Militarized Interstate Disputes Research Articles

How and why the Cold War became a long peace: Some statistical insights

A data-based analysis of how and why the long peace of the Cold War occurred. The analysis tests a proposition originally suggested by Senese and Vasquez (2008) that alliance polarization played an important role in producing the long peace, because in the 1816–1945 and post-Cold War periods, both sides having outside alliances was positively associated with the escalation of a militarized interstate dispute (MID) to war and in the Cold War it was negatively related. New hypotheses are derived to test this claim. Tests of two hypotheses support the claim that alliance polarization played a key role in the long peace, even when controlling for the presence of nuclear weapons.

Dangerous Neighbours, Regional Territorial Conflict and the Democratic Peace

The likelihood of conflict and the observation of joint democracy tend to cluster regionally. This article tests the argument that these clusters can be explained by regional variations in the stability of international borders using a new dataset of territorial dispute hot spots from 1960–1998. These hot spots identify spatial and temporal correlations in the territorial dispute data and therefore serve as close proxies for regional or neighbourhood instability. The addition of these hot spots also eliminates a common form of omitted variable bias – the spatial clustering of conflict – in international conflict models. These results confirm that joint democracy is only statistically significant as a predictor of fatal militarized interstate disputes in more peaceful neighbourhoods once territorial hot spots are jointly estimated. The interaction between joint democracy and regional instability confirms that the effects of regime type on continued conflict apply mostly to dyads in peaceful regions.

The Quest for the Liberal Peace: Toward a Measure of Interstate Cooperation

Building on the Kantian tripod of peace in liberal peace theory, we test theories of state intergovernmental organization (IGO) membership and levels of state cooperation. We examine the measurement for IGO joint membership and find that it is inadequate to measure the level of cooperation among states. Using network analysis, we propose a new dyadic measure for the level of bilateral cooperation. We argue that states craft intergovernmental agreements, purposely nested within bilateral treaty networks, to further consolidate and bolster such agreements’ efficacy. States both express and safeguard their power interests via negotiated treaties, and while costs of violating individual treaties are small, violating treaties nested within broader treaty networks are more costly as this significantly inhibits future cooperation with all states in a region. By creating networks of treaties, states bolster compliance, enhance the prospects for cooperative foreign policy behavior, and strengthen the conditions for peace. We argue that the strength of a bilateral treaty network is a better measure than joint IGO membership for liberal peace theory. We test this measure in the post-Soviet space, where many scholars expect dyadic conflict due to Russia’s regional economic and military dominance. Using militarized interstate disputes (MID’s) as the dependent variable in our model, we find that dyads that have stronger treaty networks are significantly less likely to experience a MID than dyads without a strong treaty network. We propose that the strength of treaty networks is a better measure for tapping cooperation among states, yielding analytical results more compatible with liberal peace theory.

The Effects of the International Security Environment on National Military Expenditures: A Multicountry Study

AbstractWe consider the influence of countries' external security environments on their military spending. We first estimate the ex ante probability that a country will become involved in a fatal militarized interstate dispute using a model of dyadic conflict that incorporates key elements of liberal and realist theories of international relations. We then estimate military spending as a function of the threat of armed interstate conflict and other influences: arms races, the defense expenditures of friendly countries, actual military conflict, democracy, civil war, and national economic output. In a panel of 165 countries, 1950 to 2000, we find our prospectively generated estimate of the external threat to be a powerful variable in explaining military spending. A 1 percentage point increase in the aggregate probability of a fatal militarized dispute, as predicted by our liberal-realist model, leads to a 3 percent increase in a country's military expenditures.

The Effect of US Troop Deployment on Host States’ Foreign Policy

Major powers often deploy troops abroad with the consent of host states. The stated aim of these deployments is often both to protect the host state and to foster stability in the region. Drawing from an extension of Palmer and Morgan’s two-good theory of foreign policy, the authors explore some of the (perhaps unintended) effects of troop deployments abroad on the foreign policies of the host states. In particular, the authors focus on the effects of US deployments. The authors argue that as the number of US troops deployed to a host state increases, we should expect the host state to reduce its own troop levels, be more likely to initiate militarized interstate disputes, and be less likely to be the target of interstate disputes. The authors test these hypotheses using data on US troop deployments abroad from 1950 to 2005 and discuss implications that their findings may have for US foreign policy.

Climate change and international water conflict in Central Asia

We engage in a critical assessment of the neo-malthusian claim that climatic changes can be an important source of international tensions, in the extreme even militarized interstate disputes. The most likely scenario is conflict over water allocation in international catchments shared by poorer, less democratic, and politically less stable countries, governed by weak international water management institutions, and exposed to severe climatic changes. The Syr Darya corresponds quite well to all these characteristics. If the neo-malthusian specter of conflict over water is empirically relevant, we should see signs of this in the Syr Darya. The riparian countries of the Aral Sea basin have experienced international disputes over water allocation ever since the USSR collapsed and, with it, existing water management institutions and funding. The worst such dispute concerns the Syr Darya, one of the two largest rivers in Central Asia. Based on hydrological data and other information we find that the only existing international water management institution in the Syr Darya has failed. Based on a coupled climate, land-ice and rainfall-runoff model for the Syr Darya, we then examine whether, in the absence of an effective international water allocation mechanism, climate change is likely to make existing international tensions over water allocation worse. We find that climate change-induced shifts in river runoff, to which the Uzbek part of the Syr Darya catchment is particularly vulnerable, and which could contribute to a deterioration of already strained Kyrgyz–Uzbek relations, are likely to set in only in the medium to long term. This leaves some time for the riparian countries to set up an effective international framework for water allocation and prevention of climate-induced geohazards. By implication, our findings suggest that a climate change-induced militarized interstate dispute over water resources in Central Asia is unlikely.

Rivalry, Instability, and the Probability of International Conflict

This article addresses the effect of political instability and domestic conflict on the probability of militarized interstate disputes. Existing research on the subject has produced inconsistent findings. I hypothesize that the effect of political instability on international disputes is conditional on states’ involvement in civil conflict. More specifically, I argue that while political instability provides leaders with the willingness to use force, civil war creates the necessary opportunities for initiating conflict abroad. A directed-dyad analysis of international rivals for the 1816–2000 time period shows that instability coupled with civil war increases the probability of militarized interstate dispute initiation among rival states. Results are consistent for alternative indicators of political instability and civil war.

Geopolitics, Global Patterns of Oil Trade, and China’s Oil Security Quest

Does China’s quest for oil raise tensions with the United States? This paper examines the effect of international relations on global oil trade patterns. Using voting records for the United Nations General Assembly to measure the state of international relations, we estimate a modified gravity model in a panel data framework over the period 1962-2000. Our presumption is that a divergence in voting patterns reflects misalignment in political interests among pairs of states, and hence an increase in “political distance.” Controlling for oil exporters’ endowment, potential supply disruption due to civil conflict, other standard gravity controls, as well as exporter and year fixed effects, we first show that private energy companies based in the United States import significantly less crude oil from US political opponents. The result is robust to controlling for economic sanctions and militarized interstate disputes, suggesting that the political oil import diversification is more than a wartime phenomenon. A similar oil import pattern is observed in China, in which case only a few national oil companies control the oil sector. While the incentives to diversify are stronger for both the United States and China when the exporters are nondemocratic, import sanctions have opposite effects on oil imports into the United States and China. Finally, we document that there is no such oil import pattern in other non-major power oil importing countries.

Exports of Another Type: The Determinants of Interstate Transmission of Terrorism

While the majority of quantitative terrorism research has emerged since September 11th (Silke 2004), one area that has long been the subject of quantitative analysis is international or transnational terrorism (Silke 2004) (Plumper and Neumayer 2010) (Enders and Sandler 2006). While there has been a great deal of work examining where transnational terrorism is likely to happen (Krieger and Meierrieks 2011) and some work on why some countries are targeted and where terrorism is likely to originate, “ there has been very little work on the patterns of international terrorism of links between the terrorists’ home country and the victims’ country” (Plumper and Neumayer 2010, 75) with the notable exception of work by Plumper and Neumayer (2010). Plumper and Neumayer (2010) improve upon much of the existing work by using a dyadic design and find that attacking allies - particularly stronger allies that are more democratic helps to explain the export and import of terrorism between countries. This paper broadens and improves on the dyadic approach by using a stochastic approach - specifically an exponential random graph model (ERGM) - to model patterns of import and export of terrorism. ERGMs and other stochastic approaches to social network analysis are useful because they allows us to properly control for the dependencies inherent in the data. Standard statistical approaches assume independence between the observations, which obviously does not obtain in the context of network data. Our approach also allows us to search for structural regularities in the pattern of interconnections that may help to explain what is observed - for instance, a tendency for import/export patterns to be transitive in nature or to form core-periphery structures. Controlling for these tendencies more carefully allows us to better isolate other factors as drivers of import/export behavior. To conduct this study, we use data from the Global Terrorism Database (LaFree and Dugan 2007) for the years 1998-2006 as well as country-level co-variates from the Quality of Government database (Teorell, Holmberg, and Rothstein 2008) and data on dyadic relationships between states from the Correlates of War datasets. We argue that the factors that are most likely to trump others when it comes to the export and import of terrorism are contiguity militarized interstate disputes. In addition we explore the impact of the political situation and regime within a given country, the nature of religious and ethnic affiliations, economic and development factors, and experience with conflict and civil strife.

Democracies, Territory, and Negotiated Compromises

Multiple studies have confirmed that democracies are more likely than other regime types to resolve their militarized disputes through negotiation and compromise. We argue that these findings have not controlled for the types of disputes that are most likely to involve democracies. States have often resolved their most dangerous disputes, involving territorial issues with neighbors, prior to becoming democratic. Thus, the issues involving democracies are of less salience and are more easily negotiated with compromise. Using Militarized Interstate Dispute data from Correlates of War Project, 1816 to 2001, we confirm this explanation. The pacifying effect of regime type disappears once controls are added for proximity and issue type. We find that territorial issues among contiguous states are among the most difficult issues to resolve, and democracies are unlikely to be involved in these disputes. Our findings are an advancement of the territorial peace argument and present a first step in a re-examination of the broader empirical regularities associated with democratic peace theory.

A mixed effects model for longitudinal relational and network data, with applications to international trade and conflict

The focus of this paper is an approach to the modeling of longitudinal social network or relational data. Such data arise from measurements on pairs of objects or actors made at regular temporal intervals, resulting in a social network for each point in time. In this article we represent the network and temporal dependencies with a random effects model, resulting in a stochastic process defined by a set of stationary covariance matrices. Our approach builds upon the social relations models of Warner, Kenny and Stoto [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37 (1979) 1742--1757] and Gill and Swartz [Canad. J. Statist. 29 (2001) 321--331] and allows for an intra- and inter-temporal representation of network structures. We apply the methodology to two longitudinal data sets: international trade (continuous response) and militarized interstate disputes (binary response).

Ex Oleo Bellare? The Impact of Oil on the Outbreak of Militarized Interstate Disputes

According to conventional wisdom, strategic natural resources like oil are harmful to international peace. Nonetheless, there is little empirical quantitative work on the link between resource abundance and interstate conflicts. Analyzing the impact of oil on militarized interstate disputes on a monadic level of analysis, this paper shows that oil in fact influences the conflict potential between countries. Results of logistic regressions suggest that a high absolute oil production is associated with an increased risk of dispute initiation. Per capita oil production, in contrast, does not seem to influence a country’s propensity to start militarized conflicts. We also find that while very small oil‐rich countries are more frequently the object of military actions, large oil producers seem to be generally spared from foreign attacks. We conclude that specific causal mechanisms such as an increased military capacity or the indulgence of the international community (rather than domestic political conditions inherent to the rentier state) might be particularly useful to explain our findings.

Sanctioning Violence

While economic sanctions are commonly regarded as nonviolent coercive diplomacy, scholars show that senders—particularly democratic senders—are actually more likely to use military force against the targets of their sanctions. In this article, the authors extend this connection between sanctions and military action by arguing that countries targeted with third-party economic coercion are more likely to be targets of dyadic militarized violence from states not involved in the sanctions. The act of sanctioning, the authors argue, lowers the prohibitions to use violence against the sanctioned state by others. Empirical analysis of dyadic data from 1914 to 2000 shows that, within directed dyads, militarized interstate dispute (MID) initiation is more likely when the potential target of conflict is sanctioned by third-party states, particularly when the sanctioning state is a large democracy.

The Influence of International Organizations on Militarized Dispute Initiation and Duration1

We argue that international organizations decrease the duration of international conflicts by mitigating commitment problems and encouraging combatants to cease hostilities more quickly. Empirical analyses of militarized interstate dispute duration (1950–2000) reveal that increasing shared international organization (IO) participation reduces the length of disputes, even after accounting for selection into international conflict. We also find that international organizations designed to mitigate commitment problems decrease dispute duration, while IOs capable of reducing information asymmetries do not influence dispute length.

Too Many Resources or Too Few? What Drives International Conflicts?

International conflicts over natural resources are frequently cited as the most prominent threat to global peace in the decades ahead. However, this subject has not yet been adequately tackled in the academic literature. This paper contributes to filling the gap by, first, proposing a four-class typology of resource conflicts and by, second, testing these conflict types against data on fossil fuels and interstate conflicts derived from two major conflict datasets: the Militarized Interstate Dispute Dataset (1960-2001) and the UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflicts Dataset (1960-2008). The findings, although preliminary, suggest that resource scarcity may play a less prominent role in the aggression of belligerent countries than is often assumed and that the existence of large oil deposits and high resource-rent incomes are better predictors of conflict involvement.

Conflict escalation in dyads with a history of territorial disputes

PurposeBuilding on the steps to war model, this paper seeks to examine the impact that territorial Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID) have on the time it takes a dyad to go to war after it experiences its first MID.Design/methodology/approachA model common to epidemiological research, the hazard model, is employed to examine the dyadic relationship from the time of the first MID forward. This is an improvement to dyadic analysis, as most research examines the characteristics of individual MIDs in isolation.FindingsDyads with a history of territorial MIDs go to war much more quickly than dyads without a history of territorial MIDs. Future research should explore the relationship between territory, war, and power status to test the assertion that minor power states engage in power politics behavior less frequently.Practical implicationsConflict resolution measures need to be employed more quickly when states have unresolved territorial issues. Mediation generally does not occur quickly, which may explain why territorial issues are less likely to be referred to mediators and less successfully mediated. The results presented herein highlight the need for flexible, quick responses to certain crises and the need to settle borders and other territorial disputes permanently to avoid war.Originality/valueThe paper tests a critical component of the steps to war model and examines the assertion that the historical relationship between states affects conflict decisions.

Oil and Revolutionary Governments: Fuel for International Conflict

AbstractOil-exporting states, or petrostates, engage in militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) at a much higher rate on average than nonpetrostates. Why is this so? Further, what explains the variation among the petrostates in adopting aggressive foreign policies and engaging in MIDs on that basis? This article develops a theory that proposes that revolutionary petrostates have a higher propensity to launch MIDs than comparable nonpetrostates. This theory is tested with statistical analysis using a new quantitative data set that identifies revolutionary governments in the period 1945–2001. The results show that petro-revolutionary governments constitute a special threat to international peace and security. This evidence of resource-backed aggression challenges the conventional view of petrostates as the targets of international competition for resources.

LEARNING FROM THE GREAT WAR? THE ORIGIN OF DEMOCRATIC PEACE

This paper explores the effects of dyadic democracy on both the occurrence and level of militarized disputes, with an emphasis on longitudinal tendencies and degrees of violence. We argue that experience with total war, namely, the First World War, induced democratic constraints on conflictual foreign policies via significant change in military manpower systems. Experience with total war led democratic governments to recognize each other’s sensitivity to public concerns about the burdens imposed by conscription. Thus, democratic peace in the modern era can be traced to (1) total war experience for ‘old’ democracies; and (2) the level of violence in foreign policies exceeding a threshold that induces public concerns about the burden of conscription. Empirical testing based on the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID) data set shows a significantly different effect for democratic dyads on the onset of militarized disputes before and after the First World War. Democratic dyads, however, do not reduce the likelihood of disputes in cases with a low level of violence regardless of the era in question. This implies that conflict‐averse behavior between democracies is a product of learning from the experience of total war that leads to greater government awareness of public concern about more intense foreign policy actions.

Power, Preferences, and Multiple Levels of Interstate Conflict

The purpose of this article is to reevaluate arguments that relate states' power to the likelihood of interstate conflict, by highlighting the conditional effect of preferences on the relationship between power and conflict. Also, it examines whether the conditional role of preferences works differently at two different levels of conflict—militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and War. With respect to the onset of MIDs, power disparity is likely to decrease the chances of conflict, and this pacifying effect increases as states' preferences become similar. However, when states have very divergent preferences, this dissimilarity becomes a dominant factor in the process of conflict decision making and thus the pacifying effect of power disparity on MID onsets disappears. In fact, power disparity increases the chances of fighting. Meanwhile, when states make costly decisions of war, relative national capabilities become a significant factor in the decision of fighting, and preferences do not have conditional effects on the exercise of power. In this case, power disparity reduces the chances of fighting, regardless of the level of preference dissimilarity. In sum, this paper provides an explanation for diverse theoretical arguments and empirical findings in the previous studies of power and conflict, highlighting the relative importance of power and preferences at different levels of conflict.

Beyond Kantian Liberalism

Although globalization has become one of the most salient issues in the study of international relations during the past few decades, its net effect on international conflict remains unexplored. I argue that although the manifold phenomena of globalization may conflict (i.e. produce both positive and negative influences), its overall consequences help foster a common peaceful disposition among national leaders who are then less likely to resort to arms in times of crisis. Based on a cross-sectional, time-series dyadic data analysis for 114 countries during the period from 1970 to 2001, this study reports that socio-economic and political globalization in its entirety generates a dampening effect on militarized interstate disputes. Even when common conflict-related control variables such as democracy, economic interdependence, joint membership in international organizations, and others are incorporated into the analysis, globalization emerges as the most powerful explanatory variable. Consequently, globalization when taken in its entirety represents an unambiguous force for interstate peace.