Interstate Rivalry and the Recurrence of Crises:A Comparison of Rival and Nonrival Crisis Behavior,1918–1994

Abstract

Research on enduring rivalry has received considerable theoretical and empirical attention in the last few years. As scholars begin to relax assumptions regarding event independence and historical memory, rivalry has emerged to explain dependencies across countries and over time. Despite the evidence to date, some scholars challenge the rivalry distinction and suggest that a stochastic model may explain the distribution of militarized disputes equally as well. However, if the pairings of states that define the list of enduring rivals are fundamentally different than other pairs of states, differences in behavior should be evident in crisis situations. For rival states in crisis, conflict patterns should vary systematically across conflicts. The likelihood of military action should be lower in dispute one compared to dispute six, or eight, or twelve. Moreover, the conflict strategies of rival states in crisis should differ from the conflict strategies of nonrival states in crisis. Using data from the Interstate Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project, the evidence uncovered here supports the conjecture that states in rival contexts tend to behave differently in crises than their nonrival counterparts, although an indirect effect of rivalry is observed as well. Rival states in crisis frequently resort to a military response against nonrivals. The evidence also provides empirical support for the evolutionary model of rivalry, rather than the punctuated equilibrium model.