Principal Rivalries

Abstract

The largely unanticipated end of the cold war and the consequent difficulties in explaining its demise underline the need to understand better the phenomenon of rivalries in world politics. There is, however, much more at stake than the history of the Soviet-American relationship because a respectable proportion of international conflict is embedded within the contexts of specific dyadic feuds with specific pasts and futures. To ignore these contexts may seriously distort the entire analytic undertaking of international relations. This article makes a case for identifying rivalries in terms of decision maker perceptions as opposed to the number of disputes over some period of time in which states engage. A second argument is that predominately positional and predominately spatial rivalries should be differentiated as two basic types. Finally, a third argument is advanced for categorizing positional rivalries with respect to their geopolitical milieu: dyadic, regional, global, and global-regional.