Dangerous Dyads

Abstract

Theoretical arguments and some empirical evidence suggest that war is more likely to occur between states that are geographically proximate, approximately equal in power, major powers, allied, undemocratic, economically advanced, and highly militarized than between those that are not. Bivariate analyses of these seven factors in relation to the onset of interstate war over all pairs of states in the period from 1816 to 1965 generally support these associations. However, multivariate analyses reveal some differences. In order of declining importance, the conditions that characterize a dangerous, war-prone dyad are: presence of contiguity, absence of alliance, absence of more advanced economy, absence of democratic polity, absence of overwhelming preponderance, and presence of major power. Taken together these findings suggest that our research priorities may be seriously distorted and that the idealist prescription for peace may be better than the realist one.

Domestic Political Survival and International Conflict: Is Democracy Good for Peace?

“…First, all parameter estimates on the dyad type dummies {D j,it } j6 =LL are negative and statistically 11 We also consider alternative empirical models which allow us to estimate all the parameters and hence produce a cardinal ranking. 12 Formal tests support the use of both year fixed effects and spline terms. The estimated coefficient on the spline terms indicate that the probability of a MID is higher when another MID occurred in recent past within the dyad.…”

“…Further, we include cubic spline terms to capture the temporal dependence of MID's onset on the occurrence of disputes in earlier periods within each dyad. 12 We follow the literature on democratic peace (e.g. Oneal and Russett [43]) in selecting the remaining controls.…”

“…Second, an imbalance of military power may create conflict (Bremer [12]). The COW dataset contains a measure of military capabilities, which gives equal weight to total population, urban population, energy consumption, iron and steel production, military manpower and military expenditure.…”

An Institutional Explanation of the Democratic Peace

“…One such generalization, sometimes even asserted to be an empirical law of international relations (Levy 1988), is that democracies do not¯ght wars with one another. The empirical evidence for this claim is, in fact, quite strong (Maoz and Abdolali 1989;Bremer 1992;Oneal and Russett 1997;Ray 1995). Recent efforts to cast this empirical observation in doubt notwithstanding (Layne 1994;Spiro 1994;Farber and Gowa 1995;Schwartz and Skinner 1997), extensive, rigorous statistical tests all show a signi¯cant propensity for democracies to have been virtually immune from wars with one another (Russett 1995;Maoz 1998).…”

The Strategic Development of Border Areas: Explaining Variation in Interaction Opportunity Across Land Borders

“…Unsurprisingly, a great deal of scholarly attention is devoted to measuring spatial relations among states.The most widely used instruments focus on a single spatial dimension to gauge one state's position relative to another. Measures of inter-capital city distance (Gleditsch 1995;Gleditsch and Singer 1975;Lemke 1995) and tripartite categorizations of contiguity (Bremer 1992;Diehl 1985) exemplify this approach. More recent contributions include Gleditsch and Ward's (2001) "minimum country distance" measure and Gleditsch and Ward's (1999) measure of border length (see also Starr 2001).…”