Escalation at the outset: An analysis of targets’ responses in militarized interstate disputes

Abstract

The manner in which states behave within interstate disputes is of particular theoretical interest to those concerned with the question of why some disputes between states escalate to war while others do not. Much of the literature on interstate crises suggests that the way in which a state responds to a challenge from another state is a useful predictor of the way that crisis will end, i.e., whether the crisis will escalate to war. This analysis uses data on militarized disputes and finds this to be the case. The analysis goes further, however, in that it isolates some of the important factors influencing how targets of militarized challenges respond to those challenges. The results suggest that moving from interstate war to a finer level of analysis, such as the intra‐dispute behavior of states, can provide a more complete picture of how commonly held theoretical notions are related to the presence or absence of interstate war.