scholarly journals Danger beyond dyads: third-party participants in militarized interstate disputes

2009 ◽  
pp. 110-137
Keyword(s):  
Third Party ◽  
Interstate Disputes ◽  
Militarized Interstate Disputes

Regional Influences on Mediation Behavior

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 285-314
Author(s):  
Derrick V. Frazier ◽  
Andrew P. Owsiak ◽  
Virginia Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Third Parties ◽  
Interstate Conflict ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Regional Bias ◽  
Interstate Disputes ◽  
Regional Factors ◽  
Security Concerns ◽  
Militarized Interstate Disputes ◽  
Common Security

Research on interstate mediation tends to assume (implicitly) that regional factors have little effect on the occurrence of mediation. We relax this assumption and advance an explicit regional theory of mediation in which regional ties create a type of bias that motivates both (potential) third parties to mediate conflicts within their region and disputants to select or accept these regional actors as mediators more frequently than non-regional actors. This bias first appears when states belong to the same region. In such situations, the potential third party and disputants likely understand one another better and share common security concerns. Yet regional membership does not explain the variation in mediation behavior within regions. To account for this, we argue that regionally more powerful states, as well as those that share (regional) institutional memberships with the disputants, have greater incentives to mediate than some regional counterparts. We empirically test the effect of these characteristics on the likelihood of mediation in militarized interstate disputes during the period 1946–2000. Our findings uncover support for our argument and suggest that accounting for regional bias is important in explaining mediation patterns in interstate conflict.

Transborder identities, bias, and third-party conflict management

2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 490-511
Author(s):  
Emir Yazici
Keyword(s):  
Conflict Management ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Interstate Disputes ◽  
Majority Group ◽  
Ethnic Language ◽  
Interstate Conflicts ◽  
Economic Conflict ◽  
Militarized Interstate Disputes

Which third parties are more likely to manage interstate conflicts? Once they do, what kind of conflict management methods do they use? I argue that ethnic, language, and/or religious ties between a potential third party and disputant states can affect both the likelihood and the type of conflict management. If there are strong identity ties (ethnic, language, and/or religious) between the majority group in a potential third-party state and the majority group in one of the disputant states, both the likelihood of conflict management in general and the likelihood of economic conflict management in particular should increase. Equally stronger identity ties between a potential third party and both disputants should also increase the likelihood of conflict management in which third parties use verbal and diplomatic conflict management methods since they do not harm any of the disputants. Empirical findings based on a dataset covering the militarized interstate disputes between 1946 and 2011 support my theoretical expectations. These findings contribute to the literature by exploring the role of transborder identities—in addition to material factors such as alliance, trade partnership, or joint regime type—in management of interstate conflicts by third parties.

Domestic uncertainty, third-party resolve, and international conflict

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-459 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew DiLorenzo ◽  
Bryan Rooney
Keyword(s):  
Political Institutions ◽  
International Conflict ◽  
Third Parties ◽  
Third Party ◽  
The Third ◽  
Interstate Disputes ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
The Third Party ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Militarized Interstate Disputes

Uncertainty about resolve is a well-established rationalist explanation for war. In addition to estimating the resolve of immediate rivals, leaders choose their actions in a crisis based on expectations about how third parties will respond. We argue that leaders will become more likely to develop inconsistent estimates of rivals’ relative capabilities and resolve – and thus will become more likely to fight – when domestic political changes occur in states that are allied with an opponent. We also consider how the relationship between conflict in rivalries and third-party domestic change depends on domestic political institutions in the third party. We argue that this effect should only hold when a challenger does not also share an alliance with the third party, and that the effect should be strongest when the third party is a non-democratic state. We test our theory using a dataset of changes in leaders’ domestic supporting coalitions and data on militarized interstate disputes from 1920 to 2001. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that the likelihood of conflict increases in rivalries only when domestic coalition changes occur in states that share an alliance with only one member of a rivalry, and that this effect is strongest and most consistent for non-democratic third parties.

Intervention in Conflicts from a Network Perspective

2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 314-340 ◽  
Author(s):  
Renato Corbetta ◽  
Keith A. Grant
Keyword(s):  
Third Parties ◽  
Third Party ◽  
Dyadic Relationships ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Interstate Disputes ◽  
Interstate Conflicts ◽  
Events Data ◽  
Militarized Interstate Disputes ◽  
Structural Theories ◽  
Hostility Scale

Whether neutral or on the side of a combatant, third-party states’ intervention in ongoing interstate conflicts is a triadic phenomenon which involves ties between a joining state and the two originators of the dispute. Existing studies on this topic have failed to fully capture the triadic nature of intervention, preferring instead to focus either on the joiner’s motivations or on the distinct dyadic relationships between joiners and the two separate combatants. Building on classic structural theories of triadic balance and on prior work by Maoz et al. (2007), in this article we address the triadic aspect of both mediation and “joining behavior”. The nature of the triadic relations among disputants and third parties influences not just the likelihood of intervention, but also the type of intervention. When triadic relations are unbalanced, third parties are more likely to intervene as intermediaries. On the contrary, when triadic relations are balanced, third parties are more likely to intervene in a partisan manner. We explore our main hypotheses by constructing a triadic data set that combines Corbetta and Dixon’s (2005) data on partisan third-party interventions and Frazier and Dixon’s (2006) data on neutral (intermediary) interventions in militarized interstate disputes with a friendship–hostility scale extracted from international events data (IDEA and COPDAB).

Heterogeneity in the Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs), 1816–2001: What Fatal MIDs Cannot Fix

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas M. Gibler ◽  
Erin K. Little
Keyword(s):  
Measurement Bias ◽  
Additional Measurement ◽  
Interstate Disputes ◽  
Private Citizens ◽  
Militarized Conflict ◽  
Militarized Interstate Dispute ◽  
Militarized Interstate Disputes

We examine a major source of heterogeneity across cases in the Correlates of War Militarized Interstate Dispute Dataset, 1816–2001, and demonstrate that this variation across cases biases most analyses of conflict. Disputes are coded using two logics—the familiar state-to-state militarized action represents one case while the second relies on sponsor governments to protest state targeting of private citizens. We show that the latter introduces additional measurement bias and does not match well the original conceptualization of what constituted a dispute. The protest-dependent cases are caused by different processes, and omitting them from analyses provides truer estimates of the effects of most conflict predictors. We find that previous controls for heterogeneity in the dispute data—such as using fatal militarized interstate disputes only—substantially underestimates the dangerous effects of contiguity and the pacifying effects of regime similarity. We also show that governments are seldom willing to risk militarized conflict for private citizens during these unique cases. We provide a list of the protest-dependent cases for future conflict analyses.

Same Evidences, Different Interpretations – A Comparison of the Conflict Index between the Interstate Dyadic Events Data and Militarized Interstate Disputes Data in Peace-Conflict Models

2014 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 347-372
Author(s):  
Scott Y. Lin ◽  
Carlos Seiglie
Keyword(s):  
Regression Analysis ◽  
International Conflict ◽  
Empirical Work ◽  
Interstate Disputes ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Events Data ◽  
Militarized Interstate Disputes

AbstractStudying the determinants of international conflict, researchers have found a series of influential variables, but few have addressed the robustness of the results to changes in the definition of the dependent variable, conflict. The two main sources for operationalizing conflict in empirical work are data on militarized interstate disputes (MIDs) and events data. In this paper, we find that a χ2-test indicates a correlation between events data and MIDs data. However, detailed regression analysis indicates that there are some contradictory findings depending on whether we use events data as opposed to MIDs data to measure conflict.

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