Measuring Rivalry Termination, 1816-1992

Abstract

The predominant operationalizations of enduring rivalries use a period of time without a militarized dispute to identify the termination of such rivalries. The author argues that this misses the true termination date of most rivalries because it does not identify when the underlying disputed issues in the rivalry are resolved. The author suggests an operationalization that identifies rivalry termination dates based on a combination of the absence of militarized disputes and the use of public documents and statements that show issue settlement. Such an operationalization can result in significant changes in rivalry termination dates. The 1996 version of the Correlates of War militarized dispute data set is used to apply this new measure to Goertz and Diehl's (1995) set of enduring rivalries to produce new termination dates and show that tests of a model of rivalry termination produce different results when applied to this new data set.