Assessing the steps to war

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 35, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 607-633

  Senese, Paul D ^a   Vasquez, John A ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

^b Center for Language and Brain   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 25444465627     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123405000323     Document Type: Article

References (129)

1. See, for example, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and David Lalman, War and Reason: Domestic and International Imperatives (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992);
2. Jacek Kugler and Douglas Lemke, eds, Parity and War: Evaluations and Extensions of The War Ledger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996);
3. Jack Levy, 'The Causes of War: A Review of Theories and Evidence', in Philip E. Tetlock et al., eds, Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989);
4. Hidemi Suganami, On the Causes of War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996);
5. Hidemi Suganami, 'Explaining War: Some Critical Observations', International Relations, 16 (2002). 307-36;
6. William Thompson, On Global War (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1988);
7. Stephen Van Evera, The Causes of War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999);
8. Paul F. Diehl and Gary Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000).
9. J. David Singer, The Correlates of War I (New York: Free Press, 1979).
10. See Stuart Bremer and Thomas Cusack, eds, The Process of War (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1995);
11. Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997);
12. Claudio Cioffi-Revilla, Politics and Uncertainty: Theory, Models and Applications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
13. John Vasquez, The War Puzzle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), chap. 4.
14. Suganami, 'Explaining War', pp. 313-14.
15. For evidence supporting this proposition, see Russell Leng, 'When Will They Ever Learn? Coercive Bargaining in Recurrent Crises', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 27 (1983), 379-419;
16. Vasquez, The War Puzzle, chap. 5;
17. Brecher and Wilkenfeld, A Study of Crisis, pp. 826-8, 837-8.
18. On the concept of the security dilemma, see John Herz, 'Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma', World Politics, 2 (1950), 157-80. Realists also recognize how a security dilemma arises out of realist prescriptions;
19. see, for example, Robert Jervis, 'Co-operation under the Security Dilemma', World Politics, 30 (1978), 167-214;
20. and Van Evera, The Causes of War, p. 117n, but on the whole they are more sanguine about the pacifying effects of power and resolve.
21. For an analysis of how probabilistic causality can be used to formalize conflict and war when they are used as dependent variables, see Cioffi-Revilla, Politics and Uncertainty, pp. 31-4.
22. Likewise, the language of 'steps' implies a sequence of actions or transitions across phases (on sequences and war, see Cioffi-Revilla, Politics and Uncertainty, pp. 140-50, 158-63). The various risk factors for war - territorial disputes, relevant alliances, and so forth - may increase the probability of war, however, without necessarily having worked through sequences. To see whether the actual steps take place in the sequence we imply would require a more case-focused test, which would make most sense after the present sort of analysis has been conducted.
23. See, for example, Vasquez, The War Puzzle, pp. 129-30, 133-6;
24. Paul R. Hensel, 'Charting a Course to Conflict: Territorial Issues and Interstate Conflict, 1816-1992', Conflict Management and Peace Science, 15 (1996), 43-73;
25. Paul R. Hensel, 'Territory: Theory and Evidence on Geography and Conflict', in John Vasquez, ed., What Do We Know About War? (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000);
26. Paul Senese, 'Geographic Proximity and Issue Salience: Their Effects on the Escalation of Militarized Interstate Conflict', Conflict Management and Peace Science, 15 (1996), 133-61;
27. John Vasquez and Marie T. Henehan, Territorial Disputes and the Probability of War, 1816-1992', Journal of Peace Research, 38 (2001), 123-38;
28. Hemda Ben-Yehuda, 'Territoriality, Crisis and War in the Arab-Israel Conflict, 1947-94', Journal of Conflict Studies, 21 (2001), 78-108;
29. Marie Henehan, 'The Effect of Territory on Dispute Escalation among Initiators: A Research Note' (presented at the Hong Kong Meeting of the International Studies Association, 2001);
30. Paul Senese and John Vasquez, 'A Unified Explanation of Territorial Conflict: Testing the Impact of Sampling Bias, 1919-1992', International Studies Quarterly, 47 (2003), 275-98.
31. See Barbara Walter, 'Explaining the Intractability of Territorial Conflict', International Studies Review, 5 (2003), 137-53;
32. Monica Duffy Toft, The Geography of Ethnic Violence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003).
33. Paul R. Hensel, 'One Thing Leads to Another: Recurrent Militarized Disputes in Latin America, 1816-1990', Journal of Peace Research, 31 (1994), 281-98.
34. See Paul Huth, Standing Your Ground: Territorial Disputes and International Conflict (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996);
35. Bikash A. Roy, 'Intervention Across Bisecting Borders', Journal of Peace Research, 34 (1997), 3-14;
36. see also Paul K. Huth and Todd L. Allee, The Democratic Peace and Territorial Conflict in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
37. Beth A. Simmons, 'See You in Court? The Appeal to Quasi-Judicial Legal Processes in the Settlement of Territorial Disputes', in Paul Diehl, ed., A Road Map to War: Territorial Dimensions of International Conflict (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999), pp. 205-37;
38. Beth A. Simmons, 'Capacity, Commitment, and Compliance: International Institutions and Territorial Disputes', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 46 (2002), 829-56, pp. 835, 843.
39. See J. David Singer and Melvin Small, 'National Alliance Commitments and War Involvement, 1815-1945', Peace Research Society (International) Papers, 5 (1966), 109-40;
40. Jack Levy, 'Alliance Formation and War Behavior: An Analysis of the Great Powers, 1495-1975', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 25 (1981), 581-613;
41. see also T. Clifton Morgan and Glenn Palmer, 'A Model of Foreign Policy Substitutability: Selecting the Right Tools for the Job(s)', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 44 (2002), 11-32.
42. Randolph J. Siverson and Joel King, 'Alliances and the Expansion of War', in J. David Singer and Michael D. Wallace, eds, To Auger Well: Early Warning Indicators in World Politics (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage, 1979), pp. 37-49.
43. Douglas Gibier, 'Alliances: Why Some Cause War and Why Others Cause Peace', in Vasquez, ed., What Do We Know About War?, pp. 145-64.
44. For a review of recent research on alliances, see Glenn Palmer and T. Clifton Morgan, A Matter of Choice: A Two-Good Theory of Substitution in Foreign Policy (forthcoming), chap. 7.
45. See Brett Ashley Leeds, Andrew Long and Sara McLaughlin Mitchell, 'Reevaluating Alliance Reliability: Specific Threats, Specific Promises', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 44 (2000), 686-99.
46. See Hensel, 'One Thing Leads to Another'.
47. Vasquez, The War Puzzle, pp. 184-90, 316-18.
48. On repeating crises, see: Peter Wallentsteen, 'Incompatibility, Confrontation, and War: Four Models and Three Historical Systems, 1816-1976', Journal of Peace Research, 18 (1981), 57-90;
49. Stuart Bremer, 'Who Fights Whom, When, Where, and Why?', in Vasquez, ed., What Do We Know About War?, pp. 23-36, at p. 25;
50. Leng, 'When Will They Ever Learn?'
51. Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry, p. 45.
52. Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry;
53. Frank W. Wayman, 'Power Shifts and the Onset of War', in Jacek Kugler and Douglas Lemke, eds, Parity and War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 145-62;
54. Frank W. Wayman, 'Rivalries: Recurrent Disputes and Explaining War', in Vasquez, ed., What Do We Know About War? pp. 219-34;
55. William Thompson, 'Principal Rivalries', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 39 (1995), 195-223;
56. William Thompson, 'Identifying Rivalries in World Polities', International Studies Quarterly, 45 (2001), 557-86.
57. Richard Mansbach and John Vasquez, In Search of Theory: A New Paradigm for Global Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), p. 117.
58. For additional discussion on how dyadic interaction becomes patterned, see Edward Azar, 'Conflict Escalation and Conflict Reduction in an International Crisis: Suez, 1956', Journal of Conflict Studies, 16 (1972), 183-201. Azar recognizes a similar process in his normal relations range, where he maintains that it is not so much the level of hostility that makes for a crisis between two states, but how much that level deviates from the average or typical level of hostility. Thus, a typical negative act between the United States and the Soviet Union would not have as much impact as the same act would if it transpired between the United States and Britain. Azar's concept implies that states in long-term rivalries learn to manage their crises so as to make them less dangerous.
59. See J. David Singer, 'Threat-Perception and the Armament-Tension Dilemma", Journal of Conflict Resolution, 2 (1958), 91-123;
60. Lewis F. Richardson, Arms and Insecurity (Pacific Grove, Calif.: Boxwood Press, 1960);
61. Nazli Choucri and Robert North, Nations in Conflict (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1975);
62. Susan Sample, 'Arms Races and Dispute Escalation: Resolving the Debate', Journal of Peace Research, 34 (1997), 7-22.
63. Paul D. Senese and John A. Vasquez, 'Alliances, Territorial Disputes, and the Probability of War: Testing for Interactions', in Paul F. Diehl, ed., The Scourge of War (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 189-221.
64. See Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations (New York: Basic Books, 1962);
65. Imre Lakatos, 'Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes', in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave, eds, Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 91-196.
66. On the dangers of the latter, see Bear Braumoeller and Anne Sartori, 'The Promise and Perils of Statistics in International Relations', in Detlef Sprinz and Yael Wolinsky-Nahmias, eds, Models, Numbers, and Cases: Methods for Studying International Relations (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 129-51, at pp. 133-4.
67. For a comparison of using just the disputes without breaking them into dyadic disputes, see Vasquez and Henehan, 'Territorial Disputes and the Probability of War, 1816-1992', pp. 127-31, who find that with either sample the claims of what is Proposition 1 in our study are strongly supported. As a check on the robustness of the findings presented below, we also conduct supplemental analyses excluding the First World War and Second World War years.
68. On alliances and war expansion, see Siverson and King, 'Alliances and the Expansion of War';
69. Randolph J. Siverson and Harvey Starr, 'Opportunity, Willingness, and the Diffusion of War', American Political Science Review, 84 (1990), 47-67.
70. See Leng, 'When Will They Ever Learn?';
71. Manus Midlarsky, 'Preventing Systemic War', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 28 (1984), 563-84;
72. Michael Colaresi and William Thompson, 'Hot Spots or Hot Hands? Serial Crisis Behavior, Escalating Risks, and Rivalry', Journal of Politics, 64 (2002), 1175-98.
73. Of the full 3,045 dyadic dispute cases in the data, 473 MIDs escalate to war, whereas our measure of going to war within five years has 596 escalating to war. This is an additional 123 cases out of 3,045 that go to war. However, if this were not done all these cases would count against the propositions even though the dyads involved in them go to war in a relatively short period of time. This being said, in previous work we have used dependent variables with and without the five-year window, and the results show no important differences;
74. see, for example, Senese and Vasquez, 'A Unified Explanation of Territorial Conflict', Appendix, pp. 295-6.
75. See A. F. K Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980);
76. Levy, 'Alliance Formation and War Behavior';
77. Wallensteen, 'Incompatibility, Confrontation, and War';
78. Sample, 'Arms Races and Dispute Escalation';
79. Gibier, 'Alliances';
80. Douglas Lemke, Regions of War and Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
81. See Daniel Jones, Stuart Bremer and J. David Singer, 'Militarized Interstate Disputes, 1816-1992: Rationale, Coding Rules, and Empirical Patterns', Conflict Management and Peace Science, 15 (1996), 163-213, p. 178. Non-revisionist states on opposing sides of a MID by definition do not have any revision type and hence their revision type is coded as 'non-applicable'. In our data when two non-revisionist states are coupled with each other in a dyadic dispute, that MID is dropped from the analysis. This is done because they are not contesting any substantive issue with each other. Often such states are neutrals or third parties that are caught up in a dispute in which they are not a direct party. Examples of dyads with non-applicable codes in 1914 include Switzerland-Germany, Switzerland-Austria/Hungary, Italy-Germany and Germany-Norway; examples in 1939 include Switzerland-Germany, Germany-United States, Germany-Latvia, Germany-Argentina and Britain-Uruguay. Of the 3,045 dyadic disputes in our data, 469 are coded as non-applicable; of these only three go to war within five years. Excluding them, rather than treating them as non-territorial disputes, makes it more difficult for Proposition 1 to be supported.
82. See Senese and Vasquez, 'Alliances, Territorial Disputes and the Probability of War', pp. 203-5 for elaboration.
83. Douglas Gibier and Meredith Sarkees, 'Measuring Alliances: The Correlates of War Formal Interstate Alliance Data Set, 1816-2000', Journal of Peace Research, 41 (2004), 211-22.
84. See, for example, John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
85. For an alternative measure discounting the influence of early disputes, see Mark Crescenzi and Andrew Enterline, Time Remembered: A Dynamic Model of Interstate Interaction', International Studies Quarterly, 45 (2001), 409-31.
86. Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry, p. 45.
87. For this reason, we do not start counting the number of prior disputes only at the beginning of a specific enduring rivalry, as defined by Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry, p. 45.
88. See Susan Sample, 'The Outcomes of Military Buildups: Minor States vs. Major Powers', Journal of Peace Research, 39 (2002), 669-92.
89. For a historical approach to collecting data on arms races, see David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe 1904-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 1-14.
90. Michael Horn, 'Arms Races and the International System' (doctoral dissertation: University of Rochester, 1987).
91. See John Vasquez, 'The Probability of War, 1816-1992', Presidential Address to the International Studies Association, International Studies Quarterly, 48 (2004), 1-27.
92. When the dyad or rivalry (e.g., Britain-Germany) is the unit of analysis, one would compare whether the rivals (over the course of their history) that have territorial disputes, politically relevant outside alliances and arms races are more apt to have a war than those that have one or more of these factors absent. However, with such data one does not know for sure if the alliances, arms races and so forth precede the MID that escalates to war.
93. For a discussion of odds ratios and their advantages, see Tim Futing Liao, Interpreting Probability Models: Logit, Probit, and other Generalized Linear Models (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage University Paper series on Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences, Sage Publications, 1994), pp. 13-16.
94. Michael Tomz, Jason Wittenberg and Gary King, CLARIFY: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results, Version 2.1 (Cambridge: Harvard University, 5 January 2003), http://GKing.Harvard.Edu.
95. See Senese and Vasquez, 'A Unified Explanation of Territorial Conflict'.
96. Karen Rasler and William Thompson, 'Territorial Disputes and Strategic Rivalry' (presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, 2003);
97. Alex Braithwaite and Glenn Palmer, 'The Escalation, Geography, and Evolution of Militarized Disputes' (presented at the Annual Meeting of the Peace Science Society: International, Ann Arbor, 2003).
98. Most studies in international relations looking at sampling bias use a censored probit approach. On the use of these types of techniques and their potential problems, see Charles Manski, 'Anatomy of the Selection Problem', Journal of Human Resources, 24 (1989), 343-60;
99. Charles Manski, Identification Problems in Econometrics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995).
100. See Senese and Vasquez, 'Alliances, Territorial Disputes, and the Probability of War', pp. 211-13.
101. All of the models reported here were also estimated with consideration of joint democracy and relative capability (results not shown). As expected, joint democracy was a prefect predictor of no war and was, therefore, dropped from the models. Also as expected, increasing levels of power preponderance significantly decreased the likelihood of war. Most important for our purposes here, however, is that the results reported in Tables 1-5 changed very little in the presence of these additional factors. Further, to make sure that the results were not being driven by joining states, we also performed analyses excluding all pairs that were not party to the dispute on the first day. The results for this sub-sample of initiating dyads were almost identical to those for both initiators and joiners.
102. See Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, The War Trap (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 73-83, 159-64;
103. James Ray, 'Friends as Foes: International Conflict and Wars between Formal Allies', in Charles Gochman and Alan Sabrosky, eds, Prisoners of War? Nation-States in the Modern Era (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1990), pp. 73-91.
104. Senese and Vasquez, 'Alliances, Territorial Disputes, and the Probability of War'. This earlier study did not control for the number of prior disputes or arms races and used a slightly different dependent variable - whether or not the current dispute involved a war.
105. These models were run first with just the one interaction term and then with the others also included.
106. Nevertheless, for certain time periods, sub-samples and model specifications, some significant interactions may be found. Because some of these sub-sample results are divergent, we can conclude that the relationship is at least additive. We find that the interaction of territory and both sides having outside alliances best fits a sub-sample with the years associated with the two world wars dropped (1914-18; 1939-45), along with the five-year window for war onset. This finding provides even stronger support for the steps-to-war explanation and suggests that something about the world war cases is making the relationship more additive than multiplicative.
107. 'Other' disputes and the four wars that arise out of them are discussed at length in Vasquez and Henehan, Territorial Disputes and the Probability of War, 1816-1992', p. 129, n. 9.
108. For example, the Franco-Prussian War, which began with a crisis over the succession to the Spanish throne, was manipulated by Bismarck to help bring about German unification. The Spanish-Peruvian/Chilean War of 1865 began ostensibly as an attempt by Spain to protect its rights in Peru, but in actuality was a Spanish attempt to regain control over its former colony (see George C. Kohn, Dictionary of Wars (New York: Doubleday, 1986), p. 443).
109. The Lopez War is related to intervention in the Civil War in Uruguay, but also reflects Lopez's (and that of his father, the former president) territorial claims against Argentina and Brazil (see William Langer, An Encyclopedia of World History, 5th edn (Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), p. 848).
110. Finally, the Football War, which starts over a football match, breaks out in the context of a long-term border dispute (see Paul K. Huth, Standing Your Ground (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 201). All but one of the fifteen dyadic 'other' MIDs that escalate are accounted for by these wars (out of a total of forty-nine 'other' MIDs). The remaining 'other' dispute that escalates is a 1900 MID between Russia and Japan, which is associated with the 1904 Russo-Japanese War that arises out of a territorial MID.
111. As stated earlier, distinct from Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry, we do not place any temporal clustering restrictions on the occurrence of these disputes.
112. The 0.580 war probability for the sixth dispute falls below the upper bound of the 90 per cent confidence interval (0.420-0.625) for the first dispute. The 0.679 war likelihood for the fifteenth dispute, however, falls well above this upper bound.
113. These null findings are congruent with those found by Frank W. Wayman, 'Alliances and War: A Time-Series Analysis', in Charles Gochman and Alan Sabrosky, eds, Prisoners of War? (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1990), pp. 93-113.
114. Interaction estimates for territory and the two outside alliance categories, as well as territory and arms races, are insignificant for the period after the Second World War.
115. Figure 1 depicts the probability of a territorial dispute eventuating in war based on the Number of Prior MIDs, with the other risk factors set to their modal values (i.e., no arms race and one side has an outside politically relevant alliance).
116. This point represents the maxima where the slope of the line is equal to 0.
117. Only eleven dyads have more than 27 MIDs from 1816 on: United States-Soviet Union (56), Russia-China (50), Britain-Soviet Union (40), Russia-Japan (45), Israel-Syria (45), India-Pakistan (40), Israel-Egypt (36), Japan-China (35), Greece-Turkey (33), United States-China (29), and Argentina-Chile (28), for a total of 140 dyadic disputes preceded by 27 or more MIDs.
118. See, for example, Diehl and Goertz, War and Peace in International Rivalry.
119. A model including the interaction of Territory and the Number of Prior MIDs reveals an insignificant parameter estimate for the period after the Second World War.
120. See respectively, John Caddis, 'The Long Peace: Elements of Stability in the Postwar International System', International Security, 10 (1986), 99-142;
121. and J. David Singer, 'Peace in the Global System: Displacement, Interregnum, or Transformation?' in Charles Kegley Jr, ed., The Long Postwar Peace (New York: Harper Collins, 1991), pp. 56-84;
122. Michael Brecher and Jonathan Wilkenfeld, 'International Crises and Global Instability: The Myth of the "Long Peace"', in Kegley, ed., The Long Postwar Peace, pp. 85-104.
123. Of course, as shown in Figure when the number of prior disputes is greater than twenty-seven, the probability of war actually begins to decrease. We present the war likelihoods for the sixth and fifteenth dispute in Table 5 to retain consistency with the estimates for the 1816-1945 period shown in Table 3.
124. In the steps-to-war model any outside alliance is seen as increasing threat perception and hence the probability of war, so the fact that dyadic disputes with one outside alliance will go to war is not anomalous. What is anomalous is that they go to war more frequently than disputes where both sides have outside alliances.
125. Sara McLaughlin Mitchell and Brandon Prins, 'Beyond Territorial Contiguity: Issues at Stake in Democratic Militarized Interstate Disputes', International Studies Quarterly, 43 (1999), 169-83.
126. See Levy, The Causes of War', pp. 277, 279, 281;
127. Vasquez, The War Puzzle, pp. 48-50;
128. Suganami, 'Explaining War', p. 321.
129. Richardson, Arms and Insecurity.