News Release

Enduring National Rivalries Tend To Culminate In War, Scholar Says

Book Announcement

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, News Bureau

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- A new area of international-conflict studies is burgeoning across U.S. campuses and publications. But unlike two other recent entries in the field of international conflict -- catastrophe and field theory, which burst onto the scene but then rapidly became outcasts -- enduring rivalries "represents a trend that is likely to last," says Paul Diehl, an expert on international peacekeeping and the editor of a new book on enduring rivalries.

Diehl argues that the study of enduring rivalries "has the potential to offer new insights into a wide cross-section of international conflict research, in areas such as deterrence, geopolitics and neorealism." In its favor, enduring rivalries doesn't impose a particular theoretical or methodological framework on scholarly research, but rather allows "different approaches to be used and tested," said Diehl, a professor of political science at the University of Illinois.

In the new book, "The Dynamics of Enduring Rivalries" (U. of I. Press), Diehl and eight other contributors explore two broad areas: patterns in the evolution of enduring rivalries and interactions in enduring rivalries. Most of the essays focus on the 20th century.

The contributors define enduring rivalries as repeated or prolonged militarized competitions between the same pairs of states; the competition involves six or more militarized disputes over a period of 20 years. Forty-five "dyads" or two-sided rivalries between 1816 and 1976 meet these criteria, including U.S.-U.K. (1837-1861; one of seven rivalries involving the United States); Iraq-Israel (1948-1973; one of four rivalries involving Israel); India-Pakistan (1947-1971); and Russia/U.S.S.R.-Japan (1895-1976; one of three involving the Soviet Union).

Diehl claims "there is clear evidence that enduring rivalries have a greater propensity for war than do other categories of international conflict." In the book, Diehl and co-author Gary Goertz, a professor of political science at the University of Toronto, examine the so-called "volcano model" of enduring rivalries whereby an escalating competition or crisis culminates in war. "The imagery of the model," they wrote, "relies on the language of pressure building to an eventual eruption."

In their research, the authors found "limited support" for the proposition that the volcano model accurately describes the evolution of enduring rivalry conflict.

"There appeared to be no systematic relationship between the conflict level of successive disputes and no indication of a gradual escalation of conflict even at the beginning of a rivalry. The absence of a lock-in effect led us to accept tentatively the outlines of the null model, which argues for a quick lock-in for rivalries and a relatively stable level of hostility throughout the course of the rivalry."

Although conflict levels in most rivalries are consistent across time, "some rivalries have higher basic rivalry levels than others, and some exhibit more volatility." A future fruitful area of research would be "to explain why some rivalries are far more hostile than others," Diehl and Goertz wrote.

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