First Use of Violent Force in Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1980-2001
| Published date | 01 November 2006 |
| Author | Peter F. Trumbore,Mary Caprioli |
| Date | 01 November 2006 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0022343306068115 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
741
Introduction
‘He started it! Yeah, but she hit me first!’ This
is perhaps an all too familiar scenario for
those who have ever been around children.
Who is more aggressive – the child who sup-
posedly initiated the tussle or the one who
threw the first punch? Although the conflict
predates the violence, the introduction of
violence into the dispute delineates an
important junction within the conflict that
changes the nature of the interaction, for
‘escalation raises the expected cost associated
with a failure to settle and also creates the
opportunity for a protagonist to seize every-
thing it wants’ (Bueno de Mesquita &
Lalman, 1992: 9). The first use of violence
is, thus, unambiguously an act of aggression
representing an escalation of violence within
the dispute.
With the introduction of our first use of
violent force (FUVF) variable to be used in
© 2006 Journal of Peace Research,
vol. 43, no. 6, 2006, pp. 741–749
Sage Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA
and New Delhi) http://jpr.sagepub.com
DOI 10.1177/0022343306068115
First Use of Violent Force in Militarized Interstate
Disputes, 1980–2001*
MARY CAPRIOLI
Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Duluth
PETER F. TRUMBORE
Department of Political Science, Oakland University
The authors introduce and describe a new variable for interstate conflict research for use in conjunc-
tion with the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MID) dataset. This variable, First Use of Violent Force
(FUVF), covers the period 1980–2001 and identifies which state involved in a violent militarized inter-
state dispute was the first to actually use violence rather than threatening or displaying force. This article
introduces the variable, which, along with all of the supporting documentation, is now publicly avail-
able, describes its creation, discusses its utility, and uses both multivariate regression and measures of
association to draw attention to theoretically interesting patterns in first use of violent force that are
worthy of further exploration. The authors find that non-democratic states are more likely than democ-
racies to be the first to resort to violent force when involved in a militarized interstate dispute; also,
minor powers are more likely to use violent force first, compared with major powers. Measures of associ-
ation also indicate that states that use violent force first in a MID are much more likely to be revisionist
states, but that first users of violent force are unlikely to achieve victory in the dispute as a result.
* We would like to thank University of Tennessee graduate
research assistants Ole Forsberg, Troy Goodale, and Eric
Smith for their invaluable assistance as well as Richard
Khalife, a dedicated undergraduate research assistant at the
University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth who helped get
this project started, and teams of undergraduate research
assistants at both Oakland University and Clark University.
A University of Tennessee SARIF Small Grant Award
helped support this research. Any errors, of course, are the
province of the authors. The data described in the article
and used in the analyses reported can be found at
http://www.prio.no/jpr/datasets, the First Use of Violent
Force Project website, http://www.d.umn.edu/~mcapriol/
or directly from the authors: mcapriol@d.umn.edu or
ptrumbor@oakland.edu.
SPECIAL
DATA
FEATURE
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