Paul F. Diehl

Territorial Changes and International Conflict

This book charts the incidence of territorial changes and military conflicts from 1816 to 1980. Using statistical and descriptive analysis, the authors attempt to answer three related sets of questions: * When does military conflict accompany the process of national independence? * When do states fight over territorial changes and when are such transactions completed peacefully? * How do territorial changes affect future military conflict between the states involved in the exchange?

Enduring Rivalries: Theoretical Constructs and Empirical Patterns

Historians commonly criticize studies in a more behavioral mode as being “ahistorical”; that is, they lump together a disparate group of events without regard for their historical contexts. We propose to focus on what may be the most obvious and serious form of historical continuity: repeated conflict among the same set of states, or what we refer to (in accordance with the small but growing literature) as “enduring rivalries.” Specifically, we (1) explore the theoretical relevance of the concept of enduring rivalries, (2) define the concept of enduring rivalries, (3) evaluate current operational criteria for enduring rivalries, and (4) describe empirically the rivalries generated by those criteria.

The Correlates of War (Cow) Project Direct Contiguity Data, Version 3.0

This research note summarizes version 3.0 of the Correlates of War Direct Contiguity data set, which covers the geographic proximity of all directly contiguous states in the international system during the period 1816-2000. After a brief discussion of the role that geographic proximity plays in international relations, the coding rules and procedures used for this data set are reviewed. The changes and additions to this updated version of the data are then explained. This note concludes with a basic statistical summary of the updated data set

The New Rivalry Dataset: Procedures and Patterns

The 1990s saw the emergence of a new research agenda focused on enduring rivalries, longstanding competitions between the same pair of states. The original Diehl & Goertz dataset on international rivalries has been perhaps the most widely used collection to study those rivalries. Here, that dataset is extended through 2001, and additional criteria beyond the time-density approach are used to define a population of rivalries. In the first half of the article, the conceptual and operational bases on which the original rivalry collection was based are described. The article explores each of the dimensions of the rivalry concept and the associated operational criteria. The ‘linked conflict’ dimension of the rivalry concept is made more explicit in the discussion of rivalry dimensions. The article then presents and discusses all the major changes made vis-‡-vis the earlier rivalry collection. In the second half of the article, empirical analyses highlight the conceptual dimensions of rivalry. Particular attention is devoted to the issue of rivalry symmetry, with an investigation of rival power capabilities. In an analysis on the linked conflict dimension, the article examines war occurrence and sequence in rivalry (most of which occurs at or near the outset of the rivalry) as well as the outcome and waiting times between disputes. The article concludes with a comparison of this dataset to another prominent rivalry collection.

The Initiation and Termination of Enduring Rivalries: The Impact of Political Shocks

Theory: Breaking the stability of interstate conflictual relationships requires a dramatic change in the environment of those relationships. Hypotheses: The beginning and end of enduring rivalries are closely related to the timing of large political shocks in the form of world wars, territorial changes, alterations in the international power distribution, civil wars, and national independences. Methods: Descriptive statistics on timing of enduring rivalry-initiation and termination vis-a-vis political shocks, supplemented by event history analysis. Results: Political shocks were found to be a modest necessary condition for the initiation and termination of enduring rivalries with the strongest impact from world wars, civil wars, and national independences.

Geography and war: A review and assessment of the empirical literature

This article reviews and assesses the empirical literature on geography and war. The early pioneering work of Mackinder, Spykman, and Mahan is reviewed as are the current theoretical frameworks under which most work on geography and war is carried out. The empirical findings are classified into two broad categories: as a facilitating condition for conflict and as a source of conflict. The former includes studies of contagion, diffusion, border effects, and spatial correlation. Studies that analyze geography as a source of conflict encompass those that look at the origins of territorial disputes, the outcome of those disputes, the recurring character of the disputes, and finally those that test the “shatterbelt” concept. Suggestions for future research on geography and war are offered.

What Are They Fighting For? The Importance of Issues in International Conflict Research*

Most empirical research on international conflict has focused on national, dyadic, and systemic attributes to understand state behavior. Following the ideas of Vasquez & Mansbach, this study argues that scholars must take into account the issues and their salience over which states are in dispute in order to explain the onset and escalation of conflict. The article begins with a review of the most prominent data sets and models in the subfield. Most of the prominent theoretical approaches explicitly or implicitly ignore the issues in dispute. Furthermore, only a few of the available conflict data sets include issue components and even then only in a limited fashion. Several reasons for this are reviewed, including those related to realpolitik, ignoring the decision-making level of analysis, and methodological difficulties. There are some studies that do look at issues and their salience when trying to explain the incidence and escalation of international conflict. Almost uniformly, these demonstrate that foreign policy behavior varies by issue area and that states are more willing to fight for issues that they regard as important. The remaining part of the study is devoted to demonstrating how issues and their salience can affect decisions to use military conflict and discussing how these concerns might be integrated into international conflict research. Specific suggestions are offered concerning incorporating issues in research design, identifying issues, and measuring their salience.

The empirical importance of enduring rivalries

This article explores the empirical significance of the concept of enduring rivalries for the study of international conflict. We examine whether conflict occurring in enduring rivalries was more frequent and severe than international conflict in other contexts, specifically conflict in isolation and proto‐rivalries. Our empirical results indicate that a large portion of militarized disputes take place in the context of rivalries, especially enduring rivalries. Enduring rivalries are also the setting for over half of the interstate wars since 1816; enduring rivalries at the extreme are almost eight times as likely to experience a war as a pair of states in an isolated conflict. Contrary to our expectations, enduring rivalries were not involved in a disproportionate number of territorial changes; yet, when such transfers occurred in enduring rivalries, they were three times more likely to involve military conflict than in isolated disputes. Implications for future research are discussed.

Contiguity and Military Escalation in Major Power Rivalries, 1816-1980

This research note analyzes the importance of geography for the study of conflict and explores the question: Does the geographic location (relative to the nations involved) of a confrontation influence the likelihood that the confrontation will escalate to war? It was discovered that if a dispute is contiguous by land to one of the disputants, the likelihood of escalation is increased (and increased even more if both sides are contiguous to the site). Ninety-two percent of the wars in the sample began with a dispute that was contiguous to one or both disputants; only two percent of the noncontiguous disputes escalated to war. Various interpretations of the results and suggestions for future research are noted.

Toward a Theory of International Norms

This article looks conceptually and empirically at how international norms influence state behavior. Using the decolonization norm as an example, guidelines are developed for the conceptualization, measurement, and testing of international norms and their effects on state behavior. In particular, the role of norms vis-à-vis self-interest and power politics concerns are discussed.