Geographic Opportunity and Neomalthusian Willingness: Boundaries, Shared Rivers, and Conflict

Abstract

International conflict has been analyzed extensively through the framework of opportunity and willingness. Opportunity has mainly been operationalized as physical proximity. Willingness has been measured in a number of ways, and remains a somewhat more elusive concept. Several scholars have called for boundary length to represent opportunity. Heeding such calls, Harvey Starr has used GIS methods to generate boundary length for 1993 and has found it to be associated with increased propensity to conflict. A number of his measures of willingness were not. Using a new and much more extensive dataset on boundary length for the entire Correlates of War period, this article finds very different results. We study the relationship with shared rivers and water scarcity as measures of neomalthusian factors in willingness over a 110-year period. The results indicate that the neomalthusian factors are significant although not dramatic in their effects. Boundary length, while associated with conflict in a bivariate analysis, fades into insignificance when the neomalthusian willingness measures are introduced. Work on this article was supported by the Research Council of Norway and started when Kathryn Furlong was a research assistant at PRIO on an internship funded by the International Institute for Sustainable Development. We are grateful to several PRIO colleagues – Naima Mouhleb, Håvard Strand, and Lars Wilhelmsen in particular – for help at various stages of the process. A presentation of the new boundary data used in this article is found in Furlong and Gleditsch (2003), where we record our gratitude to all of those who helped in generating that dataset. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 44th Annual Convention of the International Studies Association, Portland, OR 25 February–1 March 2003 and at the Joint Sessions of Workshops, European Consortium for Political Research, Edinburgh, March 28–April 2, 2003. We are grateful to participants at both meetings for comments. The replication data to this article can be found on http://www.prio.no/cscw/datasets. We also acknowledge the very useful comments of Harvey Starr and an anonymous referee for this journal.