Militarized Interstate Disputes

The occurrence and outcomes of the Cod Wars defy both popular and academic expectations. Iceland, a microstate, essentially won four disputes against the United Kingdom, a great power. The two states furthermore belonged to a Western security community, sharing significant institutional, economic and cultural ties. This article reviews the history and international relations literature on the Cod Wars to explain and evaluate why the Cod Wars occurred and why Iceland won them. This article also explains what lessons international relations scholarship has learned from the Cod Wars for liberal IR theory, realism and asymmetric bargaining.

This article examines the rise of maritime security in concept and practice. We argue that developments in the maritime arena have flown beneath the radar of much mainstream international relations and security studies scholarship, and that a new agenda for maritime security studies is required. In this article we outline the contours of such an agenda, with the intention of providing orientation and direction for future research. Our discussion is structured into three main sections, each of which outlines a core dimension of the maritime security problem space. We begin with a discussion of the issues and themes that comprise the maritime security agenda, including how it has been theorized in security studies to date. Our argument is that the marine environment needs to be understood as part of an interlinked security complex, which also incorporates strong connections between land and sea. Second, we examine the ways in which maritime security actors have responded to these challenges in practice, focusing on issues of maritime domain awareness, coordination of action, and operations in the field. Third, we turn to the mechanisms through which the new maritime security agenda is being disseminated to local actors through a process of devolved security governance. We focus particularly on efforts to distribute knowledge and skills to local actors through capacity building and security sector reform. In the conclusion, we outline the future challenges for maritime security studies that follow from these observations.

The new security regionalism in America during the post-Cold War period has failed to offer enough comparative empirical evidence in order to determine the presence of Regional Security Complexes (RSC) or Pluralistic Security Communities (PSC). In the face of this issue, this study intends to answer, to what extent do security practices prevailing in the continent during the post-Cold War (1992-2010) allow the differentiation between RSC and CPS at the regional and sub-regional level? Security practices were analyzed taking into account two indicators: militarized inter-state disputes by means of descriptive statistics and econometric models, and the persistence of the hypothesis of conflict in defense programmatic instruments through content analysis. The conclusion is that the most appropriate approach is offered by RSC due to the persistence of the threat and the use of force as security practice. The primacy of the American agenda in North America, Central America, and the Caribbean implies the presence of a RSC centered on its power projection and worldwide influence, while in South America there is a standard RSC. At the sub-regional level, Central American and the Andean zone constitute sub-complexes, whereas in the Southern extreme of the continent the occurrence is that of a pluralistic community.

Interstate conflicts involving religion are commonly argued to be more severe and more protracted than other forms of conflict. Although various arguments have sought to explain religion's apparent contributions to global violence, few consider the foreign policy goals over which religious actors actually fight. This article does so by examining whether religiously-exclusive states tend to militarize interstate territorial disputes (MIDs) over issues of strategic material or identity salience. Insofar as religiously-exclusive states seek to “defend the faith” against internal and external challengers, identity-salient disputes should be a particularly attractive target for militarization. We however find the opposite. Although religiously-exclusive states do initiate territorial MIDs more frequently than their secular counterparts, they are significantly more likely to do so owing to disputed territories' strategic rather than symbolic value. These results challenge accepted...

Little is known about how, among weaker states, incentives to challenge
the status quo are related to the expected response of the US as the system’s
hegemon. In contrast to conventional wisdom that suggests militarized
punishment can deter potential challengers, it is argued that weak but strongly
motivated challengers can interpret the hegemon’s military intervention against
adversaries as a window of opportunity to launch their own actions. Empirical
results using Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) and binary time-series cross-section (BTSCS) models reveal that weaker states possess incentives to
challenge the international status quo when the hegemon is preoccupied with
prior foreign policy commitments, most notably war. In other words, weaker
states dissatisfied with the status quo are more likely to challenge the hegemon
when it is preoccupied with prior military commitments. They do so because
war involvement distracts the hegemon, drains its capabilities and resolve, and
opens up a window of opportunity for weaker states to issue challenges. In
addition, weaker states that have an alliance portfolio dissimilar to that of the
hegemon are more likely than others to initiate Militarized Interstate Disputes.
Theoretically, this paper provides microfoundations to answer the question of
why weaker parties instigate asymmetric conflicts when it might seem irrational
to do so.

Scholarship has demonstrated that domestic economic inequality is related to a number of forms of intrastate conflict, such as civil wars and rebellions. There are good reasons to believe that it also has an impact on the initiation of militarized interstate disputes for diversionary reasons. Such use of external force may refocus popular attention and may reinforce the strong nationalist sentiment that tends to prevail in societies with substantial economic inequality. Our empirical results support this contention in democracies but, as expected, not in autocracies. At a time when domestic economic inequality is rising across the world, our findings may be timely.

Selectorate theory has been used to hypothesize about many different outcomes. I examine selectorate theory and its predictions for MIDs and foreign policy events within parliamentary systems as sending states. Using parliamentary governments as the time-series and sender-target dyads as the units of analysis within cross-national study, I find that the size of the winning coalition does not robustly behave as predicted by selectorate theory.

Interstate conflicts involving religion are commonly argued to be more severe and more protracted than other forms of conflict. Although various arguments have sought to explain religion's apparent contributions to global violence, few consider the foreign policy goals over which religious actors actually fight. This article does so by examining whether religiously-exclusive states tend to militarize interstate territorial disputes (MIDs) over issues of strategic-material or identity salience. Insofar as religiously-exclusive states seek to "defend the faith" against internal and external challengers, identity-salient disputes should be a particularly attractive target for militarization. We however find the opposite. Although religiously-exclusive states do initiate territorial MIDs more frequently than their secular counterparts, they are significantly more likely to do so owing to disputed territories' strategic rather than symbolic value. These results challenge accepted wisdom regarding religion's influence on international conflict and suggest critical new avenues for research. †

In light of growing water scarcity, virtual water, or the water embedded in key water-intensive commodities, has been an active area of debate among practitioners and academics alike. As of yet, however, there is no consensus on whether water scarcity affects conflict behavior and we still lack empirical research intending to account for the role of virtual water in affecting the odds of militarized disputes between states. Using quantitative methods and data on virtual water trade, we find that bilateral and multilateral trade openness reduce the probability of war between any given pair of country, which is consistent with the strategic role of this important commodity and the opportunity cost associated with the loss of trade gains. We also find that the substantive effect of
virtual water trade is comparable to that of oil and gas, the archetypal natural resources, in determining interstate conflicts’ probability

Abstract According to many of its proponents, the proposition that democracies do not fight each other is 'as close as anything we have to an empirical law'. However, there have been several incidents among solidified liberal democracies where force was threatened or ...