Paul R. Hensel

Bones of Contention: Comparing Territorial, Maritime, and River Issues

Contentious issues are important sources of militarized conflict. This article advances an issue-based approach to world politics, focusing on disagreements over territory, maritime zones, and cross-border rivers. We characterize militarized conflict and peaceful techniques as substitutable foreign policy tools that states can adopt to resolve disagreements over issues, and we present hypotheses to account for issue management based on issue salience and recent interaction over the same issue. Empirical analyses reveal that states are more likely to use both militarized conflict and peaceful methods when the issue at stake is more salient, both when the general issue type is considered more salient and when the specific issue under contention has greater within-issue salience. Recent issue management also plays an important role, as histories of both militarized conflict and failed peaceful settlements increase pressure to take further action to settle the issue.

Charting A Course To Conflict: Territorial Issues and Interstate Conflict, 1816-1992

Contentious issues have frequently been overlooked in the study of international relations and interstate conflict. This paper explores the influence of territory and territorial issues on processes of interstate conflict. I begin by reviewing existing approaches to the study of territory, and existing theoretical efforts to understand the role of territory. I then offer an empirical investigation of the effects of territory on conflict, using the Correlates of War Projects data on militarized interstate disputes. Conflict processes are found to differ noticeably when territorial issues are at stake between the adversaries. Disputes in which territorial issues are at stake tend to be much more escalatory than disputes over less salient issues, using several different indicators of dispute severity and escalation. Disputes over territorial issues are less likely to end in stalemated outcomes than disputes over other issues, and more likely to end in decisive outcomes. Furthermore, the same adversaries are more likely to become involved in recurrent conflict in the aftermath of disputes over territorial issues, and this future conflict is likely to recur sooner than after disputes over other issues. Territorial issues thus seem to be especially salient to state leaders, producing more escalatory confrontations and being difficult to resolve through militarized means without triggering recurrent conflict in the future. I conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for future research on conflict and on contentious issues, and by offering some implications for policy-makers.

One Thing Leads to Another: Recurrent Militarized Disputes in Latin America, 1816-1986

Most systematic research on interstate conflict has overlooked the effects of one confrontation on subsequent conflict between the same adversaries. This article explores three aspects of recurrent militarized interstate disputes: the likelihood of a subsequent dispute between the same states, the interval between disputes involving the same adversaries, and characteristics of the initiators of recurrent disputes. These three queries are addressed through empirical examination of recurrent militarized conflict in Latin America from 1816-1986. Subsequent conflict between the same two adversaries is found to be more likely when territorial issues are under contention, and less likely when the first confrontation ends in a negotiated compromise outcome. The next confrontation tends to occur sooner after disputes that ended in stalemate, rather than in compromise or in a decisive outcome, and when territorial issues are at stake. The level of escalation reached in the dispute had little effect by itself on the timing of later conflict, but stronger results were produced in interaction with the type of issue at stake. Similar results were obtained both for recurrent conflict overall, and for recurrent conflict over the same contentious issues as before, but the combination of dispute outcomes, contentious issues, and escalation produced much stronger results with respect to the likelihood and timing of future conflict over the same issue(s). Additionally, the results did not provide overwhelming support for any single ideal type of characteristics of recurrent dispute initiators, with different initiation patterns following different types of dispute outcomes.

Peaceful Management of International River Claims

As global water scarcity increases, both scholars and leaders have suggested that water will be a leading cause of future armed conflict. Yet other scholars argue that states typically cooperate rather than fight to manage their shared water resources. We address these arguments by examining the management of internationally shared rivers in the Americas, Western Europe, and the Middle East from 1900–2001. We propose hypotheses on the factors that lead states to become involved in disagreements over shared rivers as well as the factors that lead them to negotiate over these disagreements. Heckman probit analysis suggests that water scarcity – found by past work to be an important influence on armed conflict over rivers – is also an important influence on peaceful efforts to settle river problems; river claims are more likely where water supply is lower and demand is greater, but negotiations are also generally more likely in these same situations. Furthermore, while the existence of river treaties does not prevent the emergence of river claims, the presence of at least one treaty over the specific subject of the claim provides an important starting point that greatly increases the likelihood of negotiations over such claims. We conclude that the more pessimistic views of water management are missing an important part of the story. States are much more likely to negotiate in the most dangerous situations, and institutionalization of river resources can make an important contribution to negotiations over any disagreements that do emerge.

The Democratic Peace and Rivalries

This article reexamines the democratic peace in a longitudinal fashion. We extend the democratic peace proposition beyond isolated militarized disputes or wars to longer term interstate rivalries. Rivalries of all types are rare among democratic dyads; there is only one case of enduring rivalry between consistently democratic states, and most conflictual relationships between democracies remain confined to isolated conflict. Second, we assess the effect of regime change on rivalry behavior when a regime change precipitates or ends a jointly democratic dyad. Enduring rivalries that include both joint democratic and nondemocratic periods exhibit significantly lower dispute propensities while both rivals are democratic, although proto-rivalries show much smaller differences. Importantly, the pacifying effect of democracy appears to strengthen over time after the transition to joint democracy, which is consistent with the onset and deepening of democratic norms. Both proto- and enduring rivalries show a decreasing propensity for militarized conflict within a year of the transition to joint democracy, and this propensity decreases almost to zero within five years. Our results generally confirm and extend the robust effects of the democratic peace.

It Takes Two to Tango

In a large fraction of all cases where a state faces an immediate military threat, it chooses to respond without resort to the threat, display, or use of military force. We seek to account for this phenomenon of nonmilitary response and to assess the utility of this strategy. We present a series of hypotheses to account for nonmilitary response, based on the literature on reciprocity, and test them using cases of interstate conflict involving Latin American states since 1816. Target states are less likely to respond militarily when the issues at stake are not highly salient, when the initiators threat does not involve the actual use of military force, and when the target is substantially weaker than its adversary. A militarized response is more likely when the target state has employed a similar strategy in past conflict against the same adversary, regardless of the outcome of that past confrontation, and when the target is preoccupied with a civil war. No significant effect appears for contiguity or for the target states preoccupation with another militarized dispute. Regarding the consequences of nonmilitary response, responding with militarized means did lessen the likelihood of defeat in a confrontation and increase the prospects for a successful outcome, but this advantage was small. From a more long-term perspective, nonmilitary response served to decrease the likelihood of future confrontations against the same adversary and to increase the length of time until the outbreak of the next confrontation. There thus seems to be a trade-off in terms of the outcome of the confrontation between the slight short-term costs of responding militarily and the longer term benefits of helping to postpone or avoid future conflict.

Territorial Integrity Treaties and Armed Conflict over Territory

We reconceptualize a territorial integrity norm that has been discussed in recent research, distinguishing between general guarantees of territorial integrity and proscriptions of the forcible acquisition of territory, and we measure the strength of this norm using treaties. Over the past two centuries, the general territorial integrity norm has reduced territorial conflict, but treaties proscribing only violent gains are associated with increased conflict.The norms strongest effects stem from pressure by other states that have accepted the norm rather than from direct effects of treaties, and territorial integrity treaties have typically followed rather than preceded a reduction in territorial conflict.

Ruling the Sea: Managing Maritime Conflicts through UNCLOS and Exclusive Economic Zones

Two primary mechanisms for managing competitive interstate claims to maritime areas are evaluated: the creation of private ownership of maritime zones in the form of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and the creation of a global institution, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), to establish standards for maritime claims and dispute resolution procedures. Analyses of maritime claims in the Western Hemisphere and Europe from 1900 to 2001 show that declared EEZs help states reach agreements over maritime conflicts in bilateral negotiations, while membership in UNCLOS prevents the outbreak of new maritime claims and promotes third-party management efforts of maritime conflicts. Neither mechanism influences the probability of militarized conflicts over maritime areas.

The More Things Change...: Recognizing and Responding to Trends in Armed Conflict

It is becoming increasingly fashionable to argue that conflict patterns today are fundamentally different from patterns in past eras. If correct, this argument could call into question the future value of decades of seientific research on the sources and consequences of interstate conflict. This paper reviews several Prominent differences that have been proposed and examines major conflict-related data sets for evidence related to these explanations. It appears that intrastate conflict is currelltly more frequent and bloodier than interstate conflict, as many analysts have argued, but that this has been the case for most of the past two centuries. Similarly, while analysts claim that future conflict will revolve around ethnic or cultural issues rather than territoral or ideological questions, the available evidence is mixed. I conclude with seieral suggestions for future research on militarized conflict, focusing on three themes: non-state actors, sub-war intrastate conflict, and (both interstate and intrastate) contentious issues and issue management.

The Issue Correlates of War Territorial Claims Data, 1816–20011

This article describes the first complete release of the Issue Correlates of War (ICOW) Territorial Claims dataset, which covers all interstate territorial claims between 1816 and 2001. Territory can have substantial tangible and intangible value for states, and competing claims for control of territory represent one of the leading sources of interstate conflict. The dataset identifies 843 territorial claims and includes measures of the salience of the claimed territory, as well as details of the militarization and ending of each claim. Beyond a discussion of the structure and contents of the dataset and the coding procedures that were used to generate it, this article also presents descriptive analyses of the dataset. These analyses highlight important patterns across time and space, including changes in the prevalence, frequency of initiation, salience, militarization, and resolution of territorial claims. Notable patterns include recent declines in the frequency with which claims tend to become militarized and a lower prevalence of tangible salience measures such as natural resources. The regional distribution of claims has also shifted markedly over time, from a historical concentration in Europe towards Asia, where by 2001 claims were far more prevalent than in any other region. The article concludes with suggestions for future research.