One-Sided Crises in World Politics: A Study of Oxymoron, Violence and Outcomes

Abstract

This paper focuses on crises and seeks to extend understanding of escalation processes, outcomes, and legacy. We go beyond Hewitt and Wilkenfeld's (1999) initial study of one-sided crises, which emphasized crisis type as an explanation for violence levels, in three ways: We (1) pursue an explanation for why some crises remain one-sided; (2) include two additional crisis attributes, protractedness of conflict and ethnicity, which are expected to impact upon the role of violence; and (3) link outcomes and subsequent tension levels for adversaries with crisis type (i.e., one-sided versus others) to expand the potential explanatory range of one-sidedness. To achieve these goals, the paper unfolds in four parts. First, the study is placed in the context of ongoing research on crises in world politics, most notably as carried out by the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project. The second part presents a theoretical overview of the factors that might distinguish crisis type, along with those deemed important in determining violence, outcomes, and subsequent tension. Explicit hypotheses are derived as well. The third part conveys data, variables, data analysis for crisis type (Stage 1) and violence, outcomes, and subsequent tension levels (Stage 2), and a comparison of results for the two stages. The fourth and final part summarizes the paper's accomplishments. Key findings are that (1) we can distinguish crisis type on the basis of characteristics such as contiguity, gravity of threat, and civil war involvement; and (2) the Hewitt and Wilkenfeld model is most successful in explaining violence as opposed to outcome and legacy, which seem especially difficult to account for, even with the addition of theoretically important factors like ethnicity and protracted conflict.