RV)
We have analysed all the MIDs in which Russia was involved according to the dataset from Correlates of War

Summary

Introduction

The subject matter of this paper is to identify the factors that increase or decrease the likelihood of Russia’s involvement in militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) in the period 1992–2010.1 According to the Correlates of War dataset, Russia was involved in 65 MIDs between 1992 and 2010.2 Some of these disputes were with states belonging to the post-Soviet space (countries that were part of the former Soviet Union), and some of them were with states outside of this group; some of the states are great powers, and some are not; some have a defence pact with a third country, and some are not members of any alliance. Research design Our study examines to what extent Moscow’s military behaviour is a function of its relative power (RP), the presence or not of an external ally of the disputant state (All), the territorial salience of the disputed issue (whether it belongs to the post-Soviet space – PSS), the level of democracy/ autocracy (Pol), and regime vulnerability (RV). The third hypothesis is as follows: Hypothesis 3: In post-Soviet space (PSS) (number of dyads in which Russia interacts with states belonging to the post-Soviet space), Russia’s military behaviour will be more assertive, with an increased probability of MID involvement.. Hypothesis 5a: In a situation of low regime vulnerability (number of dyads with Russia showing an RV score in the first tertile), Russia’s likelihood of MID involvement increases (low-profile foreign policy theory). The analysis was first conducted in a bivariate form, comparing unconditional and conditional probabilities, and a multivariate analysis was run to measure the joint effect of all independent variables

Data analysis

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Findings

Conclusion