A Crisis-Density Formulation for Identifying Rivalries
| Author | J. Joseph Hewitt |
| Published date | 01 March 2005 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343305050690 |
| Date | 01 March 2005 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
183
Introduction
Many of the outbreaks of serious inter-
national conflict occur between states with a
long history of crises and militarized disputes
(Goertz & Diehl, 1992; Diehl & Goertz,
2000; Thompson, 2001). Such enduring
rivalries are characterized by frequent erup-
tions of violence, largely concerned with the
same set of disputed issues. Enduring rival-
ries command great scholarly attention
because they generate numerous armed con-
flicts over long periods of time. In general,
though, rivalry relations may vary in terms of
their duration and intensity, with some pro-
ducing many outbreaks of militarized
conflict over long periods of time and others
producing only one or two isolated episodes.
This study reports the results of a project that
identifies rivalries based on the repeated inci-
dence of international crises between the
same pairs of states.
The rivalry literature addresses a host of
questions about how rivalries begin (Diehl &
Goertz, 2000; Hensel, 1999, 2001), how
they end (Bennett, 1996, 1997b, 1998;
Goertz & Diehl, 1995; Diehl & Goertz,
2000), how the outcome of one militarized
conflict affects future behavior in the rivalry
(Leng, 1983, 2000; Hensel, 1994; Maoz &
Mor, 1998), and how regime characteristics
in rival states affect rivalry behavior
(Bennett, 1997a; Hensel, Goertz & Diehl,
© 2005 Journal of Peace Research,
vol. 42, no. 2, 2005, pp. 183–200
Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com
DOI 10.1177/0022343305050690
A Crisis-Density Formulation for Identifying
Rivalries*
J. JOSEPH HEWITT
Department of Political Science, University of Missouri-Columbia
This study reports the results of a project that identifies interstate rivalries through the repeated inci-
dence of international crises using data from the International Crisis Behavior project. Despite the exist-
ence of other rivalry data collections, a crisis-density population of rivalries has the potential for making
important new contributions to this growing literature. The article discusses several justifications for
this new formulation for rivalry and then presents an operational procedure for identifying interstate
rivals through repeated crises. The study compares the resulting population of crisis-density rivalries to
other well-known populations and discusses how attributes of the different rivalry conceptions account
for the differences and similarities between the identified populations. The study finds that the crisis-
density approach tends to identify rivalries that have reached higher levels of hostility and militariza-
tion. Rival relationships characterized by numerous low-level militarized disputes may be likely to
qualify for enduring status with dispute-density procedures, but not under the crisis-density approach.
In comparison to other populations of rivalries, however, crisis-density rivalries, especially those that
are enduring, are very similar in terms of the likelihood of experiencing full-scale war.
* I wish to thank Scott Bennett, Michael Colaresi, Paul
Diehl, Gary Goertz, Vanya Krieckhaus, William
Thompson, and the editor and anonymous referees from
JPR for their helpful comments at various stages of this
research. A dataset containing information about all rival-
ries identified in this study is available at
http://www.icbnet.org (in the Data Collections section).
The author can be contacted at hewittjj@missouri.edu.
04 hewitt (ds) 1/2/05 1:49 pm Page 183
2000; Rasler & Thompson, 2001). Clearly,
a valid and reliable method for identifying
rivalries is a prerequisite for addressing each
of these questions.
The rivalry literature features several
different methods for identifying rivals. I
argue that a crisis-based formulation for
rivalry holds the potential to make import-
ant contributions to this area of scholarship.
The crisis-based rivalry will be defined in
terms of the frequency of crises between two
states over a specified time period. By
focusing on the density of conflict episodes,
in terms of frequency over time, this
approach follows procedures originally
advanced by rivalry scholars for identifying
dispute density rivals. As Goertz & Diehl
(2000: 234) point out in their excellent
survey of the rivalry literature, dispute-
density approaches rely exclusively on the
repeated incidence of militarized interstate
disputes (MIDs), as they are recorded by the
Correlates of War project’s Militarized Inter-
state Dispute dataset (Gochman & Maoz,
1984; Jones, Bremer & Singer, 1996). By
using a different conceptualization of serious
interstate conflict (international crises rather
than militarized disputes) to define rivalry,
this study will clarify the extent to which
some findings may be due to the manner in
which rivalry was defined in the first place.
Alternatively, Thompson (1995, 2001)
identifies rivalries through a careful examin-
ation of the historical record, in order to
identify states that perceive each other as
threatening competitors without necessarily
engaging in frequent militarized conflict.
While the crisis-based definition is rooted in
the density approach, it also has important
similarities to Thompson’s approach.
The crisis-density approach for identify-
ing rivalries is a departure from the Inter-
national Crisis Behavior project’s (ICB)
conceptualization of protracted conflict
(Brecher & Wilkenfeld, 1997: 5–7). The
protracted conflict concept captures both
multilateral conflicts and strictly dyadic
interstate conflicts. The crisis-density rivalry,
however, is an explicitly dyadic formulation
that identifies the specific pairs of states
involved in prolonged conflicts featuring
recurrent crises. It is also based on different
requirements regarding the frequency of
crises and their distribution over time.
Identifying Rivalries
Despite the existence of other rivalry data
collections (e.g. Bennett, 1998; Diehl &
Goertz, 2000; Thompson, 2001), a crisis-
based population of rivalries has the poten-
tial for making important new contributions
to the growing literature. Since the crisis-
based formulation is based in the density
approach, I begin with a discussion of this
approach and how its application to repeated
crises will differ from its use with MIDs.
Most of the past rivalry research using the
dispute-density approach has developed pro-
cedures that are strictly designed for identi-
fying only enduring rivalries, a class of
rivalries distinguished by long durations and
many outbreaks of militarized conflict. Diehl
& Goertz (2000) have recently developed
systematic procedures for identifying rival-
ries of varying duration and conflict fre-
quency, classifying rivalries into three
categories (isolated, proto, and enduring).
This latter approach will serve as a model for
the identification of crisis-density rivalries in
this study.
The density approach depends on the
application of an operational procedure that
examines the sequence of conflict outbreaks
(e.g. crises or MIDs) between pairs of states.
This method is replicable and reliable. With
an established procedure, different scholars
will arrive at the same listing of rivalries
when applying the procedure to the same
sample of conflict episodes. For enduring
rivalries, such procedures consist of three
components: severity, durability, and
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