Dyadic Processes and International Crises

Abstract

This study reports the results of a project to construct dyadic-level data from the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) project data collection. The project defines coding rules used in identifying crisis dyads and applies them to identify 766 crisis dyads for the period from 1918 to 1994. This research makes it possible to perform a careful comparison of crisis dyads to dyads involved in militarized interstate disputes (MIDs). The comparison indicates that conflicts that qualify as both a MID and a crisis are significantly more severe than conflicts that do not pass both thresholds. The study offers a robustness analysis of Russett and Oneal's Triangulating Peace (2001) and finds that two of the three Kantian variables theorized to inhibit conflict involvement maintain a relationship similar to the onset of international crises as they do for MIDs. The analysis indicates that economic interdependence is a somewhat weaker inhibitor of crises than MIDs.